A BENEFIT OF MONGRELS

The natural and the supranatural inhabit the same world, intersecting but largely unseen to one another, like lodgers who share a house but keep different hours, only occasionally passing on the narrow stairs. They do not speak the same language, their customs are different and their views of the world and the laws and behaviours that govern it are wildly and mutually opposed.

It is only when they bump shoulders that they take note of each other, but when they do so, arcane and infelicitous things will happen. Because of this, it is necessary that the tight spaces where such friction may occur are governed by rules, and that those rules are policed.

For centuries there have been few more crowded nests of humanity than the great beast of a city which sprawls on either side of the Thames, and it was to regulate interaction between the natural and the supranatural that the ancient Free Company known as The Oversight of London was formed.

It is a paradox perhaps of passing interest only to those who collect quaint ironies that this shadowy borderland is best patrolled by those who carry the blood of both types in their veins… or to frame it differently: the unseen picket line which prevents one world from predating on the other is policed by mongrels.

from The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk (also known as the Ba’al Shem of London)