The invention of Philip

Despite my being immersed for years in the Wild World of Woo-Woo, I still occasionally run across things that I'd never heard of.  Some of them are apparently famous enough that I think, after finding out about them, "How on earth did I miss that one?"

Take, for example, the "Philip Experiment," which I bumped into for the first time yesterday morning.  The "experiment" -- although I myself would have hesitated to use that term to describe it -- was the brainchild of Iris Owen, leader of the "Owen Group," which was a team of parapsychology investigators in Toronto in the 1970s.  Owen and her pals apparently were tired of contacting the spirits of actual dead people, so they came up with an interesting idea; would it be possible to invent a fake dead person, and have that dead person's soul become real?

I was already laughing by this point, but it gets even funnier.  Owen & Co. dreamed up "Philip Aylesford," a fictional seventeenth-century Englishman.  Philip, according to the site Mystica, "...was born in England in 1624 and followed an early military career.  At the age of sixteen he was knighted.  He had an illustrious role in the Civil War.  He became a personal friend of Prince Charles (later Charles II) and worked for him as a secret agent.  But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl.  When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and the girl was burned at the stake.   In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty."

One of the more artistically-minded Owen Group members even drew Philip's portrait:

So the Owen Group began to meditate on Philip's life, meeting frequently to have deep discussions about All Things Philip.  After fleshing out the details of Philip's history, they finally decided to have a séance to see if they could raise Philip's soul from the afterlife.

Have I been emphatic enough on the point that Philip Aylesford wasn't a real guy?

I doubt anyone will be surprised, however, that the séance and "table tipping" sessions that followed showed some serious results.  Philip did the "rap once for yes, twice for no" thing, giving correct answers to questions about his life.  Questions that, of course, everyone in the room knew the answer to.  The table in the room where the séance was held moved in a mystifying manner; Philip, one source recounts, would "move the table, sliding it from side to side despite the fact that the floor was covered with thick carpeting.  At times it would even 'dance' on one leg." Mystica tells us that Philip "...had a special rapport with Iris Owen," and even whispered some answers to her, although efforts to catch the whispers on an audio recording were "inconclusive."

We are told, by way of an "explanation" (although again I am reluctant to use that word here), that Philip was an egrigor -- "a supernatural intelligence produced by the will or visualization of participants in a group."  I, predictably, would offer the alternative definition of, "a delightful mélange of collective delusion, hoax, wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the whole thing from being spread about as solid evidence of the paranormal.  It was the subject of a YouTube video, which I encourage you all to watch for the humor value alone.  Even funnier, the "Philip Experiment" encouraged other parapsychology buffs to try to replicate the results.  The Paranormal Phenomena site (linked above) tells us that other groups have been successful at making contact with Lilith, a French Canadian spy; Sebastian, a medieval alchemist; Axel, a man from the future; and Skippy Cartman, a 14-year-old Australian girl.

I bet you think I'm going to say "I made the last one up."  Sorry, but no.  The "Skippy Experiment" is a real thing, and "Skippy Cartman" was able to communicate via "raps and scratching sounds."

It's probably too much to hope for that she asked for "some goddamn Cheesy Poofs."

I know I've written about some ridiculous things before, but this one has got to be in the Top Ten.  All through doing the research for this post, I kept having to stop to do two things: (1) checking to see if this was some kind of parody, and (2) getting paper towels to wipe up the coffee that I'd choke-snorted all over my computer monitor.  I mean, really, people.  If the paranormalists actually want us skeptical science-minded types to take them seriously -- to consider what they do to be valid experimentation -- they need to stop pulling this kind of crapola.  I know that skeptics can sometimes be guilty of doing the throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bath thing, better known as the Package Deal Fallacy -- "some of this is nonsense, so it's all nonsense."  But still.  The fact that a lot of the paranormal sites that feature the Philip Experiment were completely uncritical in their support of its validity makes me rather doubt that they can tell a good experiment from a bad one in general.

That said, I have to say that if we really can communicate with fictional entities, there are a few characters from some of my novels that I wouldn't mind having a chat with.  Tyler Vaughan, the main character from Signal to Noise, would be a good place to start, although I have it on good authority that Tyler is so much like me that I probably wouldn't gain much by talking to him.  It'd be kind of cool to meet Duncan Kyle from Sephirot to ask him about his travels, and the brilliant, eccentric telepath Callista Lee from The Snowe Agency Mysteries because she could probably tell me anything I wanted to know about human nature.

But it's not possible, of course.  And if all I got were some "raps and scratching noises" for my effort, it'd probably not be worth the effort in any case.

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

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!]

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music. I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

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

A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

Playing cards with ghosts

So there's the story of the little kid who starts a snowball rolling at the top of a hill, and as it rolls it accumulates more snow, getting bigger and bigger, until finally it reaches the bottom and crushes a car or something.  Thus the coining of the term snowball effect and a cautionary lesson about getting things started that might eventually get away from you.

I feel a little like that kid this week.  Tuesday I posted about the fact that I loved it when woo-woos conducted hybridization experiments on disparate bizarre claims, and as an example talked about a guy who said he could summon UFOs by telepathy.  This generated an email from a reader, who said that if I liked that one, I'd love the guy who said, basically, that Bigfoot was elusive because quantum.  I ended that piece saying that if anyone had any further weird combos up their sleeve, for example, a recommendation that we choose our homeopathic remedies using Tarot cards, I didn't want to know about it.

This prompted a different loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me an email that said, "I tried to find one combining Tarot cards and homeopathy, but I found this one instead.  Do I win?"

Despite my feeling of foreboding, I clicked the link.  And found myself reading about "Using Tarot Cards to Communicate With Ghosts."

Like the other two, I kept looking for some sign that this was satire, but sadly, I don't think it was.  "Tarot cards are a great way to communicate with spirits," we're told in the introduction.  "It’s because they open up your intuition, so you become receptive to the ghost’s or spirit’s message."

But then we're immediately told to be cautious.  Ghosts and spirits, apparently, can do bad stuff, so we have to speak to them sternly right from the get-go.  There are four rules one must follow:

1. Never allow the spirit to enter your mind
2. Tell the spirit it may only guide your hand to the right card
3. Tell the spirits that you have the power to end the session when you want
4. Tell it exactly how you want it to communicate or confirm a card

There are even concrete hints on how to accomplish all of this.  These include using "protective charms and stones" such as tiger's eye and hematite to keep those spirits where they belong.

Oh, and we're told that we have to do our research about what the cards mean, and be reasonable about what we ask, because "spirit communication tires out ghosts."  I'm not all that sympathetic about this, because honestly, what else do ghosts have to do?  It's not like they have day jobs, or anything.  They can nap pretty much whenever they want to.  So if I want to talk to a ghost, I'm expecting it to get up off its ectoplasmic ass and talk back.  I don't want to hear any pathetic excuses like "I'm just too sleepy tonight," or to pull out my Ouija board and have it spell out "zzzzzzzzzzzzz."

Then we're told that we should also research what ghosts might be present, and that if (for example) we suspect that there's a female ghost haunting the place, we can expect lots of feminine imagery in the cards we draw.  But then there's the caveat that we might accidentally attract a different spirit, so we might not get the cards we expect.  Which seems about right.  We will either get cards we expect, or not, every time, which certainly sounds like hard evidence of ghostly communication to me.

Then there's a bunch of stuff about thanking the ghost and making sure he's sent back to the ghost realm and cleansing the cards with spiritual detergent or something.  By this time, my eyes had kind of glazed over.  I'm thinking I may need to read a chapter or two of this book, just to recover:

Not that it'll help.  If you're looking for me, I'll be in the corner of my office, sitting on the floor, rocking and quietly sobbing.  So thanks for the cards and letters and all.  I hope you're happy.

The invention of Philip

Despite my being immersed for years in the Wild World of Woo-Woo, I still occasionally run across things that I'd never heard of.  Some of them are apparently famous enough that I think, after finding out about them, "How on earth did I miss that one?"

Take, for example, the "Philip Experiment," which I bumped into for the first time yesterday morning.  The "experiment" -- although I myself would have hesitated to use that term to describe it -- was the brainchild of Iris Owen, leader of the "Owen Group," which was a team of parapsychology investigators in Toronto in the 1970s.  Owen and her pals apparently were tired of contacting the spirits of actual dead people, so they came up with an interesting idea; would it be possible to invent a fake dead person, and have that dead person's soul become real?

I was already laughing by this point, but it gets even funnier.  Owen & Co. dreamed up "Philip Aylesford," a fictional 17th century Englishman.  Philip, according to the site Mystica, "...was born in England in 1624 and followed an early military career.  At the age of sixteen he was knighted. He had an illustrious role in the Civil War.  He became a personal friend of Prince Charles (later Charles II) and worked for him as a secret agent.  But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl.  When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and the girl was burned at the stake.  In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty."

One of the more artistically-minded Owen Group members even drew Philip's portrait:

So the Owen Group began to meditate on Philip's life, meeting frequently to have deep discussions about All Things Philip.  After fleshing out the details of Philip's history, they finally decided to have a séance to see if they could raise Philip's soul from the afterlife.

Have I been emphatic enough on the point that Philip Aylesford wasn't a real guy?

I doubt anyone will be surprised, however, that the séance and "table tipping" sessions that followed showed some serious results.  Philip did the "rap once for yes, twice for no" thing, giving correct answers to questions about his life.  Questions that, of course, everyone in the room knew the answer to.  The table in the room where the séance was held moved in a mystifying manner; Philip, one source recounts, would "move the table, sliding it from side to side despite the fact that the floor was covered with thick carpeting.  At times it would even 'dance' on one leg."  Mystica tells us that Philip "...had a special rapport with Iris Owen," and even whispered some answers to her, although efforts to catch the whispers on an audio recording were "inconclusive."

We are told, by way of an "explanation" (although again I am reluctant to use that word here), that Philip was an egrigor -- "a supernatural intelligence produced by the will or visualization of participants in a group."  Whatever that means.  I, predictably, would offer the alternative definition of, "a delightful mélange of collective delusion, hoax, wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the whole thing from being spread about as solid evidence of the paranormal.  It was the subject of a YouTube video, which I encourage you all to watch for the humor value alone.  Even funnier, the "Philip Experiment" encouraged other parapsychology buffs to try to replicate the results.  The Paranormal Phenomena site (linked above) tells us that other groups have been successful at making contact with Lilith, a French Canadian spy; Sebastian, a medieval alchemist; Axel, a man from the future; and Skippy Cartman, a 14-year-old Australian girl.

I bet you think I'm going to say "I made the last one up."  Sorry, but no.  The "Skippy Experiment" is a real thing, and "Skippy Cartman" was able to communicate via "raps and scratching sounds."

It's probably too much to hope for that she asked for "some goddamn Cheesy Poofs."

I know I've written about some ridiculous things before, but this one has got to be in the Top Ten.  All through doing the research for this post, I kept having to stop to do two things: (1) checking to see if this was some kind of parody, and (2) getting paper towels to wipe up the coffee that I'd choke-snorted all over my computer monitor.  I mean, really, people.  If the paranormalists actually want us skeptical science-minded types to take them seriously -- to consider what they do to be valid experimentation -- they need to stop pulling this kind of crapola.  I know that skeptics can sometimes be guilty of doing the throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bath thing, better known as the Package Deal Fallacy -- "some of this is nonsense, so it's all nonsense."  But still.  The fact that a lot of the paranormal sites that feature the Philip Experiment were completely uncritical in their support of its validity makes me rather doubt that they can tell a good experiment from a bad one in general.

That said, I have to say that if we really can communicate with fictional entities, there are a few characters from some of my novels that I wouldn't mind having a chat with.  Tyler Vaughan, the main character from Signal to Noise, would be a good place to start, although I have it on good authority that Tyler is so much like me that I probably wouldn't gain much by talking to him.  It'd be kind of cool to meet Nick Calladine from We All Fall Down to tell him he made the right decision, and Bethany Hale from The Parsifal Snowe Mysteries because she's badass and tough and smokin' hot.

But it's not possible, of course.  And if all I got were some "raps and scratching noises" for my effort, it'd probably not be worth the effort in any case.

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music.  I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.