Boris de Rachewiltz Two minor Forteans.
Though one had an impressive title.
Both Boris de Rachewiltz and Signore Luigi Villari blonde to the same social circle as the Studers and Caresse Crosby—centered on Ezra Pound, and Italy—and it is through hose connections that they came to join the Society.
Born in 1926, Boris de Rachewiltz came from Russian stock. He was classically educated in Rome. In 1946, a year after Ezra Pound’s arrest, he married Pound’s daughter (with Olga Rudge), Mary. Pound had been living at the de Rachewitz’s land in Brunnenburg since 1927.
Boris attended the Faculty of Ancient Oriental Studies of the Pontificio Instituto Biblico, also in Rome, from 1951 to 1955, focusing on Egyptology. (In 1953, he also studied Vatican Diplomacy at Academia Vaticana.) In 1954, he published Massime degli Antichi Egiziana, which was translated as Maxins of the Ancient Egyptians in 1987 by the American writer and one-time friend of Ezra Pound Guy Davenport. Through the rest of the 1950s he also published books on ancient Egyptian love poetry; the Egyptian Book of the Dead; spells and incantations; and an introduction to African art. Also in 1958, Pound was released from his incarceration and returned to the de Rachewiltz’s castle.
According to the Ezra Pound encyclopedia, Pound used Boris’s research in his poems; and in the 1950s “Boris used his training in Vatican protocol and Italian politics to arrange pro-Pound broadcasts and speeches over Vatican Radio, to generate complimentary articles and testimonials on Pound, and to pressure the Italian press into taking up Pound’s cause.
Though one had an impressive title.
Both Boris de Rachewiltz and Signore Luigi Villari blonde to the same social circle as the Studers and Caresse Crosby—centered on Ezra Pound, and Italy—and it is through hose connections that they came to join the Society.
Born in 1926, Boris de Rachewiltz came from Russian stock. He was classically educated in Rome. In 1946, a year after Ezra Pound’s arrest, he married Pound’s daughter (with Olga Rudge), Mary. Pound had been living at the de Rachewitz’s land in Brunnenburg since 1927.
Boris attended the Faculty of Ancient Oriental Studies of the Pontificio Instituto Biblico, also in Rome, from 1951 to 1955, focusing on Egyptology. (In 1953, he also studied Vatican Diplomacy at Academia Vaticana.) In 1954, he published Massime degli Antichi Egiziana, which was translated as Maxins of the Ancient Egyptians in 1987 by the American writer and one-time friend of Ezra Pound Guy Davenport. Through the rest of the 1950s he also published books on ancient Egyptian love poetry; the Egyptian Book of the Dead; spells and incantations; and an introduction to African art. Also in 1958, Pound was released from his incarceration and returned to the de Rachewiltz’s castle.
According to the Ezra Pound encyclopedia, Pound used Boris’s research in his poems; and in the 1950s “Boris used his training in Vatican protocol and Italian politics to arrange pro-Pound broadcasts and speeches over Vatican Radio, to generate complimentary articles and testimonials on Pound, and to pressure the Italian press into taking up Pound’s cause.
Luigi Villari in 1918 Upon graduation with his degree from the Pontificio Instituto Biblico he worked under the Egyptologist Ludwig Keimer at Cairo University for two years. He conducted fieldwork throughout Egypt and Sudan—stomping grounds of the Fortean John Atkins, at about the same time, as it happened—through the 1960s and then took to teaching at Vatican University in 1972. Throughout this period, he wrote five books. From the 1980s until his death he wrote another five more, including one with Davenport.
He died in 1997.
Boris came to Forteanism in 1952, when he met Tiffany Thayer. The Thayers were on a long-delayed vacation to Europe, part of which had them in Rome. Just before they were to leave, they connected, Boris probably having heard of Tiffany from Ezra. Thayer wrote to Pound, afterwards: “Late Saturday night, while packing, Prince Rachewitz came on the phone. He was in Rome. Boris!” They got together the next morning before our train left, but we got a great deal said in that time, and a foundation laid for future communion. He has good hope of activity on your behalf in Italy.” Thayer described Boris as s “beautiful to see” and “quick and keen and full of humor.”
Thayer continued to drop references to Boris (and Mary), along with attempts to free Ezra, in his correspondence, but these were marginal. He also introduced the Society to him issue 38 (October 1952):
“Now through the good offices of Clara and Alfredo Studer, who are no strangers to readers of DOUBT, we have found the Fortean—of all Italian Forteans—best suited in spirit, temperament, mentality and aims, best fitted by training and experience, to carry the banner of unbelief from the Alps to Sicily and back again.
Members, all, I give you
BORIS (Prince) De RACHEWILTZ
Castello Brunnenberg
Tirolo d’Merano
(Bolzano) Italy . . .
Boris is an Egyptologist by profession, and he has promised us his translations of some hieroglyphic Forteana, with illustrations, as well as an account of the Castello’s ghost and reprints of his articles in several learned publications. The good things will appear in DOUBT at the earliest. Meanwhile, as an admirer of Fort’s canon and an exponent of Fort’s philosophy, he will be introducing the Society and its works to his colleagues, in various languages.
Forteans throughout Italy, and those living in parts of the world where they cannot pay dues in either dollars or Sterling are requested to send their dues to Boris de Rachewiltz, unless, other means of payment have been established prior to this notice. Annual dues are pegged at 1250 liri in Italy. Membership cards will be issued from New York City, as always.
“It is not necessary to address the Prince as ‘Your Highness.’ He prefers Boris.”
The report makes it seem as though Boris was already familiar with Fort. It’s certainly possible—though coming by his books in Italy would not have been easy. But it is also likely that Thayer introduced him to both, if only as a thumbnail sketch, and Boris acceded to the thrust of Fort’s ideas. Possibly there is some remark on Fort buried none of his books, but I do not read Italian so do not know. At any rate, by 1953—issue 39—Boris was on Doubt’s masthead as the Italian representative of the Fortean Society.
As it turned out, the entire substance of Boris’s Fortean career—at least in English—was encompassed by that year. Right around springtime, Mary came to the United States to plead with her father to sing papers admitting he was mad, believed to be a condition for his release, though she neither had high hopes that he would, nor was she convinced that she should make the request. Along the way, she stopped in England and visited with T.S. Eliot. Mysteriously, when the two of them were alone in his house, someone slipped a note under the door to the room where they were talking. In her memoir of being Pound’s daughter, after reporting this strange incident, she quoted a line from Pound’s Pisano Cantos: “and there are also the conjectures of the Fortean Society.”
The next paragraph began, “Tiffany Thayer, editor of Doubt, and his beautiful wife were on the pier and took me to their flat in Sutton Place. I was dazed from the voyage, from the surprise: the ease, the comfort, the elegance; the beauty of the view over the East River, and then dinner at a Japanese restaurant with a vegetable flower in the depths of the clearest soup in an Oriental bowl, and the drive down Broadway in the glitter of changing neon. I couldn’t believe my eyes: my city, my beloved, a mirage? Tiffany smiled: You haven’t seen it in daylight. But this too is America.” Cares Crosby had put James Laughlin, the publisher, in contact with Thayer, and he arranged a meeting between Laughlin and Mary at his home. Laughlin, in turn, put her in contact with the lawyer Julien Cornell, who represented Pound and, for a time, the Society)—but nothing came out of those meetings.
A few months earlier, Thayer had published his own open letter to Boris in Doubt 39 (January 1953). The immediate cause of the letter is unclear—it seems that Boris may have had some interest in the idea of Atlantis, though I cannot find if this is true or not. Thayer introduced the letter as intending to save “a young Atlantean’s time, if the views are valid.” The views in question were an update on Thayer’s geological theorizing, first—and last—mentioned in the debut issue of the magazine. (“One has so little time to theorize these days,” he quipped.) Atlantean research, he said, had been retarded by the orthodoxy that the earth was always a sphere, and that the sphere can be described as a crust floating on a liquid center, the crust moving slowly over time. That’s not true, he said: there have not been land bridges; the continents do not float.
The earth, long ago, was much smaller, and mostly land. But the planet grows by accretion, like a crystal, and in the process it changes from a cube to a larger sphere to an even larger cube to an even larger sphere . . . and on and on, through the eons. Each sphere, he says, is seven times larger than the previous cube (which is why 7 is a sacred number). His theory explains the old ideas about a flat earth—because on a cube each plane would be flat—and the distribution of ice in the tropics, as well as earthquakes. The fitting together of continents—so obvious on maps—is not the result of continental drift, but these changes. Once, long ago, he says, Africa was united with the Yucatan—which explains the similarity of the pyramids in those places. That was Atlantis, destroyed by the sudden change the earth’s shape. A great flood resulted, of course, which is now recorded in myth. He calls these changes planetary hatchings—echoes of Nelson Bond’s story “And Lo! The Bird is on the Wing.” (That phrase comes from the Rubbayat of Omar Khayyam, which was a favorite poetical work of Thayer, so both may have had the same ultimate source.) Thayer ended his epistle that the change would come again—a great planetary wrecking—but no one knew when.
Boris’s most consequential contribution to the Fortean Society came with Doubt 41 (July 1953). As it happened, this was also his last connection. It was the translation of the hieroglyphs on a Papyrus from 1500 B.C. Boris had found it in the papers of Professor Alberto Tulli—which gives the document it’s name, the Tulli papyrus. Boris said it would be the first of many translations of ancient Egyptian Forteana, but, if he presented others to Thayer, they were never printed. One gets the sense that after the euphoria of their meeting, and Mary’s ill-fated trip to the United States, the bonds between the Society and the de Rachewiltz’s became tenuous and then dissolved.
The papyrus concerned 50-meter long rods of light—brighter than the sun—that appeared over Egypt some 3,500 years before on a couple of occasions. At least once, their appearance was coupled with strange rains—of fish and volatiles. The record—in what Boris thought was a book of wonders—indicated that the Egyptian king tried to pacify the strange things with prayers. Thayer published Boris’s short introduction, the translation, a brief commentary, as well as a transcription of the hieroglyphs.
Touching as it did on the then-current fascination with flying saucers, the papyrus was taken up by the UFO subculture, and mention of it can still be found, with references to Boris as well as its publication in Doubt. The report made it into the classic “Flying Saucers Have Landed” by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, for example. Jacque Valle and Chris Aubeck discussed Rachewiltz, the papyrus, the Fortean Society, and Doubt over the course of a few pages in their “Wonders in the Sky.” The seventh issue of “The INFO Journal”—the International Fortean Journal, a successor of sorts to Doubt—also revived interest in the papyrus and Boris’s interpretation.
Since the time of the original publication, questions about the provenance of the document have arisen, but for the purposes of this story that is neither here nor there. The papyrus gained a foothold in one part of the Fortean community and persisted, much more so than did Boris, who seems to have left Forteanism behind him, after a brief flirtation.
*****************************
Of even briefer relations to the Fortean Society was another Italian, Luigi Villari. The son of a British mother and Italian father, Villari was much older than either Thayer or Boris. He had been born in 1876. A one-time journalist, historian, and diplomat, Villari served as a diplomat with the U.S. during the first part of the twentieth century. It was around this time that he started publishing books on foreign affairs, his early works concerning the Balkan and the Caucasus. He would also write on Italian history and the relations between Italy and the Anglosphere. By the 1930s, he had met and befriended Ezra Pound, who became a frequent correspondent. Both Pound and Villari had fascist sympathies, though it seems Villari was not impressed by Pound’s propaganda potential.
Villari died in 1959.
His connection to the Fortean Society came out of the Thayers’ trip to Europe. There seems to have been the same initial enthusiasm about his joining as Boris, but the fire burned out even quicker. Though Thayer had plans for Villari, none of them worked out, and his name only ever appeared once in the pages of Doubt—in Thayer’s write up of his trip:
“Besides the acquisition of this active spiral nebula [Boris], Y[our]S[ecretary] further reports, of the Roman invasion, that Signore Luigi Villari has become a Life Member.
“Signore Villari is the famous son of the famous Pasquale Villari, the eminent historian best known in English-speaking countries for his monumental work upon Savonarola
.
“Several of Luigi Villari’s books have been translated and published in the United States. Perhaps you have read his Roads from Rome. Your public library has it. His current best-seller in Italy is Gli Eredi di Bruto (Heirs of Brutus), a study of political assassination in the past century, including a chapter on Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, the mysterious circumstances attending Hardin’s death, notes upon FDR, and the attempt upon Truman.
“Readers of the Italian language who would like to have this book—and care to wait six weeks—may remit $3.00 to the Society. 331 pp. paper-bound.
“An article by Villari which appeared in Il Secolo is now being Englished for DOUBT, and we hope to have original contributions from him in the future.
“Still other advances were made in the vicinity of Rome, and will be reported as they develop. For all this, we have to thank the Studers, Clara and Alfredo, who have translated into Italian, the Duke of Bedford’s pamphlet, the Financier’s Little Game. The booklet is available in English. Send the Society quarter for three copies.”
Which is to say that Luigi came to the Society through his connections to Pound, his presence in Rome, and his fascist sympathies. It should not be a surprise that Villari reviewed the revisionist history “Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreing Policy 1933-1941,” which—like the work of another Fortean, George Morgenstern, blamed World War II on the U.S. The book favorably impressed bound. It was written by Charles Callan Tansill, who was—according to Alec Marsh—“closely connected to George Vlerick’s Nazi New York circle and, later, a passionate segregationist.” Thayer, too was closely connected to Vierick’s Nazi New York circle.
But however many the overlapping associations between Villari and Thayer’s Society, the connection never gelled.
He died in 1997.
Boris came to Forteanism in 1952, when he met Tiffany Thayer. The Thayers were on a long-delayed vacation to Europe, part of which had them in Rome. Just before they were to leave, they connected, Boris probably having heard of Tiffany from Ezra. Thayer wrote to Pound, afterwards: “Late Saturday night, while packing, Prince Rachewitz came on the phone. He was in Rome. Boris!” They got together the next morning before our train left, but we got a great deal said in that time, and a foundation laid for future communion. He has good hope of activity on your behalf in Italy.” Thayer described Boris as s “beautiful to see” and “quick and keen and full of humor.”
Thayer continued to drop references to Boris (and Mary), along with attempts to free Ezra, in his correspondence, but these were marginal. He also introduced the Society to him issue 38 (October 1952):
“Now through the good offices of Clara and Alfredo Studer, who are no strangers to readers of DOUBT, we have found the Fortean—of all Italian Forteans—best suited in spirit, temperament, mentality and aims, best fitted by training and experience, to carry the banner of unbelief from the Alps to Sicily and back again.
Members, all, I give you
BORIS (Prince) De RACHEWILTZ
Castello Brunnenberg
Tirolo d’Merano
(Bolzano) Italy . . .
Boris is an Egyptologist by profession, and he has promised us his translations of some hieroglyphic Forteana, with illustrations, as well as an account of the Castello’s ghost and reprints of his articles in several learned publications. The good things will appear in DOUBT at the earliest. Meanwhile, as an admirer of Fort’s canon and an exponent of Fort’s philosophy, he will be introducing the Society and its works to his colleagues, in various languages.
Forteans throughout Italy, and those living in parts of the world where they cannot pay dues in either dollars or Sterling are requested to send their dues to Boris de Rachewiltz, unless, other means of payment have been established prior to this notice. Annual dues are pegged at 1250 liri in Italy. Membership cards will be issued from New York City, as always.
“It is not necessary to address the Prince as ‘Your Highness.’ He prefers Boris.”
The report makes it seem as though Boris was already familiar with Fort. It’s certainly possible—though coming by his books in Italy would not have been easy. But it is also likely that Thayer introduced him to both, if only as a thumbnail sketch, and Boris acceded to the thrust of Fort’s ideas. Possibly there is some remark on Fort buried none of his books, but I do not read Italian so do not know. At any rate, by 1953—issue 39—Boris was on Doubt’s masthead as the Italian representative of the Fortean Society.
As it turned out, the entire substance of Boris’s Fortean career—at least in English—was encompassed by that year. Right around springtime, Mary came to the United States to plead with her father to sing papers admitting he was mad, believed to be a condition for his release, though she neither had high hopes that he would, nor was she convinced that she should make the request. Along the way, she stopped in England and visited with T.S. Eliot. Mysteriously, when the two of them were alone in his house, someone slipped a note under the door to the room where they were talking. In her memoir of being Pound’s daughter, after reporting this strange incident, she quoted a line from Pound’s Pisano Cantos: “and there are also the conjectures of the Fortean Society.”
The next paragraph began, “Tiffany Thayer, editor of Doubt, and his beautiful wife were on the pier and took me to their flat in Sutton Place. I was dazed from the voyage, from the surprise: the ease, the comfort, the elegance; the beauty of the view over the East River, and then dinner at a Japanese restaurant with a vegetable flower in the depths of the clearest soup in an Oriental bowl, and the drive down Broadway in the glitter of changing neon. I couldn’t believe my eyes: my city, my beloved, a mirage? Tiffany smiled: You haven’t seen it in daylight. But this too is America.” Cares Crosby had put James Laughlin, the publisher, in contact with Thayer, and he arranged a meeting between Laughlin and Mary at his home. Laughlin, in turn, put her in contact with the lawyer Julien Cornell, who represented Pound and, for a time, the Society)—but nothing came out of those meetings.
A few months earlier, Thayer had published his own open letter to Boris in Doubt 39 (January 1953). The immediate cause of the letter is unclear—it seems that Boris may have had some interest in the idea of Atlantis, though I cannot find if this is true or not. Thayer introduced the letter as intending to save “a young Atlantean’s time, if the views are valid.” The views in question were an update on Thayer’s geological theorizing, first—and last—mentioned in the debut issue of the magazine. (“One has so little time to theorize these days,” he quipped.) Atlantean research, he said, had been retarded by the orthodoxy that the earth was always a sphere, and that the sphere can be described as a crust floating on a liquid center, the crust moving slowly over time. That’s not true, he said: there have not been land bridges; the continents do not float.
The earth, long ago, was much smaller, and mostly land. But the planet grows by accretion, like a crystal, and in the process it changes from a cube to a larger sphere to an even larger cube to an even larger sphere . . . and on and on, through the eons. Each sphere, he says, is seven times larger than the previous cube (which is why 7 is a sacred number). His theory explains the old ideas about a flat earth—because on a cube each plane would be flat—and the distribution of ice in the tropics, as well as earthquakes. The fitting together of continents—so obvious on maps—is not the result of continental drift, but these changes. Once, long ago, he says, Africa was united with the Yucatan—which explains the similarity of the pyramids in those places. That was Atlantis, destroyed by the sudden change the earth’s shape. A great flood resulted, of course, which is now recorded in myth. He calls these changes planetary hatchings—echoes of Nelson Bond’s story “And Lo! The Bird is on the Wing.” (That phrase comes from the Rubbayat of Omar Khayyam, which was a favorite poetical work of Thayer, so both may have had the same ultimate source.) Thayer ended his epistle that the change would come again—a great planetary wrecking—but no one knew when.
Boris’s most consequential contribution to the Fortean Society came with Doubt 41 (July 1953). As it happened, this was also his last connection. It was the translation of the hieroglyphs on a Papyrus from 1500 B.C. Boris had found it in the papers of Professor Alberto Tulli—which gives the document it’s name, the Tulli papyrus. Boris said it would be the first of many translations of ancient Egyptian Forteana, but, if he presented others to Thayer, they were never printed. One gets the sense that after the euphoria of their meeting, and Mary’s ill-fated trip to the United States, the bonds between the Society and the de Rachewiltz’s became tenuous and then dissolved.
The papyrus concerned 50-meter long rods of light—brighter than the sun—that appeared over Egypt some 3,500 years before on a couple of occasions. At least once, their appearance was coupled with strange rains—of fish and volatiles. The record—in what Boris thought was a book of wonders—indicated that the Egyptian king tried to pacify the strange things with prayers. Thayer published Boris’s short introduction, the translation, a brief commentary, as well as a transcription of the hieroglyphs.
Touching as it did on the then-current fascination with flying saucers, the papyrus was taken up by the UFO subculture, and mention of it can still be found, with references to Boris as well as its publication in Doubt. The report made it into the classic “Flying Saucers Have Landed” by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, for example. Jacque Valle and Chris Aubeck discussed Rachewiltz, the papyrus, the Fortean Society, and Doubt over the course of a few pages in their “Wonders in the Sky.” The seventh issue of “The INFO Journal”—the International Fortean Journal, a successor of sorts to Doubt—also revived interest in the papyrus and Boris’s interpretation.
Since the time of the original publication, questions about the provenance of the document have arisen, but for the purposes of this story that is neither here nor there. The papyrus gained a foothold in one part of the Fortean community and persisted, much more so than did Boris, who seems to have left Forteanism behind him, after a brief flirtation.
*****************************
Of even briefer relations to the Fortean Society was another Italian, Luigi Villari. The son of a British mother and Italian father, Villari was much older than either Thayer or Boris. He had been born in 1876. A one-time journalist, historian, and diplomat, Villari served as a diplomat with the U.S. during the first part of the twentieth century. It was around this time that he started publishing books on foreign affairs, his early works concerning the Balkan and the Caucasus. He would also write on Italian history and the relations between Italy and the Anglosphere. By the 1930s, he had met and befriended Ezra Pound, who became a frequent correspondent. Both Pound and Villari had fascist sympathies, though it seems Villari was not impressed by Pound’s propaganda potential.
Villari died in 1959.
His connection to the Fortean Society came out of the Thayers’ trip to Europe. There seems to have been the same initial enthusiasm about his joining as Boris, but the fire burned out even quicker. Though Thayer had plans for Villari, none of them worked out, and his name only ever appeared once in the pages of Doubt—in Thayer’s write up of his trip:
“Besides the acquisition of this active spiral nebula [Boris], Y[our]S[ecretary] further reports, of the Roman invasion, that Signore Luigi Villari has become a Life Member.
“Signore Villari is the famous son of the famous Pasquale Villari, the eminent historian best known in English-speaking countries for his monumental work upon Savonarola
.
“Several of Luigi Villari’s books have been translated and published in the United States. Perhaps you have read his Roads from Rome. Your public library has it. His current best-seller in Italy is Gli Eredi di Bruto (Heirs of Brutus), a study of political assassination in the past century, including a chapter on Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, the mysterious circumstances attending Hardin’s death, notes upon FDR, and the attempt upon Truman.
“Readers of the Italian language who would like to have this book—and care to wait six weeks—may remit $3.00 to the Society. 331 pp. paper-bound.
“An article by Villari which appeared in Il Secolo is now being Englished for DOUBT, and we hope to have original contributions from him in the future.
“Still other advances were made in the vicinity of Rome, and will be reported as they develop. For all this, we have to thank the Studers, Clara and Alfredo, who have translated into Italian, the Duke of Bedford’s pamphlet, the Financier’s Little Game. The booklet is available in English. Send the Society quarter for three copies.”
Which is to say that Luigi came to the Society through his connections to Pound, his presence in Rome, and his fascist sympathies. It should not be a surprise that Villari reviewed the revisionist history “Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreing Policy 1933-1941,” which—like the work of another Fortean, George Morgenstern, blamed World War II on the U.S. The book favorably impressed bound. It was written by Charles Callan Tansill, who was—according to Alec Marsh—“closely connected to George Vlerick’s Nazi New York circle and, later, a passionate segregationist.” Thayer, too was closely connected to Vierick’s Nazi New York circle.
But however many the overlapping associations between Villari and Thayer’s Society, the connection never gelled.
