Fine-toothed comb

Sometimes I need to tell y'all about a new discovery not because it's weird or controversial, but simply because it's cool.

I owe my awareness of this one from my twin brudda from anudda mudda, Andrew Butters of the brilliant blog Potato Chip Math (which you should all subscribe to immediately).  Andrew is not only smart and a great writer and funnier than hell, he also knows my capacity for geeking out over anything related to languages, so when he found this, he sent it on to me instantaneously.

It's about the discovery of an ancient ivory comb near Tel Lachish, Israel.  It was a cool enough artifact, dating from about 1,700 B.C.E., but its coolness factor increased by a factor of a thousand when it was discovered that it was inscribed with seventeen tiny letters.

[Image courtesy of Dafna Gazit, Israeli Antiquities Authority]

The inscription is in Canaanite, and says: "ytš ḥṭ ḏ lqml śʿ[r w]zqt," which translates roughly to, "may this tusk root out lice of the hair and the beard."  If you're wondering what happened to all the vowels, they're missing because written Canaanite was an abjad -- a writing system wherein vowels are left out unless they occur first in a word.  (Modern abjads include Hebrew and Arabic, both of which are in the same family as Canaanite.  If you're curious about abjads and other writing systems, I did a post about that topic back in January.)

There are a lot of things that are cool about this.  First, it's mildly amusing that one of the earliest inscriptions ever found has to do with getting rid of lice.  Be that as it may, the (much) more awesome piece is that this is the earliest known inscription in the alphabet that would eventually morph into not only Arabic and Hebrew, but Cyrillic (used in several Slavic languages), Greek, and eventually, English.

"This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel," said archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  "There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used still today…  The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago.  This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write."

An amusing postscript is that the next oldest inscriptions ever found in Canaanite were on a 3,500 year old lead tablet found near Mount Ebal in Israel, and said, "Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW.  You will die cursed.  Cursed you will surely die.  Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed."

So that's cheerful.  I probably don't need to mention that "YHW" is a transcription of the Hebrew name for God, usually rendered either "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" in English.  It's a little humbling that the oldest surviving written texts we know of had to do with (1) ill-wishing an enemy, and (2) getting rid of parasites.

Although if you'll look around you at the behavior of people now, you'll probably be struck by the fact that not all that much has changed.

So that's our cool discovery of the day, and thanks to Andrew for bringing it to my attention.  Interesting that the letters I'm typing right at this moment have a history that stretches back over three millennia, back to inscriptions like this one.

I just hope what I'm writing these days is more edifying than "Use this comb to remove lice" and 'You will die cursed."

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Mental poison

Here in the United States, we just went through another election.  There are still several races left unsettled, but the outcome seems to be that neither side got the drubbing the other side wanted, and we're still going to be stuck on the gridlock-inducing razor's edge for another couple of years at least.

For me the most frustrating part of politics is watching how people form their opinions.  Ever since the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine back in 1987, media has devolved into a morass of partisan rhetoric.  Long gone are the days of the honorable Walter Cronkite, who was so dedicated to honesty and balance that to this day I don't know what party he himself belonged to.  No longer can we simply turn on the news and expect to hear the news.  Politically-motivated spin, not to mention careful selection (and omission) of certain news items, guarantees that if you get on your favorite media channel, you'll hear only stories that support what you already believed.

Whether or not those beliefs actually are true.

To take one particularly ridiculous example, consider commentator Joe Rogan's claim that "woke schools" are providing litter boxes for elementary school students who "identify as cats."  Rogan later admitted that he lied, and a thorough investigation showed that the story is entirely false -- but not before New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc used it as a talking point against schools' attempts to honor transgender students' identities.

"I wish I was making this up," Bolduc said, with unintentional irony, to audiences who by and large swallowed the whole story hook, line, and sinker.  (Hearteningly, Bolduc lost his race on Tuesday to Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, by a ten percent margin.)

The media has gotten to where it controls, rather than just reporting on, political issues.  The whole system has been turned on its head -- with disastrous consequences.

If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this study that appeared in the journal Memory last month.  In "Partisan Bias in False Memories for Misinformation About the 2021 U.S. Capitol Riot," researchers Dustin Calvillo, Justin Harris, and Whitney Hawkins of California State University - San Marcos describe something alarming; eighty percent of a group of over 220 volunteers "recalled" at least one false memory about the January 6, 2021 riot.  Further, the false memories Democrats recalled were almost always pro-Democrat, and the false memories Republicans recalled were almost always pro-Republican.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sagearbor, Donkey and elephant - democrat blue and republican red - polygon rough, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"The main takeaway from this study is that different people can have very different memories of the same event," Calvillo said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "People tend to remember details of events that paint themselves and their social groups in a positive light.  Accuracy of memory is important to learn from previous events.  This partisan bias hinders that learning...  Understanding factors related to false memories of real-world political events is an important step in reducing false beliefs that complicate finding solutions to public policy problems.  If people do not remember an event similarly, consensus on defining the problem becomes difficult."

Achieving consensus, though, doesn't just depend on fighting confirmation bias -- our tendency to accept slim or questionable evidence if it supports what we already believed (a fault we are all prone to, at least to some degree).  It depends critically on fighting deliberately skewed media.  Somehow we have got to get a handle on the forces that have turned public media into a non-stop conduit of partial truths, conscious omissions of the facts, and outright lies.  Until we reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, or something like it, there will be no way to halt the stream of poison that is widening the divide between Right and Left in this country -- and no way to be certain that when you turn on the news, what you're hearing is the truth.

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Spark of lies

Let me just say for the record that if you're making a claim, your case is not strengthened by lying about the evidence.

The topic comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link along with a message ending with the words "HUGE FACEPALM," and I have to say that is, if anything, an underreaction.

The story starts with a piece of (legitimate, and actually fascinating) research that appeared in Nature a few years ago.  It used the technique of fluorescence tagging to establish that rapid movement of zinc ions at the moment of fertilization is one of the mechanisms that prevents polyspermy -- the fusion of an egg with two sperm cells, which would result in a wildly wrong number of chromosomes and (very) early embryonic death.

Well, a woman named Kenya Sinclair, writing for Catholic Online, found this research -- I was going to say "read it," but that seems doubtful -- and is claiming that this "zinc spark," as the researchers called it, represents the moment the soul enters the embryo.  Thus proving that an immortal soul is conferred at the moment of conception.

Don't believe me?  Here is a verbatim quote:

Catholics have long believed life begins at the moment of conception, which is why in vitro fertilization and the use of contraceptives are considered immoral.  Now, with the discovery of the spark of life, science just may have proven the Church has been right all along...

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, "to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking."

Of course it is breathtaking - she saw the moment a soul entered the newly fertilized egg!

Though scientists are unable to explain why the egg releases zinc, which then binds to small molecules with a flash, the faithful recognize this must be the moment God allows a miracle to occur.

This then spawned a YouTube video (because of course it did) that has garnered over forty thousand views, and comments like the following:

• This gives the idea that the Shroud of Turin somewhat resembles this kind of event, where a burst of light brings someone into life.
• Glory to Lord and Savior Jesus for all eternity Thank you Lord, THANK YOU!!!
• For me if soul exist then also god exist
• In vitro fertilizaton [sic] is playing God, and should be illegal, and fertilized eggs SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED, they are killing human beings!  Life begins at conception no matter what athiest [sic] scientists say!
• I am a Christian but I'm confused on this.  If the flash of light has something to do with God and the souls entering the body, why does it happen in animals?  I've been told that animals don't have souls... is that wrong idk?

IDK either, honestly, but mostly what IDK is how people who post this stuff remember not to put their underwear on backwards.

The whole thing put me in mind of the map that was circulating in the months after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and was claimed to show the spread of horrible toxic nuclear contamination from the breached nuclear reactor:

I mean, look at that!  Glowing purple at the center, with evil red and orange tendrils reaching out like some kind of malign entity all the way across the Pacific!

There are just a couple of problems with this.  First, if you'll look at the scale on the right, you'll see that the colors represent something measured in centimeters.  I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever seen radioactivity measured in units of distance.  ("Smithers!  We've got to get out of here!  If this reactor melts down, it will release over five and a half furlongs of gamma rays!")

In fact, this is a map showing the maximum wave heights from the tsunami.  But that didn't stop people from using this image to claim that NOAA and other government agencies were hiding the information on deadly contamination of the ocean in a particularly nefarious and secretive way, namely by creating a bright, color-coded map and releasing it on their official website.

Look, I get that we all have our pet theories and strongly-held beliefs, and we'd love it to pieces if we found hard evidence supporting them.  But taking scientific research and mischaracterizing it to make it look like you have that evidence is, to put it bluntly, lying.

And the fact that you're successfully hoodwinking the gullible and ignorant is not something to brag about.

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Cup of woo

I was just thinking yesterday that it'd been a long time since I'd seen a good example of the kind of loony New Age woo-woo I seemed to run into on a daily basis when I first started Skeptophilia twelve years ago.  "Maybe," I thought, "people have moved beyond all that nonsense into a more scientific, skeptical, rational way of looking at the world."

Ha ha ha.

By stating that aloud, I must have tapped into some kind of Quantum Vibration Frequency Resonance Field of Actualization, because while idly perusing TikTok not an hour later, I stumbled upon a post from a guy who is like what would happen if you gave Simon Pegg a hit of acid and then told him to do his best impression of Deepak Chopra.

His name is Matt Cooke, and he calls himself a "manifestation coach."  Lest you think I'm exaggerating in my description, here's a transcript of the post in question:

If you understand the power of the quantum field, you hold in your hands the secret of manifestation.  I'm going to simplify what the quantum field means, and how you can use it as a tool to manifest anything in your life.  So quite simply, you'll hear people say either the quantum field or the unified field.  What that basically is is an invisible field of energy carrying information and frequency that is invisible to our five senses but is all around us in space that we can't see.

People say that, do they?  Not scientists, presumably, just "people."  Do go on.

What people don't realize, though, is that we are also an extension of that field, because we're just energy.  The human body is just a dense form of energy moving at a very slow rate of vibration.  We in fact vibrate in and out of the quantum field eight times every second.

I've been in this business long enough that as soon as he said "eight times every second," I immediately knew where he'd gotten that number from, and it wasn't from a Quantum-Field-O-Meter, or anything.  He's almost certainly referring to a woo favorite, the Schumann resonances, which somehow got wrapped up in mystical goofiness despite the fact that it's actually a very real electromagnetic phenomenon.  It's a resonance between the Earth's surface and the conductive layer of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), which has resulted in a standing wave -- an electromagnetic field pulse that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hertz (i.e. just shy of eight times per second).  It's been nicknamed "the Earth's heartbeat," which is an unfortunate choice of phrase (second only to physicist Leon Lederman's choice of "the God particle" as his nickname for the Higgs boson), because it encourages woo-ish types to see the Schumann resonances as being evidence of a global consciousness or whatnot, when in reality, as a phenomenon it's about as conscious as a pendulum swinging on a string.

But back to Cooke:

The way the field works is that it is outside of three-dimensional reality.  It's something called the fifth dimension.

Presumably not related to the people who sang "This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius," although you can see how one might be confused on this point.

The fifth dimension quite simply is beyond time.  Time is infinite.  Meaning that if time's infinite, there are endless infinite opportunities that exist right now.  So anything you desire is there electromagnetically.

Right!  Sure!  What?

This is why people never change.  This is why people continue to attract more of the same stuff into their lives.  How we think and how we feel is how attraction works.  A thought is an intention, a feeling is an emotion.  So if right now you are in lack and hating life, subconsciously you are creating those same thoughts and you're feeling the same way.  You're vibrating in and out eight times a second, the field doesn't respond to what you want, it responds to who you're being.  This is why you hear people say, if you want to manifest you need to become it right now.  If you are seeking something right now in your life, if you change how you think and how you feel, you will broadcast a new electromagnetic signature into the quantum field.  Right?  You'll be drawing back to you a new state of being.  Basically, you'll be reprogramming your vibration.  If you change your vibration, you change your personality, and it's your personality, who you are, that creates your outside world.  Your inside world creates your outside world, and that is how the quantum field works.

Allow me to direct your attention to the Wikipedia article on quantum field theory, wherein you will quickly find that this is not, in fact, how the quantum field works.

Look, it seems like this guy's heart is in the right place, and that he honestly wants to help people.  And I certainly like his take on how to make the world a better place more than I do the evangelical Christians' approach, which is to alternate between praising the God of Unconditional Love and smiting the absolute shit out of anyone who is not also an evangelical Christian. 

What bothers me about people like this is that they're trying to gain credence for their claims by adding a scientific, physics-based spin on them, and end up using technical terms in such a bizarre way that large numbers of people now have no idea whatsoever what those terms actually mean.  And I do mean large numbers; Matt Cooke has over 144,000 followers on TikTok.  And he, of course, is small potatoes compared to the champion purveyor of quantum woo, the aforementioned Deepak Chopra, who is so renowned that someone created a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces pearls of arcane wisdom so similar to the real thing that I defy anyone to tell the difference.  (Here was mine for today: "Infinity differentiates into the expansion of brains through the activation of love.")

So, by all means, Mr. Cooke, keep trying to help people live their best lives.  But leave the quantum field to the quantum physicists.  It doesn't help your case, and to anyone who has ever taken a college physics course, it makes you sound like a snake oil salesman.  Thanks bunches.

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Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff. It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American several years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants. Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stephen Shephard, The wheel of life, Trongsa dzong, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then, there are the people who -- like one person I know who I swear I'm not making up -- believe they are reincarnated from individuals who lived in places that don't, technically, exist.  This particular woman says in a past life she was a "gifted healer and wise woman from Atlantis."  She apparently remembers a lot of what she knew as an Atlantean person, which include pearls like "always strive to bring peace and love to those around you."

Which, honestly, I can't argue with, whether or not you're from Atlantis.

Apparently this study found that there are a great many other people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation." In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.  Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there.  At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already."  Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there.  Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof?  And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?"  At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.'

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

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The gift of a voice

I can think of no more terrifying disorder than locked-in syndrome.

Locked-in syndrome, also called a pseudocoma or cerebromedullospinal disconnection, is a (fortunately) rare condition where the entire voluntary muscle system shuts down but leaves the cognitive facilities relatively intact.  The result: you can't move, speak, or respond, but your brain is otherwise functioning normally.

You are a prisoner inside your own useless body.

The most famous case of locked-in syndrome was French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke at age 43 and lost control of his entire muscular system except for partial control over his left eye.  This at least allowed him to eventually communicate to his doctors that he was still conscious, and -- astonishingly -- he used that tiny bit of voluntary muscular movement to direct a cursor on a computer screen and painstakingly, letter by letter, write a book about his experience.  It's called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and it is simultaneously devastating and uplifting -- a paean to the human spirit's ability to rise above a level of adversity that, thankfully, very few of us will ever face.

Thanks to an article last week in IEEE Spectrum, I just found out about a new prosthetic device that will give people who have lost their ability to communicate their voices back -- by converting their brain waves into words.

A team at the University of California - San Francisco has done (successful) clinical trials of a device that is implanted through a small port in the patient's skull, and is able to detect the neural signals the cerebellum and motor cortex send to the patient's larynx and mouth when they think about speaking.  From the encoded electric impulses representing the movements the person would have made, had they been able to speak, the prosthesis is able to produce whole sentences of text -- at eighteen words a minute.

Pretty impressive, especially considering that this was just proof-of-concept, so as the technology is refined, it'll only get better.  And considering that Bauby was communicating at two to three letters per minute, this is an incredible leap forward.

"We’re now pushing to expand to a broader vocabulary," said Edward Chang, who led the team that developed the prosthesis.  "To make that work, we need to continue to improve the current algorithms and interfaces, but I am confident those improvements will happen in the coming months and years.  Now that the proof of principle has been established, the goal is optimization.  We can focus on making our system faster, more accurate, and—most important— safer and more reliable.  Things should move quickly now."

They are also working toward developing a wireless version that would be able to pick up the relevant brain waves from outside, thus obviating the need to place a port in the patient's skull.  With further refinements, it might become possible to create a device that could be used on any individual who is unable to speak -- the present ones require a training period during which they learn the patient's specific neural firing patterns.  Once those are generalized, it might be possible to create a "universal translator," something Chang calls "plug-and-play."

Even what they have now is amazing, however.  Imagine regaining your voice after months or years of muteness.  I never fail to be astonished at the progress we're making in science; it seems like everywhere you turn, there are new discoveries, new inventions, new insights.

In a time when so much seems hopeless, it's wonderful that we have such stories to remind us that there are people who are working to ease the burdens of others -- and that, in the words of Max Ehrmann's beautiful poem "Desiderata," "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."

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Tut tut

I ran into an interesting article in Science News yesterday about a new museum in Egypt that will feature the famous treasure trove of King Tutankhamun's tomb.  Tutankhamun was, as you undoubtedly know, the pharaoh of Egypt between about 1332 and 1323 B.C.E. before dying at the age of nineteen (probably of complications from malaria).  Because of his short reign and youth he's been nicknamed "the Boy King," and prior to his tomb's discovery in in 1922 held a relatively obscure spot in Egyptian history.  This may have been what saved his tomb nearly intact for archaeologists to find; no one knew it was there.

He was also eclipsed by his infamous father, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the "heretic king" who attempted to replace the Egyptian pantheon of gods with a single monotheistic religion, the worship of the god Aten.  Trying to decree a change in people's religion went about as well as you'd expect, and after Akhenaten's death everyone went back to worshiping Ra and Horus and Thoth and Anubis and the rest of the gang, not to mention erasing every trace of Akhenaten they could find.

The whole thing, though, put me in mind of the famous "King Tut's Curse," which supposedly claimed the lives of a number of people who investigated the tomb and has since spawned countless movies and horror novels about evil befalling people who violate people's final resting places.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roland Unger, CairoEgMuseumTaaMaskMostlyPhotographed, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The story goes that shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus.

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his book London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End, Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, you may recall, was the subject of a seriocomic post here about a magical battle only a couple of months ago, so he's a bit of a frequent flyer here at Skeptophilia.  For those of you who missed that one, Crowley is the guy who proclaimed himself the "Wickedest Man on Earth," and was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who became notorious for founding a magical society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Fuck anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

Crowley ca. 1912 [Image is in the Public Domain]

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley; after all, almost everyone in London at the time did.  At least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not is debatable, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  It's probably impossible at this point to prove if Benyon's claim is correct in all its details, rather like the dozens of explanations put forward to explain the Ripper murders themselves.  But this certainly makes me inclined to file the "Mummy's Curse" under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."

In any case, I'm glad to hear the archaeologists are still working on the discoveries from Tutankhamun's tomb, and not afraid that they themselves will be struck down by the ghost of the Boy King.  I'll take actual scientific research over loony superstition any day of the week.

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