Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages.  Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real, and alive.  And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor.  I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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The Battle of Blythe Road

I've been interested in the occult since I was a teenager.  It started when I was about fifteen, on one of the annual trips with my dad to Arizona and New Mexico (mostly for hiking and rockhounding, as my father was a lapidary and avid rock collector), and stumbled upon a funky little old used bookstore in the town of Alpine, Texas.  It was there I picked up a book called The Black Arts: A History of Occult Practice by Richard Cavendish, which I devoured (and, incidentally, I still own).

I started collecting Tarot decks (again, which I still own) and other objets de magique, not to mention reading voraciously other books on the occult.  By the time I was in my upper teens I'd already begun to admit to myself that it was all rather ridiculous, but -- to paraphrase the famous poster on Fox Mulder's office wall in The X Files -- dammit, I wanted to believe.

There was a time while I was in college when my attraction for magical thinking did serious war with my training in skeptical, rational hard science, but eventually I had to admit that -- as far as I'd seen -- occult practice stumbles hard over one fact; it simply doesn't work.  There's never been a single rigorous test of magical claims in which the claim has proven to be valid.  It hasn't stopped people from believing in it all, of course.  I can attest that even despite my skepticism, I'm still drawn to it.  It's undoubtedly why I write paranormal fiction; it allows me to exercise, or perhaps exorcise, some very deep-seated desires about the way I'd like the world to work.

Of course, I should interject here that the fact that it hasn't been validated yet doesn't mean it never will.  As I've said many times before about such matters as ghosts and the afterlife and cryptids, all I'd need is scientifically admissible hard evidence, and I'd have no choice but to change my mind.  But from my perspective, the times people have actually tried to do the occult have always devolved into something fruitless, silly, and... well... a bit banal.

And that brings us to the Battle of Blythe Road.

All of you will undoubtedly recognize the names of the major players in this calamitous non-event.  First, there was Irish poet W. B. Yeats; second, Samuel Liddell "MacGregor" Mathers (he added the "MacGregor" part because he was a Celtophile and didn't much like his solidly English-sounding given names); and finally, Aleister Crowley, British occultist and writer and self-styled "Wickedest Man in the World."  

Aleister Crowley in 1912 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The backdrop of all this is an occult organization called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded and ruled with an iron fist by Mathers, which held its meetings in a building on Blythe Road in London.  The Order had three levels; the lowest was initiatory, and involved study of esoteric philosophy including the Qabalah and other occult writings.  The second was where the good stuff started; once in the second order, you learned alchemy, astral projection, divination, and geomancy, and also (by some accounts) got to participate in some pretty hot-sounding sex rituals.  The third order was only for the crème de la crème, i.e., the people MacGregor Mathers liked.  It had a great many influential members -- not only the ones I've mentioned, but such luminaries as Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen.

The trouble started when Aleister Crowley, who was in the lowest order, demanded to be initiated into the second.  Yeats, who was quite influential in the Order of the Golden Dawn, spoke out very forcefully against Crowley's being allowed to take the step up.  Yeats and Crowley had hated each other pretty much from the get-go; a lot of it apparently stemmed from Yeats criticizing Crowley's poetry, something the latter did not accept lightly.  Yeats, on the other hand, was concerned with more than just literary output.  He took seriously Crowley's penchant for controlling and threatening people, not to mention his habit of having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough, and told some of the higher-ups that he was concerned that if Crowley learned the secrets of the second order, he'd use them for evil purposes.

So the leaders -- notably, not including Mathers -- told Crowley no deal.

Crowley, predictably, didn't take that well either.  He went to complain to Mathers, who was in Paris at the time, and Mathers sided with Crowley.  He did a solo initiation of Crowley into the second order, and gave him instructions for some spells to use against Yeats and his cronies.  Thus armed, Crowley came to the Golden Dawn headquarters on Blythe Road to open a can of magical whoopass.

What happened was nothing short of comical.  Crowley walked up the stairs, thundering the magic spells he'd learned from Mathers.  Yeats et al. were waiting for him at the top of the stairs.  When he was in range, Yeats simply kicked Crowley until he lost his balance and fell down the stairs.

And thus ended the Battle of Blythe Road.

Crowley retreated in disarray, but recall that he was not a man to admit defeat, and he decided to take revenge on Yeats (magically, of course).  He seduced the Irish artist Althea Gyles and asked her for help casting some spells on Yeats, but Gyles (for reasons unknown, but possibly related to the fact that Crowley was a skeevy sonofabitch) double-crossed him by snipping off a lock of his hair while he was asleep and sending it to Yeats, so the latter could come up with some Crowley-specific counter-spells.  So Crowley's second attempt to kick ass and take names also failed.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn never quite recovered from the infighting.  It splintered into bunches of schismatic offspring, such that at one point there were more secret occult esoteric orders in Britain than there were actual secret occult esotericists.  But what strikes me is that despite all this, the members still seemed to treat their practices with such infernal gravity that the whole situation began to resemble a bunch of little kids playing some kind of super serious game of Let's Pretend.  This, despite the fact that everyone knew that three of the most accomplished adepts -- Yeats, Mathers, and Crowley -- had a massive magical duel that was settled when one of them kicked another one down the stairs.

So anyhow, that's the story of the Battle of Blythe Road.  Like I said before, I would love it if I could report that there was all of this occult stuff done, à la Harry Potter dueling Voldemort, and sparks flew and crazy magic shit happened until the evil guy was vanquished by a powerful spell.  But as my grandma used to tell me, wishin' don't make it so.  More's the pity, because it sure would be fun to live in a world where Tarot decks told you the future and magic wands really worked.

****************************************

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do yard chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery, which is scheduled to come out in a collection called A Quartet for Diverse Instruments in the summer of 2021.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is well worth reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my dog, and he clearly had no idea.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an attention span longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]