The descendants of Dr. Dee

One of the difficulties with establishing paranormal claims is that there are so many ways of getting the wrong answer.

There are the inevitable battles with confirmation bias and dart-thrower's bias, and even when there's actual numerical data to work with, you have to contend with the subtler problem of cherry-picking and p-hacking (something that has plagued experiments designed to detect telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition).  The difficulty becomes even worse when you have the additional problems that sometimes people honestly believe what they're claiming even though it's false (i.e. they're delusional) or that they don't believe what they're saying but say it anyhow for their own reasons, often having to do with personal gain (i.e. they're lying).

Those last two can be hard to tell apart.  Our memories are plastic enough that if you tell the same lie often enough, you're in danger of falling for it yourself.  Take, for example, the strange figure of John Dee, who was in his heyday during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England.

Portrait of John Dee (ca. 1594, artist unknown) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Dee was of Welsh ancestry but was born and raised in London.  His father was one of Henry VIII's courtiers; John had access to a good education, and got a degree at Cambridge University (something that was as prestigious then as it is now).  He studied in Belgium, France, and Italy, ultimately returning to England with an excellent background in mathematics, astronomy... and divination.

It was this last-mentioned that got him in trouble for the first (but not the only) time.  He was arrested and charged with the crime of "calculating" -- casting horoscopes -- in particular doing one for Queen Mary, who was a bit on the superstitious and paranoid side herself and looked upon anything like that as tantamount to wishing her dead.  He ultimately cleared his name through what appears to have been mere luck; "don't shoot the messenger" didn't carry a lot of weight with monarchs back then.  But when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1558, he found a much more willing ear, and in short order really saw his star in ascendancy.  (*rimshot*)

Where things get interesting -- and where the question of "did he really believe what he was saying?" comes up -- is when he fell in with one Edward Kelley.  Kelley is a mysterious figure, probably by choice.  It is thought he was born in Worcester in 1555, but what he was doing between childhood and ending up in the Elizabethan court in his twenties is pure conjecture.  Kelley was obviously educated -- he knew Greek and Latin -- and in 1582 he approached Dee with the idea of a partnership.

Kelley told Dee he was in contact with angels, and they spoke to him in a language called "Enochian."  As the angels dictated, Kelley said, he'd transmit what they told him to Dee, who would then write it all down.  And they did... resulting in numerous diary entries and two books, the Liber Loagaeth and the Claves Angelicae.  Linguists have analyzed Enochian to a fare-thee-well, and found that it's in that odd shadowland between a conlang (i.e. an invented language with actual syntax, morphology, and phonology) and glossolalia, the random noisemaking that occurs during "speaking with tongues."  What syntax it does have is remarkably like English; this is a tipoff that it's not even an authentic conlang, but a simple one-to-one substitution code.  (As someone who has tried his hand at writing a conlang, I can verify that it ain't easy to come up with a language that has its own distinctive structure, and not merely to copycat the languages you know.)

Kelley's "Enochian alphabet" [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Obankston, Enochian alphabet, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, I hasten to reassure you that I don't think Kelley actually was in communication with angels.  But you have to wonder if he thought he was.  A lot of the portrayals of Dee and Kelley in historical fiction have painted Kelley as a cunning liar and charlatan and Dee as a dupe, but from the extant records they both seem awfully earnest.  Both of them ended their lives still clinging to the claim that they were capable of magic -- they traveled all over Europe trying to convince people of their angelic communications, eventually ending up at the court of King Stephen Báthory of Poland and Hungary (interestingly, the uncle of the infamous serial killer Elizabeth Báthory).  The king, though, was a devout Catholic and told Dee and Kelley to shove off, that any claims of that sort had to get the approval of the Pope before they'd get his imprimatur.  Little chance of that; Dee and Kelley were both Protestants, and had worked in the court of the much-detested-at-the-Vatican Queen Elizabeth I of England.

Their case was not helped when Kelley told Dee to relay the message that the archangel Uriel had told him that men were now commanded to share all their possessions freely, including their wives.

You can only imagine how that went over.

Kelley, in fact, never made it back to England.  He and Dee parted ways in the 1590s, and Kelley ended up in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, whom he had convinced that he could transmute lead into gold.  He couldn't.  Kelley died in prison in 1598 -- by one account, from injuries incurred while trying to escape, by another from poison at his own hand.  His end is as mysterious as his origins.

Dee didn't fare much better.  He got back to England to find his huge library had been burglarized, his home damaged by vandals, and his reputation sullied by his association with Kelley.  When James I succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, Dee found his presence at the royal court was no longer welcome -- James was deeply religious and hated anything that smacked of occultism or witchcraft.  Dee died in poverty and obscurity in Mortlake, Richmond upon Thames, in 1608 or 1609.

Dee's name, however, was still revered centuries later by the Spiritualists, Hermeticists, and Rosicrucians.  (Kelley's, not so much, which is odd; it's hard to imagine an explanation for the whole thing where Dee was speaking revealed truth but Kelley was a liar.)  Aleister Crowley (and many other members of The Golden Dawn) thought Enochian especially was the cat's pajamas, and claimed it was the "Adamic language" -- i.e., the language spoken by humans prior to getting their phonemes blenderized by the Almighty during the whole Tower of Babel incident.  Others have claimed that Kelley was in touch with a spiritual power, all right -- but an evil one.  In other words, a demon.

It's a curious story.  Like I said, whatever spin you put on this, both Kelley and Dee were claiming stuff that was objectively false.  But you have to wonder if they thought they were telling the truth.  And it's tempting to think that in our scientific, high-tech world, we're immune to falling for people like this -- either delusional fanatics or else cunning and persuasive liars.  I don't think I need to name names for you to come up with a few modern examples that prove we're still all too susceptible.  They may not be trying to persuade us that they can turn base metals into gold any more, but the falsehoods they're promulgating are perhaps even more dangerous.  The descendants of Dr. Dee, it seems, are still with us -- and now, as then, the only cure for their poison is a combination draught of facts, evidence, and critical thinking.

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Not magic

Can I beg scientists to please please puhleeeez stop giving names to scientific phenomena that induce the woo-woos to have multiple orgasms?

It's bad enough that the woo-woos already take perfectly reasonable terms like "frequency" and "vibration" and "resonance" and "quantum" and define them any damn way they want, and interpret the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as meaning "we're not certain about anything, therefore my noodling around is just as likely to be true as whatever Stephen Hawking came up with."  But some of the names the scientists themselves have come up with are just egging the woo-woos on, with the same result as my putting a pair of juicy pork chops on the floor in front of my dogs and turning my back.

Then acting all surprised when 3.8 milliseconds later, there's nothing but contented chewing noises.

This sort of thing happens way too often.  I suspect that a lot of it has to do with an honest desire to give laypeople some sort of simple, catchy phrase to hang onto.  After all, a lot of physics -- and the problem does seem to occur most often in physics -- is hard and math-y, so the real models themselves are often relatively inaccessible to people who haven't been trained in the field.  (And even some who have.  Despite my bachelor's degree in physics, 95% of academic papers in physics lose me after the first paragraph.  If I even get that far.)

But for fuck's sake, let's learn from our mistakes, okay?  Look at what happened when Murray Gell-Mann introduced a new quantum characteristic, and dubbed it "strangeness."  There's nothing especially strange about strangeness, or at least, it's no stranger than the rest of the quantum model.  Actually, it's a number, and describes the decay of certain particles in strong nuclear and electromagnetic interactions.  But the name stuck, and the "strange quark" has gotten the woo-woos going, lo unto this very day.

There's no better example, however, than the infamous "God Particle."  This moniker was given to the Higgs boson by physicist Leon Lederman because of its ability to interact with and influence any particle with mass, but Lederman himself quickly realized what a misstep this was.  He later said he regretted not calling it the "goddamn particle," but admitted this probably wouldn't have gotten past his editors.

The whole annoying subject comes up because of an article this week in Phys.org about a new mathematical model that may account for the chaotic high energy and information loss that occurs near black holes.  The gravitational fields around a black hole's event horizon are so warped by the high mass that standard formulations tend to break down, and simulating them in a model has proven to be extremely complex.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Event Horizon Telescope, Black hole - Messier 87 crop max res, CC BY 4.0]

So Kanato Goto, Tomoki Nosaka, and Masahiro Nozaki, of RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences, have come up with a new model to account for the complicated behavior at the boundary of a black hole.  It uses a mathematical measure of how difficult a quantum system is to simulate on a classical (non-quantum) computer.  Figuring it into their calculations, Goto et al. were able to show that near the boundary of a black hole, systems will evolve to maximize this measure -- i.e., to become maximally complex and chaotic.

So far, so good, right?  But I haven't told you what this mathematical measure is called.

It's called magic.

When I saw this, I said, and I quote, "Oh, fuck."

In fact, the Phys.org article is titled, "Quantum 'Magic' Could Help Explain the Origin of Spacetime."  At least they had the good sense to put Magic in quotation marks.

Not that it'll help.  I predict that there will be articles on woo-woo websites popping up all over the place claiming that scientists are finally admitting that the whole universe is magical.  Citing the headline, probably without the relevant quotation marks, and conveniently ignoring the contents of the actual article.  "See?  We were right!  It is all magic!  So crystals and homeopathy and astrology and quantum vibrations of love and everything else we've been babbling about for decades!"

Confirmation Bias "R" Us, baby. 

Anyhow, I guess anything I say isn't going to offset this trend to give purely scientific stuff goofy and/or eye-catching names.  But as far as quantum magic -- without the quotation marks -- goes, let me end this rant with a quote from the inimitable Tim Minchin: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be... not magic."

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Different kinds of impossible

Many of us engage in magical thinking -- attributing causal relationships between actions and events that are simply (often accidentally) correlated.  Superstitions are magical thinking; as nice as it would be if you could influence the win/loss ratio of your favorite team by wearing a particular shirt, the universe just isn't put together that way.

Where it gets interesting is that there are different degrees of magical thinking. A clever piece of research from the online journal PLoS-One, carried out by psychologists John McCoy of the University of Pennsylvania and Tomer Ullman of Harvard, illustrates that even those of us who engage in magical thinking seem to be intuitively aware of how impossible different false causations are.

So we can, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, believe in six impossible things before breakfast.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The paper, entitled "Judgments of Effort for Magical Violations of Intuitive Physics," asks test subjects to perform a simple task.  First, imagine a world where magic is real, where conjuring a spell could make things happen that are impossible in our world.  Then, they were asked to judge how difficult those spells would be.  What the researchers found is that the bigger the violation of physics required for the spell to work, the greater the effort by the conjurer must be.  The authors write:

People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them.  Such beliefs are likely affected by people’s intuitive theories of the real world.  In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations.  People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics.  For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground.  A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants.  A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2. These results suggest that people’s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.

After all, to levitate a frog using ordinary physics has already been achieved.  Frogs, like humans, are mostly water, and water is diamagnetic -- when exposed to a strong magnetic field, the constituent atoms align, inducing a magnetic field of the opposite polarity and triggering a repulsive force.  So it doesn't take any particular violation of physics to levitate a frog, although imagining a situation where it could be done without a powerful electromagnet is more of a reach.

Conjuring a frog out of nothing, though?  This is a major violation of a great many laws of physics.  First, if you imagine that the frog is coming from the air molecules in the space that it displaces when it appears, you have to believe that somehow oxygen, nitrogen, and the trace gases in the air have been converted to the organic molecules that make up living tissue.  Just getting from lightweight gaseous elements to the iron in the frog's hemoglobin isn't possible in the lab -- iron, in fact, is formed in the cores of supergiant stars, and only dispersed into space during supernova explosions.  (Pretty cool that the molecules that make up you were once in the ultra-hot cores of giant stars, isn't it?  Carl Sagan was spot-on when he said "We are made of star stuff.")

So there are different sorts of impossible.  You'd think that once you've accepted that the regular laws of physics don't apply -- that you're in a world where magic really happens -- you'd decide that all bets are off and anything can happen.  But our intuitive understanding of the laws of physics doesn't go away.  We still are, on some level, aware of what's difficult, what's impossible, and what's ridiculously impossible.  The authors write:

[P]eople’s ranking of the spells in all our studies were not affected by exposure to fantasy and magic in the media.  We suggest that the media does not primarily affect what spells are seen as more difficult, but rather that people bring their intuitive physics to bear when they engage with fiction.  That is, in line with previous research on myths and transformation, systems of magic are perceived as coherent to the extent to which they match people’s intuitive theories.  People perceive levitating a frog as easy not because they know it’s one of the first charms that any young wizard learns at Hogwarts, rather young wizards learn that spell first because readers expect that spell should be easy.

 
In his 1893 essay The Fantastic Imagination, the novelist George Macdonald wrote, “The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them …but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own.”  It seems people’s little worlds do not stray far from home.

What's especially interesting to me about this study is that being an author of speculative fiction, tweaking the laws of physics is kind of my stock in trade.  I've messed around with time travel (Lock & Key), alternate/parallel worlds (Sephirot), machines that act as psychic amplifiers (Gears), and ordinary people gaining knowledge of the future (In the Midst of Lions), to name a few.  It's fascinating to think about my own writing -- and figure out which of the crazy plot points I've invented were impossible, and which were really impossible.

At least it's reassuring that the evil superpowerful shapeshifters in Signal to Noise fall into the latter category.

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Wrack and rune

Yesterday I stumbled upon a post claiming that someone had programmed an artificial intelligence to cast magical spells, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that was way deeper than I'd expected.

The post was this:

So I googled "AI magical spells," and that was the last anyone saw of me for about four hours.

The first thing I ran into was an article in Vice about a GPT-3-powered AI interface called "Norn" that co-authored (so to speak) a book called A Chaos Magick Butoh Grimoire.  Butoh is a Japanese dance form that incorporates "playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments," but I haven't found any indication that it's connected with magic or the occult, so that's peculiar right from the get-go.  Alley Wurds, the human half of the co-authorship of the Grimoire, apparently tied it in by practicing Butoh moves until exhaustion and then going to the computer to see what Norn could create about the experience.  "GPT-3 has read a huge amount of stuff that it cuts and pastes together in a stream of consciousness free association manner, due to its lack of long term memory," Wurds said.  "So GPT-3 is like the subconscious mind of the internet expressing itself through cut-ups. I’m using my experience in the occult to direct this subconscious mind, rather than just my own."

This resulted in disquieting shit like the following:

The knowledge ritual involves chanting a mantra.  The mantra must be repeated while walking deosil [clockwise] around the boundary of the circle, and then stopping at each of the four cardinal points to meditate upon the knowledge you seek...  You sit down, repeat the mantra, and visualize a pentagram glowing with light.  Once this pentagram is fully visualized, you must carve the pentagram upon your flesh, and repeat the mantra yet again.  You carve the pentagram upon your chest, and feel the blood trickling down.  Repeat the mantra.  Once you are ready, you then pick up your ceremonial blade and stab it through your chest, killing yourself.  You repeat the mantra as you die.  This causes your soul to be released from your body.  The knowledge you seek will appear in your mind.

So, upside: you get to find out the knowledge you're looking for!  Downside: you're dead.

Unsurprisingly, the hyper-religious and hyper-paranoid (the Venn diagram for those two sets would have considerable overlap) are seriously freaking out about stuff like this.  Allowing soulless machines to learn how to cast magic spells and summon demons and whatnot is going to open a portal to hell and release Cthulhu and activate the sigils of evil and the gods of the underworld alone know what else.  But I was having a hell of a time trying to find out where the original post -- the one about the AI casting runes -- came from.  There was a lot of shrieking hyperbole about how evil it was and how we were all doomed, but no one seemed to know for sure where it had originated.

It took me an inordinate amount of time to figure out that the runes weren't created by an AI at all, and had, in fact, zero to do with AI.

They were a set of rune designs developed by author Brandon Sanderson for his Cosmere fictional universe.

Emphasis, of course, on the fictional part.

I shoulda known.  Just last week a woman in Texas became internet-famous for posting on Facebook that parents shouldn't let their kids watch Hocus Pocus 2 because the characters in the movie "could be casting any type of spell [that]… could be coming through that TV screen into your home," and that it could "unleash hell on your kids."

Ignoring the fact that once again, Hocus Pocus 2 is a work of fiction.

So yeah.  That's how I spent my afternoon yesterday.  You'd think I'd have learned by this time.  Run into something like that, immediately say, "It's the conspiracy nuts freaking out over fiction again," and forthwith moving on to some more productive enterprise, like attempting to explain quantum physics to my dog.  But I guess I should look on it as a public service.  I delve into these things so you don't have to.

You're welcome.

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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.

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Lost in the shadows

Some historical discoveries are in that gray area between evocative and frustrating as hell.  The evocative part because it gives us a glimpse into a long-gone culture; frustrating because the great likelihood is we'll never know anything more about it.

It's why I will never get over the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria.  Destroyed piece by piece, starting with a strike against secular intellectuals by King Ptolemy VIII Physcon in 145 B.C.E. and an apparently accidental fire during Julius Caesar's attack on Egypt a hundred years later, the library lost most of its holdings -- and its reputation -- and was gone entirely by the end of the third century C.E.  At its height it had books from all over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and almost certainly contained the complete catalogue of works by such luminaries as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theophrastus, and Aristotle -- the vast majority of which no longer exist.

It's as if we only knew about Shakespeare because of fragmentary copies of Cymbeline and Timon of Athens.  All his other works are gone, known only by title -- or perhaps completely unknown.  That's the situation we're in with most early authors.  The most painful part is that they're gone forever, irreclaimable, disappeared beyond rescue into the murky waters of our past.

That was the reaction I had to a discovery I found out about because a friend of mine sent me a link a couple of days ago, regarding an archaeological discovery in Finland.  Near the town of Järvensuo, northwest of Helsinki, a team of archaeologists from the University of Turku and University of Helsinki found a 4,400-year-old shaman's staff, the top of which was carved into the likeness of a snake.  It resembles depictions of ritual staffs in cave art from the area, so there isn't much doubt about what it is.

It's a pretty spectacular discovery.  "My colleague found it in one of our trenches last summer," said research team member Satu Koivisto.  "I thought she was joking, but when I saw the snake’s head it gave me the shivers."

The discovery brings up inevitable questions about how it was used, and what it tells us about religions and beliefs back then.  "There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people," said team member Antti Lahelma.  "This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman…  Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman's staff?"

Tantalizing indeed, in the full sense of the word.  Like the lost books of the Library of Alexandria, the knowledge, culture, and rituals of the people who used this staff are almost certainly gone forever.  While we can speculate, those speculations are unlikely to be complete (or even correct).  Imagine taking a random assortment of objects from our culture -- a pair of glasses, a stop sign, a computer mouse, a spoon, a garden rake -- and from those alone trying to figure out who we were, what we believed, what we did.

Note that I'm not diminishing the significance and interest of the find, which is pretty amazing.  It's just that it makes me even more cognizant of what we've lost.  It's inevitable, I know that -- nothing lasts forever, not artifacts, not knowledge, not culture.  It's just frustrating realizing how little we know, and worse still, how little we can know.

Maybe that's why I became a fiction author.  If you can't figure stuff out, make stuff up, that's my motto.  It doesn't replace what we've lost, but at least it provokes our imaginations to wonder what things were like back then, to ponder the lives of our distant ancestors, to picture what the world must have looked like to them.

It's better than nothing.  And until we create a time machine, I guess that'll have to be enough.

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

Wishing wells and chicken curses

Combatting magical thinking can be an uphill battle, sometimes.

Even as a diehard skeptic, I get where it comes from.  It can sometimes be an amazingly short trip from "I wish the world worked this way" to believing the world does work that way.  Besides wishful thinking, superstitions can sometimes arise from correlation/causation errors; the classic example is going to watch your favorite sports team while wearing a particular shirt, and your team wins, so you decide the shirt's a lucky charm and proceed to wear it to subsequent games.

This reminds me of one of my college philosophy teachers, who recounted to us something that happened the previous evening.  There'd been a big thunderstorm, and the power went out, and his three-year-old daughter got scared and said, "Daddy, make the lights come back on!"

So he stood up and said, in a thunderous voice, "LET THERE BE... LIGHT."

And the power came back on.

His daughter really respected him after that.  But I bet she started getting suspicious the next time there was a power outage, and his magical ability suddenly didn't work so well any more.

Once a superstitious belief is in place, it can be remarkably hard to eradicate.  You'd think that, like my professor's daughter, once you had some experience disconfirming your belief, you'd go, "Oh, okay, I guess my lucky shirt doesn't work after all."  But we've got a number of things going against us.  Confirmation bias -- we tend to give more weight to evidence that supports what we already believed to be true.  The sunk-cost fallacy -- when we've already put a lot of energy and time into supporting a claim, we're very reluctant to admit we were wrong and it was all a waste.

Another, and weirder, reason superstitions can get cemented into place is the peculiar (but substantiated) nocebo effect.  As you might guess, the nocebo effect is kind of an anti-placebo effect; nocebo is Latin for "I will harm" (placebo means "I will please").  When somebody believes that some magical action will cause them injury, they can sometimes sustain real harm -- apparently the expectation of harm manifests as actual, measurable symptoms.  (This has sometimes been used to explain cases where "voodoo curses" have resulted in the targets becoming ill.)

The reason this comes up is because of two recent discoveries of artifacts for delivering curses in ancient Greece.  The ancient Greeks were a fascinating mix of science and superstition -- but, as I mentioned above, that seems to be part of the human condition.  When we think of them, it's usually either in the context of all the scientific inquiries and deep thought by people like Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Aristotle, or because they had gods and sub-gods and sub-sub-gods in charge of damn near everything.  

This latter tendency probably explains the 2,500 year old tablets that were recovered from a well in Athens, each one containing a detailed curse targeting a specific person.  The people who wrote each one didn't sign them; apparently, cursing someone and then signing it, "cordially yours, Kenokephalos" was considered a stupid move that was just asking for retribution.

The tablets, which were made of lead, were found by a team led by Jutta Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens.  They were found in a well supplying a bath-house near the Dipylon -- the city gate near the classical Athenian Academy.

One of the curse tablets discovered by Stroszeck et al.

Apparently throwing the curses into the well started happening because the previous technique was to put them in the coffins of recently-deceased persons, with the intent that the dead guy's spirit would bring the curse-tablet down to the Underworld and say to Hades, "Hey, bro, get a load of this," and Hades would obligingly smite the recipient.  But around that time Athens tried to put the kibosh on people practicing the Black Arts, and made it illegal to put curses in coffins, so the would-be hexers started to throw them into wells instead.

You have to wonder if any ill effects their targets suffered upon drinking the well water came not from the curse, but from lead poisoning.

The second discovery, which was described in the journal Hesperia last week, is even more gruesome; the remains of a dead chicken that had been chopped up, its beak tied shut, then put in a clay vessel pierced with a nail.  It also contained a coin, presumably to pay whatever evil spirit found the cursed Chicken-o-Gram for carrying out the intent of the spell, which was probably to render the target unable to talk.  The paper describes a similar spell launched against one Libanos, a fourth-century C. E. Greek orator:

To his despair, Libanos had lost the ability to speak before an audience.  He could neither read nor write; he was plagued by severe headaches, bodily pain, and gout.  Libanos's condition improved upon the discovery and removal of a mutilated, dismembered chameleon, which had been hidden in his classroom -- a place where he spent much time.  The animal's head was bent between its hind legs, one of its front limbs cut off, and the other was stuffed into its mouth.

The weird mutilations and twisted pose had an obvious aim; to visit upon Libanos painful symptoms and an inability to speak.  What I suspect, though, is that the problems he had were purely natural in origin, and the discovery and removal of the curse acted as a placebo -- he thought, "Okay, now I should get better!", and did.

Why exactly the nocebo and placebo effects work isn't known; it may have to do with the production or inhibition (respectively) of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to have long-term bad effects if levels stay high.  But honestly, that's just a guess.

Although I still think it's more likely than damage delivered directly by cursed chickens.

In any case, the discoveries are fascinating, and illustrate that the magical thinking we're still fighting today has a long genealogy.  Wouldn't it be nice if logical and science came as readily?

You have to wonder what the human race would have accomplished by now if we had an inborn tendency toward evidence-based thinking rather than believing in evil curses and wishing wells.

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

Symbols, sigils, and reality

When I was little, I had a near-obsession with figuring out whether things were real.

I remember pestering my mom over and over, because I felt sure there was some essential piece of understanding I was missing.  After much questioning, I was able to abstract a few general rules:

• People like Mom, Dad, Grandma, and our next-door neighbor were 100% real.
• Some books were called non-fiction and were about people like Abraham Lincoln, who was real even though he wasn't alive any more.
• For people in live-action shows, like Lost in Space,  the actors were real people, but the characters they were depicting were not real.
• Cartoons were one step further away.  Neither Bugs Bunny's adventures, nor his appearance, were real, but his voice was produced by a real person who, unfortunately, looked nothing like Bugs Bunny.
• Characters in fictional stories were even further removed.  The kids in The Adventures of Encyclopedia Brown weren't real, and didn't exist out there somewhere even though they seemed like they could be real humans.  
• Winnie-the-Pooh and the Cat in the Hat were the lowest tier; they weren't even possibly real.

So that was at least marginally satisfying.  At least until the next time I went to church and started asking some uncomfortable questions about God, Jesus, the angels, et al.  At this point my mom decided I'd had about as much philosophy as was good for a five-year-old and suggested I spend more time playing outdoors.

The question of how we know something has external reality never really went away, though.  It's kind of the crypto-theme behind nearly all of my novels; a perfectly ordinary person is suddenly confronted with something entirely outside of his/her worldview, and has to decide if it's real, a hoax, or a product of the imagination -- i.e., a hallucination.  Whether it's time travel (Lock & Key), a massive and murderous conspiracy (Kill Switch), an alien invasion (Signal to Noise), a mystical, magic-imbued alternate reality (Sephirot), or the creatures of the world's mythologies come to life (The Fifth Day), it all boils down to how we can figure out if our perceptions are trustworthy.

The upshot of it all was that I landed in science largely because I realized I couldn't trust my own brain.  It gave me a rigorous protocol for avoiding the pitfalls of wishful thinking and an inherently faulty sensory-integrative system.  My stance solidified as, "I am not certain if _____ exists..." (fill in the blank: ghosts, an afterlife, psychic abilities, aliens, Bigfoot, divination, magic, God) "... but until I see some hard evidence, I'm going to be in the 'No' column."

This whole issue was brought to mind by an article in Vice sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.  In "Internet Occultists are Trying to Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm," by Tamlin Magee, we find out that today's leading magical (or magickal, if you prefer) thinkers have moved past the ash wands and crystal balls and sacred fires of the previous generation, and are harnessing the power of technology in the service of the occult.

A group of practitioners of magic(k) have developed something called the Sigil Engine, which uses a secret algorithm to generate a sigil -- a magical symbol -- representing an intention that you type in.  The result is a geometrical design inside a circle based upon the words of your intention, which you can then use to manifest whatever that intention is.

So naturally, I had to try it.  I figured "love and compassion" was a pretty good intention, so that's what I typed in.  Here's the sigil it generated:

Afterward, what you're supposed to do is "charge" it to give it the energy to accomplish whatever it was you wanted it to do.  Here's what Magee has to say, which I'm quoting verbatim so you won't think I'm making this up:

Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation.  Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most commonly, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and awaiting the results.

Needless to say, I didn't do any of that with the sigil I got.  Especially the last-mentioned.  It's not that I have anything against what my dad called "shaking hands with the unemployed," but doing it while staring at a strange symbol seemed a little sketchy, especially since my intention was to write about it afterward.

Prudish I'm not, but I do have my limits.

Later on in the article, though, we learn that apparently this is a very popular method with practitioners, and in fact there is a large group of them who have what amounts to regular virtual Masturbate-o-Thons.  The idea is that if one person having an orgasm is powerful, a bunch of people all having orgasms simultaneously is even more so.  "Nobody else has synchronized literally thousand of orgasms to a single purpose, just to see what happens!" said one of the event organizers.

One has to wonder what actually did happen, other than a sudden spike in the sales of Kleenex.

In any case, what's supposed to happen is that whatever you do imbues the sigil with power.  The link Magee provided gives you a lot of options if meditating, singing, or masturbating don't work for you.  (A couple of my favorites were "draw the sigil on a balloon, blow it up, then pop it" and "draw it on your skin then take a shower and wash it away.")  

Magee interviewed a number of people who were knowledgeable about magic(k)al practices, and I won't steal her thunder by quoting them further -- her entire article is well worth reading.  But what strikes me is two things: (1) they're all extremely serious, and (2) they're completely convinced that it works.  Which brings me back to my original topic:

How would you know if any of this was real?

In my own case, for example, the intention I inputted was "love and compassion."  Suppose I had followed the guidelines and charged it up.  What confirmatory evidence would show me it'd worked?  If I acted more compassionately toward others, or them toward me?  If I started seeing more stories in the news about people being loving and kind to each other?

More to the point, how could I tell if what had happened was because of my sigil -- or if it was simply dart-thrower's bias again, that I was noticing such things more because my attempt at magic(k) had put it in the forefront of my mind?

It might be a little more telling if my intention had been something concrete and unmistakable -- if, for example, I'd typed in "I want one of my books to go to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List."  If I did that, and three weeks later it happened, even I'd have to raise an eyebrow in perplexity.  But there's still the Post Hoc fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this" -- you can't conclude that because one thing followed another in time sequence, the first caused the second.

That said, it would certainly give me pause.

Honestly, though, I'm not inclined to test it.  However convinced the occultists are, I don't see any mechanism by which this could possibly work, and spending a lot of time running experiments would almost certainly generate negative, or at least ambiguous, results.  (I'm reminded of the answer from the Magic 8-Ball, "Reply Hazy, Try Again.")

So the whole thing seems to me to fall into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  I'm pretty doubtful about sigil-charging, but there are definitely worse things you could be spending your time doing than concentrating on love and compassion.

Or, for that matter, pondering the existence of Bugs Bunny.  Okay, he's fictional, but he's also one of my personal heroes, and if that doesn't give him a certain depth of reality, I don't see what would.

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

The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

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

No wands for you!

In today's contribution from the "So Weird I Couldn't Possibly Make It Up" department, the owner of a magical tools store in England is refusing to sell wands to Harry Potter fans because he says the wands he sells are real magic wands.  Like, that can cast spells and everything.

Richard Carter, owner of Mystical Moments in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, is miffed that he is being approached by customers who want one of his hand-made wooden wands not because they plan on using it for witchcraft, but because they fancy themselves candidates for Gryffindor. 

"J.K. Rowling has obviously done her research but Harry Potter is for children," Carter told a reporter for The Telegraph.  "It has done nothing for business."

Well, obviously not, if you refuse to sell them your wands.  But it's kind of hard to imagine turning away customers throwing cash in your general direction as being a sound business strategy.

"You wouldn't believe how many real witches and wizards there are knocking about," Carter went on.  "You would be amazed.  They know they can come here in reveal themselves without people thinking they're mental...  I don't have customers who have been Harry Potterfied.  If I had someone come in wanting a wand just because they liked Harry Potter I would not sell them one, not matter how much money they were offering."

Which brings up how Carter could tell the Harry Potterfied people from the Potterless variety, since I'm guessing that once the word got out that he wasn't serving the Potterfied folks they wouldn't just walk in and announce what House they got sorted into.  But Carter is way ahead of any people who are thinking of sneaking:

He can tell the Potterfied customers by their aura.

Apparently he can also recognize the ones who intend to use the wand for evil purposes.  No Harry Potter fans or dark witches and wizards, that's Carter's motto.

So that goes double for you, Bellatrix Lestrange.

He seems like he's got a knack for making some pretty cool items, however.  He picks different woods for different uses -- oak for strength, chestnut for love, elm for balance, mahogany for spiritual growth.  Oh, and yew for immortality, because that's always a possibility, even considering that the Sorcerer's Stone is kind of out of the question.

He makes the wands on a lathe, but claims he has no background in wand-making at all.  "I have no training in woodwork.  I use spiritual guidance and don't know how any of the wands will turn out.  All you need for them to work is faith."

It bears mention that my son works on a lathe as part of his job every day -- a glass lathe, not a woodworking one, but same principle.  And he says, "Working on a lathe and expecting the spirits to tell you what to do sounds like a good way to lose a hand."

Carter's been lucky so far, apparently, because as of the time of this post he has both limbs attached and is still doing his thing.  And after making the wands, he anoints them with oil, and then puts them into a locked cabinet until the right witch or wizard comes along.

Predictably, local Hogwarts fans are a bit ticked off.  Slaithwaite Harry Potter enthusiast Mariella May said that Carter's refusal to sell wands to J. K. Rowling fans is like "McDonald's refusing to sell Happy Meals to sad people."  Which is an apt, and strangely hilarious, comparison.

Not everyone has had such a shoulder shrug of a reaction, though.  Fantasy author G. P. Taylor suggested that the shunned fans should take Carter to court.  Which opens up the possibility of Carter defending himself to a judge against a charge of discrimination based on how customers' auras tell him what variety of fiction they believe in.

See what I mean about this being way weirder than anything I could have made up?

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I kind of admire Carter for his purity of purpose.  Isn't that supposed to be one of the guiding principles of good magic, or something?  Everything in balance, don't try to take advantage for your own gain.  So however weird it sounds to a doubter like myself, I hope that the publicity he's getting helps his sales -- only to bonafide witches and wizards, of course.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

Return to Boleskine

There are few figures in the history of magical thinking more famous, or more polarizing, than Aleister Crowley.

He was a member -- eventually a leader -- of esoteric societies like the Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, and eventually founded one of his own.  After all, once you're a member of an esoteric society, you generally find it's not so esoteric after all, and either have to find one even more esoteric or else make one up.

Some time around 1900 Crowley took the latter option, and named his society Thelema, the Greek word for "will" -- as the whole idea of the thing was "do what you will," especially in matters of sex, which fit beautifully with Crowley's apparent obsession with fucking anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough.

Thelema as an abbey (located in Cefalú, on the island of Sicily) was abandoned in 1923 after Mussolini decided that Crowley wasn't exactly the sort of person he wanted in Italy, and had him and his followers deported en masse.  Today it's more or less a ruin, but still a mecca for practitioners of magick and such stuff.  Crowley had a way of leaving behind these kind of sites, and in fact one of them is the reason this whole topic comes up today -- because one of Crowley's centers of operation, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, recently sold after years of standing empty and decrepit for the tidy sum of £500,000 to "three unnamed investors."  The owners, who call themselves the "Boleskine Foundation," are now apparently in negotiation with the Ordo Templi Orientis (yes, it still exists) to bring back Crowley's practices to Boleskine and turn it into a "sex magick retreat."

Boleskine in 1912, right before Crowley sold it [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently the house has a bit of a reputation even outside of Crowley's antics.  All the way back in the seventeenth century, there supposedly was a "devious local wizard" who kept reanimating corpses, and the minister of the church that stood on Boleskine's grounds spent most of his time trying to rebury them and get them to stay there.  The church itself burned to the ground, allegedly along with the entire congregation, in the early eighteenth century, and the first bit of Boleskine House itself was built in the middle of that century -- right over top of the graves that the minister had such a tough time keeping intact.  (You can see why someone as conscious of ambience as Crowley was would be attracted to the place.)

So Crowley bought Boleskine, and true to his self-styled title of the "Wickedest Man in the World," engaged in all sorts of depravity and hijinks with his friends for nearly fifteen years.  When Crowley sold the place in 1913, it went through a number of different owners, none of whom stayed there for long.  One supposedly killed himself by blowing his own head off with a shotgun.  It was owned for a time by Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, although Page apparently wasn't there all that often.  His caretaker Malcolm Dent, however, said the place was haunted.  "One evening," he said, "a small porcelain figure of the Devil rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace."  He also said he'd been awakened more than once by the sound of "a huge beast, snorting, snuffling and banging.  Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil."

To be fair, though, the owners who bought it from Page, the MacGillivray family, scoffed at the whole thing and said their time in Boleskine House was wonderful, and free from any paranormal fooling about.  So maybe the ghosts only appear to people who already believe in them.

Pretty convenient, that.

In any case, the current owners are planning on renovating and reopening the place, and dedicating it to its previous use as a site for practicing the magickal arts.  Their public statement says that they will "promote events and activities that facilitate health and wellness such as meditation and yoga as well as education on Thelema, the spiritual legacy forwarded by previous Boleskine House owner, Aleister Crowley."

No word yet on any kinky sex stuff, although one would have to expect that's to be a part of it if they're striving for historical accuracy.  I'll keep you posted.

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

The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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