Christmas Day 1976

Christmas Day 1976 marks the clandestine ritual at Manchester Museum in which Laurence Arne-Sayles and two other men handled the preserved head known as Marepool III. The episode joins his theories about recovering ancient powers to the labyrinth’s history: years later, a witness described the rite, and Matthew Rose Sorensen was told that Arne-Sayles had devised rituals to help students reach the labyrinth.

Background and Intended Purpose

Arne-Sayles argued that ancient people had experienced a world that answered them and could be persuaded to bend to human wishes. In his first book, he treated the Ancients’ powers as irretrievably lost; by his second, after experimenting with ritual magic, he considered their recovery possible if a practitioner had a physical link to someone who had possessed them. Actual remains—the body or part of it—would provide the strongest link.

Marepool III, a head held in Manchester Museum, became the focus of that ambition. Arne-Sayles said divination had identified its owner as a king and seer whose knowledge could advance his research and usher in a new age. In May 1976 he asked the museum director to lend him the head for a rite intended to transfer that knowledge. The director refused. Arne-Sayles then encouraged demonstrations outside the museum, including a campaign whose placards read “Free the Head”; after a second demonstration ended with a broken window and a scuffle with police, he appeared to lose interest in the bog bodies.

The Museum Break-In

The museum closed for Christmas at the end of December. When it reopened in the New Year, staff found that someone had broken in and camped inside: food crumbs, biscuit packets, litter, and the smell of cannabis remained. “Free the Head” had been painted on a wall. Burnt candle stubs, with wax and mistletoe fragments on Marepool III, formed a circle on the floor. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, but the display cabinet was broken and the head had been handled.

The museum staff and police suspected Arne-Sayles, but he had an alibi: he had spent the Midwinter festival at an Exmoor farmhouse with the Brookers, wealthy neo-pagans who revered him. Police doubted their account but could not disprove it. Nobody was charged, leaving the break-in and the exact circumstances of the rite unresolved in the contemporary investigation.

Later Testimony and the Labyrinth

In 2001, while Arne-Sayles was in prison, Tony Myers went to a London police station and gave a statement. He said that he had been a student at Manchester University and had broken into the museum on Christmas Day 1976. He described smashing a window and opening the doors for others, then witnessing Arne-Sayles perform a ritual with two men. Myers thought the other participants might have been Valentine Ketterley and Robin Bannerman, but emphasized that he could not be certain after so much time. He also said he saw Marepool III’s lips move, though he heard no words. Myers was not prosecuted.

The ritual’s place in the wider story is sharpened by Matthew Rose Sorensen’s later account of Arne-Sayles’s teaching. Arne-Sayles claimed that he himself could access the labyrinth-world by adjusting his frame of mind and returning to a childlike, prerational state of wonder. Since most students could not do this, he supplied a ritual as a concession to their lack of ability. The account links the museum episode to his attempts to reach the labyrinth, but it does not establish precisely what the Christmas rite achieved or whether Marepool III’s apparent movement had a supernatural cause.

Significance

The episode places human remains at the intersection of scholarship, power, and ritual use. Arne-Sayles sought to treat a preserved head not only as an archaeological object but as a material conduit to the knowledge he desired; the museum’s refusal and the ensuing break-in expose the conflict between institutional custody and his claimed pursuit of ancient wisdom. The candle circle and handled head give the scene concrete traces, while the witness’s uncertainty prevents those traces from resolving into a complete account.

Christmas Day 1976 also forms a hinge between Arne-Sayles’s public theories and the later labyrinth narrative. His published claim that a path between worlds could be walked, the reported rite, and his students’ ritualized attempts to reach the labyrinth converge without fully explaining one another. That gap preserves the event’s double character: a documented museum crime in the later testimony and an unresolved experiment in the novel’s history of crossing between worlds.