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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Birdwalking through life

I have sometimes compared the sensation inside my brain as being like riding the Tilt-o-Whirl backwards.

I've had a combination of an extremely short attention span and insatiable curiosity since I was a kid.  I still remember when I was about ten and my parents splurged on a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, figuring (rightly) that it would come in handy during my education.  What they didn't figure on was my capacity for getting completely and inextricably lost in it.  I'd start out looking up some fact -- say, what year James Madison was elected president -- then get distracted by a nearby entry and head off toward that, and before you knew it I was sitting on the living room floor with a dozen of the volumes open to articles having to do with a string of only vaguely-connected topics.  I could start out with James Madison and end up in an entry for the flora and fauna of Cameroon, with no real idea how I'd gotten from one to the other.

That facet of my personality hasn't changed any in the intervening five-odd decades.  I still birdwalk my way through the world, something regular readers of Skeptophilia undoubtedly know all too well (and if you are a regular reader, thank you for putting up with my whirligig approach to life).  Now, of course, I don't need an Encyclopedia Brittanica; the internet is positively made for people like me, to judge by the winding path I took just yesterday.

It all started when I was doing some research into the origin of the word cynosure (meaning "something attention-getting, a guidepost or focal point") for my popular feature "Ask Linguistics Guy" over on TikTok.  I was pretty certain that the word came from the Greek κυνός, meaning "dog," but I wasn't sure of the rest of the derivation.  (I was right about κυνός, but for the rest of the story you'll have to check out my video, which I'll post later today on TikTok.)

But while looking up cynosure my eye was caught by the preceding entry in the etymological dictionary, cynocephaly.  Which means "having a dog's head."

Fig. 1: an example of cynocephaly.  Of course, he's kind of cyno-everything, so it probably doesn't count.  And if you are thinking that I'm only using this as an excuse to post a photograph of my extremely cute puppy, you're on to me.

A more common usage of cynocephaly is someone who has a dog's head and a human body, and it was apparently a fairly common belief back in the day that such beings existed.  In the fifth century B.C.E. the Greek writer Ctesias of Cnidus wrote a book in which he claimed that there was a whole race of cynocephalic people in India, which he was free to say because he'd apparently never been there and neither had any of his readers.  Other writers said that the Cynocephali lived in Libya or Serbia or Finland or Sumatra; you'd think the fact that none of those places are close to each other would have clued them in that there was something amiss, but no.  There was even a discussion in the ninth century, launched amongst the church fathers by a theologian named Ratramnus of Corbie, about whether dog-headed people would have eternal souls or not, because if they did, it was incumbent upon the Christians to find them and preach the Gospel to them.

As far as I know, this discussion came to nothing, mostly because the Cynocephali don't exist.

In any case, this got me on the track of looking into the attitudes of the medievals toward dogs, and my next stop was the story of Saint Guinefort.  If you've never heard of Saint Guinefort, I'm sure you're not alone; he was never officially beatified by the Catholic Church, because he's a dog.  The legend goes that a knight near Lyon had a greyhound named Guinefort, and he left his infant son in the care of the dog one day (that's some solid parenting, right there).  Well, when the knight returned, the cradle was overturned, and Guinefort's jaws were dripping blood.  The infuriated knight pulled his sword and killed the dog, assuming Guinefort had killed the baby.  Only then did he think to turn the cradle over (a real genius, this knight) -- and there was the baby, safe and sound, along with a dead viper covered with dog bites.  So the knight felt just terrible, and erected a shrine to Guinefort, who was venerated in the area as a saint, despite the local priests saying "Hey, you can't do that!" and even threatening to fine people who came there to pray.  The whole episode supposedly happened in the thirteenth century -- but people were still bringing their sick children to be blessed by Saint Guinefort in the 1940s!

From there I started looking into folklore surrounding protectors of children, and after several more jumps that I won't belabor you with, I ended up reading about the mythical monster called Coco (or Cucuy) from Spain and Portugal.  The Coco is a hooded figure that is supposed to haunt houses with children, sometimes appearing only as a stray shadow cast by no physical object.  (Shades of the pants-wettingly terrifying Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Identify Crisis," which if you haven't watched I highly recommend -- only don't watch it while you're alone.)

Fig. 2: "Wait a moment... whose shadow is that?"  *shudder*

Anyhow, the idea is that El Coco particularly goes after disobedient children, so the legend probably started as a way for parents to get their kids to behave.  The problem with these kinds of stories, though, is that it's a fine line between scaring kids enough to obey the rules and scaring them so much they refuse to sleep, which is why there are lullabies about keeping the Coco away.  Some are barely better than the legend itself:

Duérmete niño, duérmete ya...
Que viene el Coco y te comerá

(Sleep child, sleep or else...
Coco will come and eat you)

I don't know about you, but that would have pacified the absolute shit out of me when I was four years old.  I would have been so pacified I wouldn't have closed my eyes until I was in my mid-twenties.  Then there's this one, from Portugal:

Vai-te Coco. Vai-te Coco
Para cima do telhado
Deixa o menino dormir
Um soninho descansado
Dorme neném
Que a Coco vem pegar
Papai foi pra roça
Mamãe foi trabalhar

(Leave Coco. Leave Coco
Go to the top of the roof
Let the child have
A quiet sleep
Sleep little baby
That Coco comes to get you
Daddy went to the farm
Mommy went to work)

Because there's nothing like "hey, kid, your parents are gone, so you're on your own if the monsters come" to get a child to settle down.  Maybe they should have hired a greyhound or something.

Fig. 3: Que Viene el Coco, by Goya (1799).  The mom looks like she's about to say, "You can have the kids, I'm getting right the fuck outta here."  [Image is in the Public Domain]

In the "See Also" listings at the bottom of the page for El Coco was an entry for Madame Koi-Koi, who sounded interesting (and whom I had also never heard of).  So that was my next stop.  Turns out Madame Koi-Koi is -- and I am not making up the wording -- "one of the most popular boarding school ghosts in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa."  Myself, I wouldn't have thought there were enough boarding school ghosts to turn it into a competition, but shows you what I know.  Supposedly Madame Koi-Koi is the ghost of a wicked teacher who was killed by her own students because of her cruelty, and now she haunts schools.  She always wears high heels -- "Koi-Koi" is apparently imitative of the sound her heels make on the floor -- so at least you can hear her coming.  Her favorite thing is to corner students in the bathroom for some reason, especially at night.

Getting up to pee at two a.m. is a fraught affair, in many African boarding schools.

Anyhow, I suppose I've recounted enough of my wanderings.  I'd like to tell you that I stopped there and then went and did something productive, but that would be a lie.  But at least you have a sense of what it's like in my head 24/7.

I hope you enjoyed the ride.  At least you can get off.

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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.

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

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!]