When I moved to Scotland, I wanted to see the Brocken
Spectre with my own eyes. I asked people I met on Scottish mountains if they
had ever seen the Brocken Spectre, and all had said nay. But I knew that the phenomenon must occur in
Scotland, since Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869-1959) came up with the idea
of the cloud chamber (for charting the curving paths of subatomic particles)
after climbing around on Ben Nevis and witnessing the Brocken Spectre in 1894. Seeking the Brocken Spectre is the kind of activity you have to do alone. You may find it after some
discomfort and persistence. You will find it after climbing several mountains,
when your blood is full of oxygen and your mind is soft like wax, ready to receive some new impressions.
To experience it in the flesh meant driving around the
Highlands in low visibility weather and climbing mountains in the rain. Here is
the beginning of one of those climbs.
A mountain forest in the fog looks creepy and ominous, the
kind of place that would harbour hermits and talking birds.
When I climbed above the fog line, the sky opened up into a bright
blue.
When I climbed a bit higher, toward the low roasting sun,
the light became strange. When I turned around, I saw that the sun was
projecting my giant shadow puppet onto the screen of clouds, with a donut
rainbow at its core. This was the Brocken Spectre. When I waved my arms, my shadow version
reacted by sweeping an arc across ten miles of cloud screen. When I danced on a rock, my rainbow shadow
danced miles away. I was controlling two bodies, one of them nearly a mountain
away. I felt like a celestial body planet interacting with the sun and planet
earth. I had two bodies, one of them ethereal, vibrantly coloured, and very far
away. My second body could float on
clouds and was unencumbered by the physical restraints of travel.
Recently when visiting friends in Freiburg, we visited
Colmar and looked at the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Mathias Grünewald in
the 1510s and now in the Unterlinden Museum there. I realized that Grünewald
may have been responding to a Brocken Spectre when he painted the Resurrection
panel of his polyptych. He paints a spectre-like
Jesus, one whose flesh dissolves into light and fills a radial rainbow.
In the polyptych’s closed state, Grünewald paints a gruesome and
tortured earthly body, which gives way in the altarpiece’s second state to a perfected
body, distanced, and ablaze in light. Grünewald may be sacralising an
awe-inspiring meteorological phenomenon, which he could have witnessed in the
mountains of the Alsace and which would not be named for 200 more years. He
equates the fleeting, awe-inspiring optical effect, which provides a creepy
out-of-body experience, with resurrection.
