The Stonehenge Letters. Harry Karlinsky
forty-five years, I practised psychotherapy utilising Freud’s principles. As I approached retirement, I was uncomfortably aware that Freud was no longer venerated in the psychiatric community and that the prestige of psychoanalysis as a discipline was in rapid decline. Indeed, there were ‘biological’ psychiatrists who dismissed Freud’s theories as the unverifiable beliefs of a man bordering on madness. More than once I had to defend the nature of my work to the (much younger) Chair of my Department. In now numerating and restating Freud’s accomplishments, and re-examining his Nobel defeats, it was obvious I was also attempting to legitimise my own career in the process.
I was in the midst of these private musings, when – browsing aimlessly in the Nobel Archives – I stumbled upon the ‘Crackpot’ file, the source of the remarkable story that follows. Nominations for each Nobel Prize are intended to be elicited only by invitation. Each year, the various Nobel Prize Committees invite, in confidence, thousands of qualified individuals, including all previous Nobel Laureates, to nominate deserving candidates other than themselves. Those names proposed by invited nominators – the ‘official’ nominees – are then considered for the coming year’s Nobel Prizes. Despite well-publicised admonitions that only official nominations are adjudicated, the Nobel Prize Committees still receive a substantial number of unsolicited applications, many from individuals who nominate themselves on the basis of questionable achievements. These unsought applications are immediately consigned to the B file, or the Knäppskalle (‘Crackpot’) file as the committee members more affectionately know it, and are rife with such claims as well-intentioned but ill-conceived cures for cancer and flawed designs for perpetual motion machines. The file made for sad but compelling reading and I began to spend more time perusing its contents.
It soon became evident, to a psychiatrist at least, that a significant proportion of those who nominated themselves were in the throes of serious psychiatric illness. Untreated mania, with its pathognomonic features of inflated self-esteem and irrepressible self-confidence, was pervasive. Euphoric applicants, without any prior training or demonstrated expertise, were pronouncing definitively on such matters as pandemics and elementary particle physics or declaring lengthy and incoherent memoirs as great works of literature. Of more concern were those applications fuelled by the bizarre delusions of individuals with psychotic disorders. The frequency of such submissions suggested that there might be merit in conducting a formal review of all unsolicited applications in an attempt to establish the underlying prevalence of psychopathology. Perhaps the resulting data might also identify a unique cluster of symptoms precipitated by the siren song of a Nobel Prize.
As the Knäppskalle file was organised by year of application, I began in 1901, the first year in which the Nobel Prizes were awarded. The number of entries on file increased substantially each year and it was difficult not to be impressed by the range and power of the human imagination, diseased or otherwise. One submission in particular caught my attention. Handwritten in Russian, it contained three unusual figures, two of which related to earthworms. The third, torn from a text written in English, was a sketch depicting ‘one of the fallen Druidical stones at Stonehenge’. Intrigued, I requested the assistance of a translator. In brief, the submission’s central thesis was that a causal relationship existed between the digestive habits of earthworms and why the enormous stone pillars at Stonehenge were gradually sinking into the ground. Despite its unusual supposition, it was a serious account and appeared to have been written as a focused response to an enquiry from a Mr Sohlman.
By this stage in my research, I was able to recognise Sohlman’s name as that of the principal executor of Alfred Nobel’s will and, for many years, the executive director of the Nobel Foundation. To my surprise, I also recognised the applicant’s name: Ivan Pavlov, winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Although I had not been exposed to Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning since the early years of my psychiatric training, the submission’s arguments and style of writing seemed consistent with Pavlov’s well-known reputation for meticulous observation and measurement. Perplexed, I continued my review of the Knäppskalle file, utilising translators as required, until it was complete.
In the end, five other letters related to Stonehenge were addressed to Mr Ragnar Sohlman. Remarkably, early Nobel Laureates had written all but one. Even more remarkably, all alluded to solving the ‘mystery’ of Stonehenge.
And so began my journey of discovery, from Ivan Pavlov to Theodore Roosevelt to Rudyard Kipling to Marie Curie to Albert Einstein to a gentleman by the name of Norman Lockyer.
Or, as Freud once said more eloquently, ‘From error to error, one discovers the entire truth’.
For those readers unfamiliar with the early history of the Nobel Prizes, the man in whose honour they were named – Alfred Bernhard Nobel – was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1833. The third eldest of four sons (two younger siblings died in infancy), Alfred’s childhood years in Sweden were spent in relative poverty. His father, Immanuel Nobel, a self-taught pioneer in the arms industry, had been forced into bankruptcy the year of Alfred’s birth. Immanuel subsequently left his wife Andriette and their children in Sweden to pursue opportunities, first in Finland and later in Russia, that would re-establish the family’s wealth. It was not until 1842 that the Nobel family was reunited in St Petersburg. By then, Immanuel had convinced Tsar Nicholas I that submerged wooden barrels filled with gunpowder were an effective means to protect Russia’s coastal cities from enemy naval attack. This was surprising, as virtually all of Immanuel’s brightly painted underwater mines failed to detonate, even those brought ashore and struck severely with hammers.
Due to the ongoing military tensions that eventually led to Russia’s involvement in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Immanuel’s munitions factory prospered and Alfred’s adolescent years in St Petersburg were privileged. With the assistance of private tutors, he became fluent in five languages and excelled in both the sciences and the arts. At age seventeen, Alfred was sent abroad for two years in order to train as a chemical engineer. In Paris, his principal destination, he was introduced to Ascanio Sobrero, the first chemist to successfully produce nitroglycerine. On Alfred’s return to St Petersburg in 1852, he and his father began to experiment with the highly explosive liquid, initially considered too volatile to be of commercial value.
Despite initial setbacks, Alfred Nobel quickly established himself as a talented chemist and aggressive entrepreneur. His most important discoveries – the detonator, dynamite, and blasting gelatin – would form the lucrative underpinnings of an industrial empire. By the time of his death in 1896, Nobel held 355 patents and owned explosives manufacturing plants and laboratories in more than twenty countries. According to his executors, his net assets amounted to over 31 million Swedish kronor, the current equivalent of 265 million American dollars.
As his legacy, Nobel directed in his will that his immense fortune be used to establish a series of prizes. These were to be annual awards for exceptional contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The will then ended with a curious closing directive:
Finally, it is my express wish that following my death my veins shall be opened, and when this has been done and competent Doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be cremated in a so-called crematorium.
It was Freud who stated that there was no better document than the will to reveal the character of its writer. Nobel was terrified of being buried alive, a phobia termed taphophobia (from the Greek taphos, for ‘grave’). The triggering stimulus, at least as cited in Nobel’s conventional biographies, was Verdi’s opera Aida. Nobel had attended its European premiere at La Scala, Milan, on 8 February 1872 and was deeply affected by the closing scene. Aida, a slave in Egypt (but, in truth, an Ethiopian princess), chooses