Chapter 10. Paranormal phenomena

Powers

Some say belief
is a prerequisite to their powers.
Others need to believe in them,
and they need to believe in themselves.
However, I know people
whose powers are not voluntary,
who discover them accidentally,
and whom others actively discourage.
Geoffrey of Monmouth
claimed that Merlin’s powers
came from his birth by a moral woman
sired by a non-human incubus.
Paranormal powers take many forms,
but all are some kind of ability
to cause, control, or perceive things
that cannot be scientifically explained.

Extrasensory perception

ESP includes mind-reading and telepathy,
clairvoyance, and precognition of future events.
There’s something odd about people who have ESP
because they’re never able to scientifically prove it.
Their ability must be linked, maybe genetically,
to an evasive and contrary spirit in the orbitofrontal cortex.

Astral projection

After a near-death experience
people report floating above their bodies
looking down on the doctors in the room
or seeing someone discover their bodies.
Some people say they have learned
how to control this phenomenon,
so they can travel anywhere, bodiless,
even outside our solar system.
If we can take these claims seriously,
astral projection does not require brain injury,
Alzheimers, schizophrenia, delusion,
vivid dreaming, or hallucinogenic drugs.

Ghosts

People say ghosts are disembodied spirits,
but I don’t understand why they say that,
because we have an instinctively negative reaction
when encountering ghosts,
but we don’t have the same reaction
when encountering people or animals
who have their spirits still inside them,
at least not most people.
Of course the separation—when a spirit
is without a body or a body
is without a spirit—maybe the separation
is shocking in and of itself.
But I suspect ghosts aren’t animal spirits
but projections of another dimension,
echos of a hellish other world,
intended only to fool us.
Because if a ghost looks like a person
or speaks like a person, but it is not the person,
it suggests more that the ghost can imitate a person,
not that it is derived from the person.
Otherwise, how can ghosts appear
to wear the clothing of a dead person?
Do spirits wear clothes? No, ghosts are only
illusions and deceptions.

Divination

You’d think, considering
the myriad forms of psychic readings
and their ancient roots
there’d be something to it.
You’d think there’d be something to astrology,
even though it began before people knew
the stars and the planets followed Newton’s laws,
so it seemed perfectly reasonable
to think the positions of the planets at your birth
relative to their positions today
affect your individual emotions,
finances, and other practical affairs.
You’d think there’d be something to palmistry
given its roots in ancient Hindu astrology.
Why shouldn’t lines and bumps on my palm
be fair guides for making important decisions?
At least palm-reading is more respectable
if not more believable
than bibliomancy
(opening a book and blindly selecting a word),
cartomancy
(reading random arrangements
of a deck of cards, often a Tarot deck),
ceromancy
(reading wax drippings),
cleromancy
(casting lots to choose a reading
from a book such as the I Ching),
haruspicy
(examining entrails),
pyromancy
(reading flames),
molybdomancy
(reading molten metal),
nephelomancy
(reading clouds),
tasseography
(reading tea leaves),
ureamancy
(reading froth on urine),
or using a Magic 8-Ball,
which people use for amusement.
Or how about scrying,
where people go into a trance
or pretend to go into a trance
in which they see things,
or pretend to see things
in crystal balls (crystallomancy),
or smooth bodies of water (hydromancy),
or looking into mirrors (catoptromancy),
or into glowing coals (anthracomancy),
or rising smoke (turifumy),
or opaque rounded stones (peep stones),
or even whatever’s going on
inside the scryer’s eyelids?
You’d think these diviners were doing more
than looking at you with cold eyes
and interpreting your reactions
to general and contradictory mumbo jumbo.
Your professional diviner today
should be regarded not as a mystic
but as an entertainer.

Numerology

You shall see
when we add up the numeric values
of the letters of your name
your importance in the universe.
Each name, each number
has a mystical significance
from before the Pythagorian ideal
unto the present time.
Just as 666 is the number
of the beast of Revelation,
so then 888 is the number
of Christ the Redeemer.
These numbers show the divine origins
of the alphabetic order
of Hebrew, Greek, and English letters,
and the infallibility of base ten.
Your number is a sum
of your past and your future,
whether to be grateful, regretful,
hopeful, or dreadful.

Curses

A good curse is the result of a proper ritual.
We are talking real serious here, including, possibly:
a circle enclosing a pentagram with candles,
display or creation of sacral symbols,
blood and flame, also shadows,
a witches’s cauldron, eye of newt, and all that,
an invocation of lesser demons or compromised angels,
repeating certain words sacred and profane,
manipulation of certain objects sacred and profane,
performance of dance, song, or sacred mumbo jumbo,
or a custom-made voodoo doll with sharp pins.
God and Jesus are exceptions;
they issued curses without rituals.
God cursed the serpent for convincing Eve to eat the apple,
and he cursed Cain for murdering Abel
and the earth where Abel’s blood was spilled.
Jesus cursed the fig tree because it was barren.
The best curses
have the best justifications:
retributions of wrongs such as
murdering your brother,
social ostracism, relentless bullying,
financial ruin
(where someone else is to blame),
misappropriation of a throne,
any of the seven deadly sins,
or desecrations, such as
grave robbery,
or opening King Tut’s tomb
(which was grave robbery).
However, accidentally stepping on a crack
should not break your mother’s back.
Cursers are either outcasts or tyrants.
Fugitives, gypsies, witches,
and sorry loners lamenting their fates
curse because they want to punish
those who brought misery upon them.
Tyrants curse to exercise
their arbitrary and cruel power.
A curse could be a metaphor
for something unmentionable
(which we won’t mention),
or for something universal
(such as random bad luck),
or a plot device
because some plots
just don’t work without them.
But all curses rely on guilt,
the power of suggestion,
and confirmation bias,
essentially where stupidity
validates superstition.

Con artists

The father of spirit photography
(a well documented fact)
deliberately doctored his photographs
and relied on double exposures.
He was exposed as a fraud because some of his ghosts
were living people who could be identified.
So many séance mediums were debunked
that today séances are seen
as a form of entertainment,
not as a means of communicating with the dead.
Harry Houdini was well-known for exposing
the cheap tricks of mediums and psychics,
but Arthur Conan Doyle exposed Houdini;
Doyle said that Houdini possessed paranormal abilities
that he used in performing his own tricks,
and in preventing others from proving themselves.
Furthermore, Houdini’s wife after his death
hired mediums to communicate with him.
Even if many mediums were frauds,
it doesn’t mean that all of them were.
If voices of the dead cannot be heard in a darkened room,
if the dead cannot answer questions by rapping on tables,
if they cannot rotate or levitate hair or tables,
then they probably cannot testify
against either frauds or debunkers.

Stone tapes

People say during a traumatic event
mental and emotional energies
are projected into rocks and other hard objects,
and these energies can be replayed
in the presence of a sympathetic soul.
Our Native American ancestors spoke
of something different;
they said that the stones themselves
speak to us
but in a metaphorical sense,
not literally.
They elicit a reverence
from shared love and belonging.