Joquel in 1943. Imagine a top, spinning, spinning furiously. It’s a man, and as he spins he throws off ideas, letters, self-published magazines, new societies, institutions, plans for the future of humankind. Spinning, spinning: constant motion. But at the center there is stillness: the eye does not move. And that is how I imagine this Fortean, an active Fortean, ever so active, and—in a nice coincidence—also one whose life is well documented. Even so, there was so much activity, so many things put out in such obscure places, that I haven’t found even some of the most important pieces yet—at least important in the sense of trying to reconstruct his Forteanism.
Arthur Louis Joquel II was born 9 February 1919, fatherless.
His mother was Evelynn Seay (Woodruff) Joquel, a Daughter of the American Revolution who had been born in Steelville, Missouri on 30 March 1893. That was where Joquel the Second was born. And Joquel the First. She had moved around a bit, although the census always caught her in Missouri. As her son would be, she was fatherless from a young age, her own dad passing before she was 7. By the time she was 17 she had left home. At some point, she met Arthur Louis Joquel, another Steelville native, and the two were married on 2 June 1917, when they were both 24. (Arthur was just shy of a month younger than Evelynn.) He was a draftsman. Three days later, he registered for the draft.
Apparently he went to officer school, because he was not appointed until September 1918, when, as a lieutenant, he was sent to Barron Field in Texas. A few months before—calculations suggest it was May—he and Evelynn had conceived. Joquel the First was a pilot, and on 4 November 1918 he was killed in an accident at Baron Field. Evelynn, back home in Steelville, was three months from giving birth. Soon, she fled the state.
Evelynn appears in the 1919 Long Beach (California) city directory. Why Long Beach? Why California? Not sure. And I cannot find the Joquels in the 1920 or 1930 census at all. But wherever they were during that time, Art the Second attended high school in the area. He went to Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, graduating—it seems—in 1936. He was active with the yearbook, newspaper, and the graphic arts club. The Los Angeles city directory has Evelynn living at 1946 W. 38th Place in 1938 and Arthur at 1646 on the same street; this may have been a mis-print, or he may have moved down the street. On 17 June of that year, he married Marie Louise Burnett. Two years later, according to the census, Evelynn and Arthur were living together at 1426 W. 38th place, a little more than a mile from Evelynn’s 1938 home. There was no mention of Marie. Evelynn had worked for 17 weeks that year, and made $300. At some point, Arthur had worked for a rubber company for eight weeks (and made $200) but had been out of work for more than a year, and was actively looking for a job.
Arthur Louis Joquel II was born 9 February 1919, fatherless.
His mother was Evelynn Seay (Woodruff) Joquel, a Daughter of the American Revolution who had been born in Steelville, Missouri on 30 March 1893. That was where Joquel the Second was born. And Joquel the First. She had moved around a bit, although the census always caught her in Missouri. As her son would be, she was fatherless from a young age, her own dad passing before she was 7. By the time she was 17 she had left home. At some point, she met Arthur Louis Joquel, another Steelville native, and the two were married on 2 June 1917, when they were both 24. (Arthur was just shy of a month younger than Evelynn.) He was a draftsman. Three days later, he registered for the draft.
Apparently he went to officer school, because he was not appointed until September 1918, when, as a lieutenant, he was sent to Barron Field in Texas. A few months before—calculations suggest it was May—he and Evelynn had conceived. Joquel the First was a pilot, and on 4 November 1918 he was killed in an accident at Baron Field. Evelynn, back home in Steelville, was three months from giving birth. Soon, she fled the state.
Evelynn appears in the 1919 Long Beach (California) city directory. Why Long Beach? Why California? Not sure. And I cannot find the Joquels in the 1920 or 1930 census at all. But wherever they were during that time, Art the Second attended high school in the area. He went to Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, graduating—it seems—in 1936. He was active with the yearbook, newspaper, and the graphic arts club. The Los Angeles city directory has Evelynn living at 1946 W. 38th Place in 1938 and Arthur at 1646 on the same street; this may have been a mis-print, or he may have moved down the street. On 17 June of that year, he married Marie Louise Burnett. Two years later, according to the census, Evelynn and Arthur were living together at 1426 W. 38th place, a little more than a mile from Evelynn’s 1938 home. There was no mention of Marie. Evelynn had worked for 17 weeks that year, and made $300. At some point, Arthur had worked for a rubber company for eight weeks (and made $200) but had been out of work for more than a year, and was actively looking for a job.
Joquel never really seemed to find a job—or, rather, had a series of job,s but not a career until the end—but he found a way to occupy his time. Apparently, he’d been reading science fiction for years, but wasn’t involved with fandom: and then, in 1941, he was. He joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. He corresponded with other fans, notably Donn Brazier. And in 14 months he published 21 ‘zines. Specula and Scorpio published amateur science fiction stories, mostly by him. (He wrote two science fiction stories in 1941 that were much published professionally much later, the only two of his stories that escaped amateur publications.) He published a chain letter under the name Spectra. He summarized the best of other ‘zines in FMZ Digest. (FMZ was coined by Brazier, stood for Fan Magazine, was meant as a replacement for ‘zine, and was pronounced Femmes. It never caught on.) And in Sun Trails he critiqued fandom. He also edited a few issues of the LASFS’s zine Shangri L’Affaires.
According to F. Towner Laney, an associate at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, Joquel was . . . flamboyant. He dressed in an opera coat. He occasionally affected a British accent. He wore an upside down crucifix pin to indicate he was a Satanist, and practiced black magic. He preferred to make dramatic entrances and exits—and, indeed, entered and exited the LASFS several times, quitting in high dudgeon, then rejoining, condemning fandom, then becoming a fan again himself. One of these kiss-offs was in the huge—over 100 page—‘zine Fanfile, which Harry Warner takes to be Joquel’s last stand in fandom, but which was not: just another of his exits. Thrilling Wonder has him establishing a new chapter of the Science Fiction League in the fall of 1943.
But it wasn’t just science fiction fandom that excited him. He collected a series of stories he had written for Manual Arts Daily and published these as Death’s Secret Messengers. He published several poetry collections, with fellow LA science fiction fans, including some poems that admitted his peers homosexuality. And he was a peace activist, founding something called “The Society of Juridica” in 1940, which advocated for a strong system of justice to ensure a peaceful society. Late, he put out “The Peace Witness.” Mostly, these were condensations of other articles from peace publications along with condemnations of the draft—it was the final act of the U.S.’s descent into totalitarianism—and defenses of Conscientious Objectors. Under the Fanfile imprint he republished Tiffany Thayer’s “Circus Day is Over” from The Fortean Society Magazine, the bitter essay that got the FBI sicced on Thayer, and led to a number of resignations and denunciations by founders. Joquel’s own stand similarly cost him. Robert A. Heinlein, then a part of Los Angeles fandom, called him a “traitorous little bastard” and thought it a “bitter thing” that he should still be alive while other Americans had fallen in the conflict.
Joquel said, “Maybe we’re really anarchists. Maybe we just have a propensity for being on the ‘wrong’ side of the question. But we have a strong tendency to lean toward things that are ‘anti-.’
He was also interested in music—he wanted to compose an orchestra based on A. Merritt’s “Snake Mother” and Tigrina’s “Hymn to Satan.” Tigrina was another Los Angeles fan; she would go on to put out one of the first lesbian ‘zines. He researched lost continents, was a Theosophist, and read through esoteric and lost literature, rediscovering “Mabel P. Malter,” who wrote tomes under the name St. George. Rockets fascinated him. After the end of World War II, he started a ‘zine called “Atomic Age,” which, inter alia, considered the baleful effects of nuclear fallout. He worried over the proper cataloguing of fantastic fiction. He compiled a bibliography of H.G. Wells’s writing after the father of science fiction died. Sometime around October 1941, he started a substantial job—not sure what—which cut into his other activities, too. On 6 September 1943, Marie gave birth to their daughter, Chloe Joquel.
It was around this time, late 1943, that he started to make good on an earlier promise. A full two years before—in one of his exits from the LASFS—he complained, “Orthodoxy, in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, has apparently come to mean using the club as a convening-place from where to start out on an evening’s binge. The phrase ‘LASocialFunSociety’ fits too well. The last meetings we attended resembled a battle-field scene too much to suit our pacifistic temperament, and our efforts to find a thread of discussion about science-fiction or fantasy were unavailing.” And he had contemplated retiring into Coventry—a word he borrowed from one of Heinlein’s stories. “A place where people who were dissatisfied with the milk-fed social system of their time could withdraw to,” he said. (Heinlein had a less sanguine opinion of such a place.) Finally, on 17 December 1943 he sent out a prospectus for the ‘zine Coventry. He explained that he had worried the war would make publishing impossible—because vital supplies were made in Japan—but since it hadn’t he would start again, Coventry being the official publication of the “Society for the Investigation of Unusual Phenomena.”
Coventry was meant to be an explicitly Fortean publication, not unlike Brazier’s Frontiers (and its associated Frontier Society). The first issue, which I have not seen, started with an article on Fort. It is clear that in 1943, Coventry’s mind had become occupied by Fort. In January, he lectured the LASFS on the man—with special attention to his influence on science fiction, although, again, I have not seen the text of the lecture—and Thayer singled him out for praise in the June 1943 issue of The Fortean Society Magazine. The second issue—which I have seen—reads like Thayer’s rag. There are longer articles on lost cities, and the forgotten theory of Geonomy; an excerpt from Donnelly’s Atlantis is included. There is an index to R. DeWitt Miller’s “Forgotten Mysteries” column in Coronet. Joquel recounts strange events reported in the Los Angeles papers. He pokes fun at patriots, the government, and science. Back in 1941, when he first contemplated Coverntry, he also proposed “The Un-Intellectual Brotherhood of Anti-Science.” (He was just “anti-.”) Coventry seemed to be fulfilling that promise, too.
But his anti-scientific side was always balanced by own more appreciative of science as the 1940s continued—he appreciated science, but chafed at its limits. In the late 1940s, he wrote a series of articles for the magazine Theosophia on scientific mysteries: undiscovered and lost planets, Atlantis, pyramids, and Alexandrian Library. He brought a scholar’s attention to detail and diligence in searching out sources to his studies, and wrote in a generally smooth style, giving his presentations a veneer of reason that was belied by his claims: that the spread of Swastikas around the world as a mystical symbol, for example, proved the existence of Atlantis. Joquel worked for a time as a librarian in Manly Hall’s occult library, which allowed him to put together some of his articles.
Like fellow southern Californian Jack Parsons, Joquel’s interest in both science and the occult led him to rockets, and hope for interplanetary travel. As early as 1944, Astro-Jet, publication of the Glendale Rocket Society. This may have been the seed of a later Glendale-based group, Reaction Research, with which Joquel was associated in 1947. He remembered later, “It was largely a group of scientifically-minded students from Glendale Junior College. They were old enough to have the know-how, and young enough to try anything wild.” In late June 1947, the group brought two rockets—each fifteen-feet long—to Winterhaven, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. They filled the noses with stamped letters and launched them toward Yuma, Arizona, on the rivers’s other bank. The first splashed down, the mail washed away. The second made it across and was then brought to the local post office. (Arizona Republic, 14 June 1959, page 44.) Also during this period Joquel said he belonged to a group known as FutuResearch, but most of his rocket activity seemed to be associated with Reaction Research. Presenting himself as a scientist and rocket expert, he was able to generate some press interest in his ideas: that the moon was once inhabited, but life there did itself in with atomic bombs; that in the future astronomers would set up observatories on the moon; that humans would have already reached the moon if it weren’t for the Great Depression and Hitler—the German leader’s association with rockets making them seem evil; and that the United States best do more to reach space, as the Soviets were taking the lead.
As dedicated to rockets as he was, though, Joquel was loath to give up all his other interests. he continued studying Fort, discovering a short story by him that Thayer and the Fortean Society did not know about: “The Marooned Campers,” from Popular Magazine August 1905. He also sent in clippings and material for the Society’s archives. He was interested in graphology—having devoted some space to interpreting signatures in a ‘zine—and expanded this fascination to collect examples of odd typography that, in 1955, he donated to Valley College in Van Nuys. (He was a student there, and seemingly a good one.) He gave lectures, too: on rockets before Rotarians, on satellites before engineers. “The young author and lecturer is said to have the rare ability to coordinate many diversified fields of leaning in his talks,” reported one newspaper. “Speaking extemporaneously, he weaves together the latest scientific information with the lore of the ancient world, combines the most modern technical discoveries with history and philosophy.” (The Taos News, 28 July 1960, page 3.) In 1952, he compiled, edited, and extended his essays for Theosophia into the book The Challenge of Space.
Some time in the late 1950s, Joquel relocated to Arizona. He taught history at Sunnyslope Hig School, in Phoenix, and wrote up science news for The Arizona Republic. He continued lecturing, including at least once on Oriental art, entered his antique collection into the state fair, wrote on Atlantis for Egerton Sykes’s journal, and published an article in the Sunnyslope Journal on “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights” which won the Freedoms Foundation’s George Washington Medal. In addition to all of this activity, Joquel received a master’s degree from Arizona State University, his thesis in sociology titled “Some Sociological Aspects of Automation.”
He then moved again, to New York, where he received a master’s in television production from NYU and went to work as managing editor for the publisher Grolier. With a press pass from the publisher, he visited the United Nations, poked around UNESCO and UNICEF and the WHO. He worked with Herbert S. Zim—founder of the Golden Guides nature books—on Our Wonderful World: An Encyclopedic Anthology and edited Encyclopedia Science Supplement 68 (1968). Other enthusiasms included cats, Sherlock Holmes, and the Fortean Buckminster Fuller.
While Joquel was in New York, his mother died. It was 1967 and she was 74. Some time a little later, Joquel returned to California, settling into Fresno. He had a new enthusiasm, The Society For Creative Anachronism. A “protest against the twentieth century” started by a group of Berkeley, California, science fiction fans, the Society held festivals recreating Medieval Europe as it should have been, selectively focusing on parts of the history, amplifying them and playing with them. Joquel wrote a book for the Society called Swordplay for the New Renaissance. He also taught anthropology classes at Fresno City College, including courses on television. And he was still lecturing on science fiction into the early 1970s.
Joquel lived a very full life. He didn’t move a whole lot, staying mostly in the Southwest, but he had a lot of interests and hobbies, which he engaged passionately. Unlike Robert Spencer, he didn’t really go through incarnations—from voice of the youth to communist, to Fortean—but experienced his loves at the same time, or in mostly overlapping periods. He tried to share his enthusiasms—to change the world—proselytizing through self-published magazines, lecturing, joining and creating societies. He didn’t seem to have the focus, though, to see any of them through for very long: ‘zines came and went. Organizations, too. And jobs. But always there was a core interest in merging scientific and occult topics, in Theosophy and the peaceful development of humanity at a time when death by fiery war was too likely the future.
Joquel died on 31 March 1974. He was 55.
Forteanism was one of Joquel’s (many) passions, and he stayed with it for a long time. I do not know if he ever joined the International Fortean Organization, founded in the 1960s after the demise of the Fortean Society, but he was credited with sending in clippings to Doubt until its very last issue. He lectured on Fort before the LASFS in January 1943 and later that year, feeling the need to retreat from fandom, set up The Society for the Investigation of Unusual Phenomena” as kind of a refuge—his “Coventry,” where he could be separate from the rest of the world. Joquel was always a collector and classifier—“a library mole, burrowing underground . . . a troglodyte, rejoicing in unheralded caves,” as Theodore Dreiser had said of Fort himself. And he was always interested in the unusual, the off-trail, trying to reconcile it with what was known.
In 1944, his rooting uncovered the works of St. George, an independent California philosopher who had published earlier in the century. He sent copies of three of St. George’s books—“Errors of Thought” (1911; 1915); “Gold Secret and Its Connection with Tariff and Trusts” (n.d.); and “World Process” (1914)—to Thayer, who was enthusiastic about the discovery. He saw them as precursors to Korzybski’s “General Semantics” and asked his readership to find more information on the man. (The Fortean Society Magazine 10, p. 141). After getting a bit of information on the man behind the pseudonym—George Mabel, owner of the Fresno winery “St. George”—Thayer for a time thought he was the same man as “Stuart X,” an eccentric thinker of the same time period who had been championed by the Great Beast Aleister Crowley.
It turned out Thayer was wrong. George Mabel and Stuart X (read: Henry Clifford Stuart) were different beings entirely, even if they shared an interest in reforming the economic system. (And both were influenced by that other George, the renegade California economist Henry George.) Thayer admitted his mistake in 1947 (Doubt 18), after some further correspondence. Nevermind that confusion, though, Thayer enjoyed St. George. He sold his books, seemed to get another Fortean (Art Castillo) to take his philosophy seriously, and when he contemplated creating a Fortean University devoted one of its sections to the study of St. George (and Stuart X). The subject was “the FU equivalent of ‘ontology’”:
“Malter’s work was done before semantics, as such, had attracted much attention, but his chief criticism of his contemporaries and their forerunners falls in that field today. With sheer horse-sense, he surmounted many of the drawbacks which inhere to being a Deist, an American, a Capitalist, a Republican, and (probably) a Freemason—the which [sic] is a formidable array of drawbacks—and wrote much which is soundly Fortean. He blames most of man’s woes on the alphabet and insists that words have deprived the race of a better means of knowing. He calls for a return to this simpler, surer way (via symbolism), a course which, if successfully pursued, would obviate the need for Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian system.”
Unlike so many other Forteans, Joquel embraced not only Thayer’s disdain for science, but also his social, political, and linguistic windmill-fighting. The tight connection can be seen in a photograph Joqquel sent to Thayer with the announcement that his book The Challenge of Space had been published. It showed Joquel standing next to a Manekin-Pis statue in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Behind him, squatting, is a local. Thayer had designated the Manekin-Pis as the herald of Forteanism—Forteanism was pissing on everything, always—and Joquel was happy to have the symbol. But he also knew his Fort, and joked that the unknown third figure in the picture was a reincarnation of Ambrose, either Small or Bierce, which referenced Fort’s famous quilt that he thought someone might be collecting Ambroses.
According to F. Towner Laney, an associate at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, Joquel was . . . flamboyant. He dressed in an opera coat. He occasionally affected a British accent. He wore an upside down crucifix pin to indicate he was a Satanist, and practiced black magic. He preferred to make dramatic entrances and exits—and, indeed, entered and exited the LASFS several times, quitting in high dudgeon, then rejoining, condemning fandom, then becoming a fan again himself. One of these kiss-offs was in the huge—over 100 page—‘zine Fanfile, which Harry Warner takes to be Joquel’s last stand in fandom, but which was not: just another of his exits. Thrilling Wonder has him establishing a new chapter of the Science Fiction League in the fall of 1943.
But it wasn’t just science fiction fandom that excited him. He collected a series of stories he had written for Manual Arts Daily and published these as Death’s Secret Messengers. He published several poetry collections, with fellow LA science fiction fans, including some poems that admitted his peers homosexuality. And he was a peace activist, founding something called “The Society of Juridica” in 1940, which advocated for a strong system of justice to ensure a peaceful society. Late, he put out “The Peace Witness.” Mostly, these were condensations of other articles from peace publications along with condemnations of the draft—it was the final act of the U.S.’s descent into totalitarianism—and defenses of Conscientious Objectors. Under the Fanfile imprint he republished Tiffany Thayer’s “Circus Day is Over” from The Fortean Society Magazine, the bitter essay that got the FBI sicced on Thayer, and led to a number of resignations and denunciations by founders. Joquel’s own stand similarly cost him. Robert A. Heinlein, then a part of Los Angeles fandom, called him a “traitorous little bastard” and thought it a “bitter thing” that he should still be alive while other Americans had fallen in the conflict.
Joquel said, “Maybe we’re really anarchists. Maybe we just have a propensity for being on the ‘wrong’ side of the question. But we have a strong tendency to lean toward things that are ‘anti-.’
He was also interested in music—he wanted to compose an orchestra based on A. Merritt’s “Snake Mother” and Tigrina’s “Hymn to Satan.” Tigrina was another Los Angeles fan; she would go on to put out one of the first lesbian ‘zines. He researched lost continents, was a Theosophist, and read through esoteric and lost literature, rediscovering “Mabel P. Malter,” who wrote tomes under the name St. George. Rockets fascinated him. After the end of World War II, he started a ‘zine called “Atomic Age,” which, inter alia, considered the baleful effects of nuclear fallout. He worried over the proper cataloguing of fantastic fiction. He compiled a bibliography of H.G. Wells’s writing after the father of science fiction died. Sometime around October 1941, he started a substantial job—not sure what—which cut into his other activities, too. On 6 September 1943, Marie gave birth to their daughter, Chloe Joquel.
It was around this time, late 1943, that he started to make good on an earlier promise. A full two years before—in one of his exits from the LASFS—he complained, “Orthodoxy, in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, has apparently come to mean using the club as a convening-place from where to start out on an evening’s binge. The phrase ‘LASocialFunSociety’ fits too well. The last meetings we attended resembled a battle-field scene too much to suit our pacifistic temperament, and our efforts to find a thread of discussion about science-fiction or fantasy were unavailing.” And he had contemplated retiring into Coventry—a word he borrowed from one of Heinlein’s stories. “A place where people who were dissatisfied with the milk-fed social system of their time could withdraw to,” he said. (Heinlein had a less sanguine opinion of such a place.) Finally, on 17 December 1943 he sent out a prospectus for the ‘zine Coventry. He explained that he had worried the war would make publishing impossible—because vital supplies were made in Japan—but since it hadn’t he would start again, Coventry being the official publication of the “Society for the Investigation of Unusual Phenomena.”
Coventry was meant to be an explicitly Fortean publication, not unlike Brazier’s Frontiers (and its associated Frontier Society). The first issue, which I have not seen, started with an article on Fort. It is clear that in 1943, Coventry’s mind had become occupied by Fort. In January, he lectured the LASFS on the man—with special attention to his influence on science fiction, although, again, I have not seen the text of the lecture—and Thayer singled him out for praise in the June 1943 issue of The Fortean Society Magazine. The second issue—which I have seen—reads like Thayer’s rag. There are longer articles on lost cities, and the forgotten theory of Geonomy; an excerpt from Donnelly’s Atlantis is included. There is an index to R. DeWitt Miller’s “Forgotten Mysteries” column in Coronet. Joquel recounts strange events reported in the Los Angeles papers. He pokes fun at patriots, the government, and science. Back in 1941, when he first contemplated Coverntry, he also proposed “The Un-Intellectual Brotherhood of Anti-Science.” (He was just “anti-.”) Coventry seemed to be fulfilling that promise, too.
But his anti-scientific side was always balanced by own more appreciative of science as the 1940s continued—he appreciated science, but chafed at its limits. In the late 1940s, he wrote a series of articles for the magazine Theosophia on scientific mysteries: undiscovered and lost planets, Atlantis, pyramids, and Alexandrian Library. He brought a scholar’s attention to detail and diligence in searching out sources to his studies, and wrote in a generally smooth style, giving his presentations a veneer of reason that was belied by his claims: that the spread of Swastikas around the world as a mystical symbol, for example, proved the existence of Atlantis. Joquel worked for a time as a librarian in Manly Hall’s occult library, which allowed him to put together some of his articles.
Like fellow southern Californian Jack Parsons, Joquel’s interest in both science and the occult led him to rockets, and hope for interplanetary travel. As early as 1944, Astro-Jet, publication of the Glendale Rocket Society. This may have been the seed of a later Glendale-based group, Reaction Research, with which Joquel was associated in 1947. He remembered later, “It was largely a group of scientifically-minded students from Glendale Junior College. They were old enough to have the know-how, and young enough to try anything wild.” In late June 1947, the group brought two rockets—each fifteen-feet long—to Winterhaven, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. They filled the noses with stamped letters and launched them toward Yuma, Arizona, on the rivers’s other bank. The first splashed down, the mail washed away. The second made it across and was then brought to the local post office. (Arizona Republic, 14 June 1959, page 44.) Also during this period Joquel said he belonged to a group known as FutuResearch, but most of his rocket activity seemed to be associated with Reaction Research. Presenting himself as a scientist and rocket expert, he was able to generate some press interest in his ideas: that the moon was once inhabited, but life there did itself in with atomic bombs; that in the future astronomers would set up observatories on the moon; that humans would have already reached the moon if it weren’t for the Great Depression and Hitler—the German leader’s association with rockets making them seem evil; and that the United States best do more to reach space, as the Soviets were taking the lead.
As dedicated to rockets as he was, though, Joquel was loath to give up all his other interests. he continued studying Fort, discovering a short story by him that Thayer and the Fortean Society did not know about: “The Marooned Campers,” from Popular Magazine August 1905. He also sent in clippings and material for the Society’s archives. He was interested in graphology—having devoted some space to interpreting signatures in a ‘zine—and expanded this fascination to collect examples of odd typography that, in 1955, he donated to Valley College in Van Nuys. (He was a student there, and seemingly a good one.) He gave lectures, too: on rockets before Rotarians, on satellites before engineers. “The young author and lecturer is said to have the rare ability to coordinate many diversified fields of leaning in his talks,” reported one newspaper. “Speaking extemporaneously, he weaves together the latest scientific information with the lore of the ancient world, combines the most modern technical discoveries with history and philosophy.” (The Taos News, 28 July 1960, page 3.) In 1952, he compiled, edited, and extended his essays for Theosophia into the book The Challenge of Space.
Some time in the late 1950s, Joquel relocated to Arizona. He taught history at Sunnyslope Hig School, in Phoenix, and wrote up science news for The Arizona Republic. He continued lecturing, including at least once on Oriental art, entered his antique collection into the state fair, wrote on Atlantis for Egerton Sykes’s journal, and published an article in the Sunnyslope Journal on “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights” which won the Freedoms Foundation’s George Washington Medal. In addition to all of this activity, Joquel received a master’s degree from Arizona State University, his thesis in sociology titled “Some Sociological Aspects of Automation.”
He then moved again, to New York, where he received a master’s in television production from NYU and went to work as managing editor for the publisher Grolier. With a press pass from the publisher, he visited the United Nations, poked around UNESCO and UNICEF and the WHO. He worked with Herbert S. Zim—founder of the Golden Guides nature books—on Our Wonderful World: An Encyclopedic Anthology and edited Encyclopedia Science Supplement 68 (1968). Other enthusiasms included cats, Sherlock Holmes, and the Fortean Buckminster Fuller.
While Joquel was in New York, his mother died. It was 1967 and she was 74. Some time a little later, Joquel returned to California, settling into Fresno. He had a new enthusiasm, The Society For Creative Anachronism. A “protest against the twentieth century” started by a group of Berkeley, California, science fiction fans, the Society held festivals recreating Medieval Europe as it should have been, selectively focusing on parts of the history, amplifying them and playing with them. Joquel wrote a book for the Society called Swordplay for the New Renaissance. He also taught anthropology classes at Fresno City College, including courses on television. And he was still lecturing on science fiction into the early 1970s.
Joquel lived a very full life. He didn’t move a whole lot, staying mostly in the Southwest, but he had a lot of interests and hobbies, which he engaged passionately. Unlike Robert Spencer, he didn’t really go through incarnations—from voice of the youth to communist, to Fortean—but experienced his loves at the same time, or in mostly overlapping periods. He tried to share his enthusiasms—to change the world—proselytizing through self-published magazines, lecturing, joining and creating societies. He didn’t seem to have the focus, though, to see any of them through for very long: ‘zines came and went. Organizations, too. And jobs. But always there was a core interest in merging scientific and occult topics, in Theosophy and the peaceful development of humanity at a time when death by fiery war was too likely the future.
Joquel died on 31 March 1974. He was 55.
Forteanism was one of Joquel’s (many) passions, and he stayed with it for a long time. I do not know if he ever joined the International Fortean Organization, founded in the 1960s after the demise of the Fortean Society, but he was credited with sending in clippings to Doubt until its very last issue. He lectured on Fort before the LASFS in January 1943 and later that year, feeling the need to retreat from fandom, set up The Society for the Investigation of Unusual Phenomena” as kind of a refuge—his “Coventry,” where he could be separate from the rest of the world. Joquel was always a collector and classifier—“a library mole, burrowing underground . . . a troglodyte, rejoicing in unheralded caves,” as Theodore Dreiser had said of Fort himself. And he was always interested in the unusual, the off-trail, trying to reconcile it with what was known.
In 1944, his rooting uncovered the works of St. George, an independent California philosopher who had published earlier in the century. He sent copies of three of St. George’s books—“Errors of Thought” (1911; 1915); “Gold Secret and Its Connection with Tariff and Trusts” (n.d.); and “World Process” (1914)—to Thayer, who was enthusiastic about the discovery. He saw them as precursors to Korzybski’s “General Semantics” and asked his readership to find more information on the man. (The Fortean Society Magazine 10, p. 141). After getting a bit of information on the man behind the pseudonym—George Mabel, owner of the Fresno winery “St. George”—Thayer for a time thought he was the same man as “Stuart X,” an eccentric thinker of the same time period who had been championed by the Great Beast Aleister Crowley.
It turned out Thayer was wrong. George Mabel and Stuart X (read: Henry Clifford Stuart) were different beings entirely, even if they shared an interest in reforming the economic system. (And both were influenced by that other George, the renegade California economist Henry George.) Thayer admitted his mistake in 1947 (Doubt 18), after some further correspondence. Nevermind that confusion, though, Thayer enjoyed St. George. He sold his books, seemed to get another Fortean (Art Castillo) to take his philosophy seriously, and when he contemplated creating a Fortean University devoted one of its sections to the study of St. George (and Stuart X). The subject was “the FU equivalent of ‘ontology’”:
“Malter’s work was done before semantics, as such, had attracted much attention, but his chief criticism of his contemporaries and their forerunners falls in that field today. With sheer horse-sense, he surmounted many of the drawbacks which inhere to being a Deist, an American, a Capitalist, a Republican, and (probably) a Freemason—the which [sic] is a formidable array of drawbacks—and wrote much which is soundly Fortean. He blames most of man’s woes on the alphabet and insists that words have deprived the race of a better means of knowing. He calls for a return to this simpler, surer way (via symbolism), a course which, if successfully pursued, would obviate the need for Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian system.”
Unlike so many other Forteans, Joquel embraced not only Thayer’s disdain for science, but also his social, political, and linguistic windmill-fighting. The tight connection can be seen in a photograph Joqquel sent to Thayer with the announcement that his book The Challenge of Space had been published. It showed Joquel standing next to a Manekin-Pis statue in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Behind him, squatting, is a local. Thayer had designated the Manekin-Pis as the herald of Forteanism—Forteanism was pissing on everything, always—and Joquel was happy to have the symbol. But he also knew his Fort, and joked that the unknown third figure in the picture was a reincarnation of Ambrose, either Small or Bierce, which referenced Fort’s famous quilt that he thought someone might be collecting Ambroses.
Manekin-Pis Clearly, Thayer influenced Joquel’s Forteanism—how much is hard to measure. Unfortunately, his early thinking on Fort is lost to scholars: there are no publicly available transcripts of his 1943 lecture or copies of the first issue of Coventry which had an article on the gadfly of science and his “The Un-Intellectual Brotherhood of Anti-Science” ‘zine was never published. But whatever his early thinking, even his more mature thoughts on Fort were not identical with Thayer’s. He developed in different ways, as shown by the chapter he devoted to Fort in his 1952 book The Challenge of Space.
The title of the book is slightly mis-leading—but in a good way. At first blush, the book would seem to be about the difficulties inherent in rocket travel beyond the earth’s atmosphere. But Joquel thinks bigger than this: his ideas are rooted in Theosophy. Joquel claims that humans have always been moving into space--larger and larger parts of space, villages and nations and planets and eventually the interplanetary ether--and will continue to do so, driven by the ineluctable laws of physics and metaphysics. Although he does acknowledge that we might--unfortunately--blow ourselves to smithereens, but that would be a mere blip on the scale of cosmic evolution.
What follows then are a series of loosely connected essays, tracing human evolution from its beginning to its end, with an emphasis on lost and secret knowledge. Joquel spends a chapter on the parallels between the accounts of the universe's beginning given by astrophysicists, the Bible, and The Stanzas of Dyzan (a Theosophical text). He claims to show that all these are similar--enough for jazz or government work, anyway. And what's God if he's not a great big bureaucrat?
He then jumps feet first in Theosophical speculations, arguing that the Plato-described Atlantis was real and its spread can be seen in the spread of bronze as well as the swastika. He goes on to argue that science in the ancient world was extremely advanced, and was on the verge of creating great technical things--just like the ones we use today--except that the Library of Alexander was burned (repeatedly) and Christians enforced an anti-intellectual stance, that eventually hardened institutionally.
A series of chapters—based on his articles for Theosophia--then look at various bits of secret knowledge: Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Christ, who may have invented a religion as powerful of Christianity had he not been ignored; the lost years of Christ--the time from when he was 12 to 30--and speculation that Christ may have visited England (where he came into contact with Druidic paganism) and India (where he learned Buddhism), these experiences influencing his later teachings. There is a very long chapter on the origins of playing cards, which he ties to the Tarot and claims was a way of smuggling secret knowledge between the elect with the uninitiated understanding; Francis Bacon and his hopes for a "New Atlantis"; the story of St. Germain, a mystic who supposedly lived hundreds of years. Clearly, he made good use of his time as librarian to Manly P. Hall and read widely in esoteric literature.
The final two chapters look forward, the penultimate one on the promise of the upcoming generation and how invested they are in seeing a new world created, especially the exploration of space. And the final arguing that such exploration would initiate a new stage in human evolution, likely dampening enthusiasm for war (though by no means eliminating it). This would be the finishing of the fifth race, and the setting of the stage for the final two, when spiritual values caught up with technical ones, and the universe came to understand itself.
The book sounds flaky, and certainly a lot of the ultimate points are. And Joquel can sometimes be too fond of overarching explanations--as in the last chapter when he tries to correlate the Great Chain of Being, geometric forms, and the evolution of human society. But mostly the book impresses, despite the flakiness, because Joquel comes across as a good writer in full command of a lot of material, a thinker with a nuanced point of view, willing to admit that there are exceptions to the rules (without dispensing all rules because of these anomalies) and allowing for gray areas and complexities.
One chapter is devoted to Fort. Here, his thinking shows similarities to the science fiction writer Norman L. Knight (no Theosophist) as well as Theosophically-inflected Forteans such as N. Meade Layne and R. DeWitt Miller. That is not to say he is derivative of them, only that they developed in the same direction—parallel evolution, say. Joquel argues that Fortean anomalies are explicable by then-current physics. Slight wobbles in universal laws, he argues, allows for the occasional folding of time and space—and thus unusual events:
“That space can fold over, bringing two remotely separated points into juxtaposition for a moment or longer, becomes easily possible under this theory, just as a handkerchief can be folded so that a spot of ink on one corner can be blotted onto an opposite corner without disturbing the intervening fabric. . . . Falls of grain, frogs, fish, and other objects . . . Mysterious bullets apparently out of nowhere, some of large calibre, which have struck trains, buildings, and people—somewhere a gun is fired, but the bullet never reaches the target. Instead it passes through a warp in space to inexplicable strike far from its point of origin.” (190-91).
Not that he thought he had completely solved the riddle of Fortean phenomena. He was pointing a way forward—just as Fort had done:
“By putting rsearchers [sic] on the track of new concepts, the vast mountain of unexplained phenomena may mark the grave of dogmatism in science, and be a guidepost to the new vistas of nature about which we are just beginning to gain a comprehension and an understanding.”
Science was a a stage in human evolution, something that had to be overcome as the Theosophical plan unfolded. Fort had brought that new stage into view by showing science’s contradictions. Joquel hoped to lead humanity further into that new space.
