 Historians must reconstruct the past out of hazy memory. "Once upon a time" requires "second sight." The "third eye" of intuition can break the "fourth wall" of conventional perspectives. Instead of "pleading the fifth," historians can take advantage of the "sixth sense" and be in "seventh heaven." All with the power of hindpsych, the "eighth wonder of the world." It has been said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Therein lies the importance of Tarot readings for antiquity. When we confirm what has already occurred, we break the shackles of the past, freeing ourselves to chart new courses into the future. |
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Two Otherworldly Books: Polar Opposites?
The two most famous mystical manuals for guidance through the Otherworld are, in staggering ways, diametric opposites. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was preserved by the living, its chapters kept intact over millennia by monks in monasteries. Contrariwise, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was preserved by mummies, its chapters scattered piecemeal (even as Osiris was dismembered?) and sealed for millennia in coffins and tombs. The Tibetan was meant to be recited to a corpse by a living undertaker. The Egyptian was meant to be read only by the deceased individual, in the afterlife. In the Tibetan, the soul navigating the afterlife liminality is a human who encounters deities and torments, judgments, and pitfalls, the book serving as a guide map to another incarnation. In the Egyptian, the soul in the netherworld is itself a divinity (indistinguishable from all deities), the book constituting "identity papers" that exempt one from any torments, judgments, or pitfalls on the way not to another incarnation but rather eternal providence. The Tibetan is read in whole and then retained by the living. The Egyptian is unread in fragments (as chapter 64 notes, "This composition is a secret; not to be seen or looked at ... by any man, for it is forbidden to know it. Let it be hidden") and retained by the dead. The Tibetan would have the soul disattach from memories of illusory experiences. The Egyptian soul, as a deity having been disguised as a mortal, is prompted to say, "That which I went in order to ascertain I am come to tell. Come let me enter and report my mission" (chapter 86). The Tibetan calls the soul toward realms indescribable by known language, while the Egyptian promises a perpetuity of familiar worldly food, bodily pleasures, landscapes, climates, planting and reaping, labor and recreation.Clerical (pun intended) errors by Egyptian scribes corrupted the book to the extent that varied copies of the same chapter are wildly discordant. It would seem that over the millennia the copyists did not understand the original texts, the original meanings having been lost at a very early date. The Tibetan, while similarly reproduced, is significantly less adulterated. Because the Egyptian copies were never meant for living eyes, the scribes' attention to detail naturally faltered (in other words, the accuracy of their work went unchecked). It was the opposite situation for the Tibetan scribes. As the Egyptian is significantly bastardized, translators are so often left to conjecture, to either fill or not fill the empty pools of textual lacunae, to baffle over the legitimacy of enigmatic hapax legomena. Yet there's a strange poetry to that — a book of metaphysical mysteries, not meant for living eyes, gathering further unfathomableness over time. (Somewhat ironically, Egyptologists seek "accuracy" of non-literal, possibly deliberately nonsensical esoterica and paronomasia. As translator Peter Le Page Renouf notes, the various chapters of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and other texts prove that "with reference to the details, free scope was allowed to the imagination of the scribes or artists." Though Renouf fastidiously checked his own guesswork, he perhaps needn't have been overly cautious. The Egyptian Book of Dead would seem to be unstuck in time and even unstuck in phraseology, like a text in an hallucinatory dream that morphs as the visionary tries to read it.)In short, the Tibetan (guarded at extraordinarily high elevations) is addressed to human beings, while the Egyptian (preserved at very low elevations) is addressed to gods.P.S. Interestingly, the judgment scenes in both books are so alike in essentials as to suggest a common prehistoric origin. The Tibetan's King of the Dead as judge corresponds to the Egyptian Osiris. Both books have a symbolical weighing. On the scales before the King of the Dead, black pebbles are weighed against white (symbolizing evil and good deeds). Before Osiris, the heart and a feather are weighed (conduct/conscience against righteousness/truth). In both books, a simian-headed figure oversees the weighing (the ape-headed Thoth in the Egyptian, the monkey-headed Shinje in the Tibetan). In both books, a jury of deities looks on, some animal- and some human-headed. The record-board that Thot holds corresponds to the Mirror of Karma held by the King of the Dead. The deceased in both books pleads innocence.
See Books of the Dead, a distillation of twenty-four books of the dead from around the world and across the centuries. Each book’s most intriguing, poetic, and useful revelations are painstakingly gathered.
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An Ancient Egyptian "Blueprint" for Co-Creating a Better Tomorrow
For anyone who feels at rock bottom, this is an intuitive divination that requires no knowledge of Egyptian mythology or astrology. The image you'll work with is like a blueprint of a four-walled room, the walls of which have been flattened. Picture the central rectangle, holding four figures and framed with a double line, as the floor. Above it, below, left, and right are the room's four walls, as if they're lying on the ground. The blueprint comes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and it depicts a funeral chamber. Note the jackal-headed Anubis, protector of tombs, leaning over a mummy. The mummy is you in your current state, feeling bound and powerless, awaiting the dawn of a new life of plenitude. Under the bed (below Anubis and your mummy) is a bird with a human head, a symbol of your soul. You are actually represented three times in this blueprint (you'll see yourself honoring the rising and setting suns, in the top corners). Instructions: There are 16 letters on the blueprint. Next to each letter you will write a number. Begin by writing a 1 next to any letter your intuition guides you, or seemingly at random. There is no "wrong" way to do this. Follow your whim. Just as the letters are somewhat unpredictably placed, so should your numbers be at your discretion. Continue here and there around the blueprint until you've written all 16 numbers. Then, referring to the chart below, match the numbers to the letters, one pair at a time, to form messages. The numbers represent astrological particulars (the greater symbolic meaning of each planet and asteroid). Those meanings are offered in brackets. The letters identify each figure in the diagram and what it communicates (as per the Egyptian Book of the Dead). Each of those communications is like a fill-in-the blank. They each feature the word "this," and that's like the blank to be filled by the bracketed word in the numerical list. For example, letter A says that "Anubis prepares this good way for you." If A were paired with the number 12 ("Inspiration") then the message is that you're on the cusp of a sudden bright idea or brainstorm that will send you moving forward on a better path of life. "Anubis prepares inspiration as a good way for you." Some paired message will make perfect sense immediately, while others will encourage some contemplation and some "wait and see." This blueprint may be re-numbered at different times, for different circumstances. The grand, overarching message of these readings is that many forces are at play, some seen and some unseen, that collaborate on one's destiny. A new start may feature one of a great variety of characteristics. Being conscious of those characteristics will empower one to better take advantage of opportunities for shifting one's life path or otherwise co-collaborate on one's destiny. [Note that the walls of the blueprint feature 12 figures, recalling the 12 houses of the Zodiac; you may find other ways to work with this mystical diagram to inspire new insights.]
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1. Ceres Asteroid [Nurturance]
2. Pallas Asteroid [Wisdom]
3. Juno Asteroid [Commitment]
4. Vesta Asteroid [Spirituality]
5. Hygeia Asteroid [Wellness]
6. Chiron Asteroid [Wounded Healer]
7. Moon [Emotions]
8. Pluto [Power]
9. Mercury [Communication]
10. Mars [Passion]
11. Venus [Love/Money]
12. Neptune [Inspiration]
13. Uranus [Rebellion]
14. Saturn [Karma]
15. Jupiter [Luck]
16. Sun [Self]
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A. Anubis prepares this good way for you.
B. Goddess Isis protects and strengthens you with this.
C. Goddess Nephthys justifies you and keeps you from losing your head with this.
D. The statue of the northern wall binds you with this for protection.
E. The symbol of the western wall brings light to this.
F. The flame on the southern wall illuminates the heights of this.
G. Anubis in his divine hall watches over this and averts wrath.
H. Your living soul hails this arising on the eastern horizon.
I. Your living soul adores this setting in the land of the living, the western horizon.
J. The statue nurtures this (like a field is planted and watered).
K. The statue establishes a foundation for this (like sand conveyed from east to west).
L. Cardinal point genie Kebehsenuf puts the heart of this in its right place.
M. Cardinal point genie Hapi revives the "head" of this.
N. Cardinal point genie Taumautef rescues the originator of this from evil doers.
O. Cardinal point genie Emsta causes this to proper permanently.
P. Your living soul is vitalized by this.
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Due to our mysteriously esoteric studies, we're often asked for oracular predictions about the new year. For this New Year's Eve, we consulted our own Mimetic Oracle, and here's why: the changing of the year is a grand pageant, and it's been said that theatre reveals what is behind so-called reality. Our Mimetic Oracle draws from 92 characters in six vintage plays, with 166 spoken lines and 31 stage directions in the mix. With the system, one randomly draws five characters and generates a script to illuminate the current drama of life. (There’s a detailed F.A.Q. which explains how the scripts are created, how to make sense of the dialogues, how to determine whether a reading is positive or negative, what to make of the various characters, and why these specific 6 plays were chosen for the system: http://www.mysteryarts.com/play/.)
Here's the scenario that the oracle generated when asked about the coming year:
The cast of characters, intriguingly, features two sets of twins: the "Dutch Twins" and the tin soldiers Jack & Mack. The other two figures, Melissa and Mrs. Mulligan (both M names), each have doubled letters (two s's for Melissa, two l's for Mulligan), further accentuating the twinning. So apparently 2021 will carry over some sort of doubling inherent in the mirrored numbers of 2020. In both dates, it's the 2's that are doubled, and our cast of characters certainly has twins doubled. The first line is itself doubled: "Begin and never cease, begin and never cease." We shall interpret that as a renewed call to make 2021 a brand new beginning, with the added insight that true beginnings never cease but are in a constant state of renewal. So our little play encourages a new sort of dynamism in which we never rest on our laurels. Music and bells follow, growing louder and louder, and this is a harbinger of increasing harmony and boisterous celebration—a very good sign for the coming year. Then Mrs. Mulligan says that "if you stand on your head like that, all your brains will rush down into your fate." This is a vital detail: it acknowledges that our world has been turned topsy-turvy, but we mustn't get stuck like that. We must turn ourselves rightside-up, lest we lose our heads and seal our fate. The first tin solder, Private Jack, is perhaps taken aback by the instruction, as if having followed orders for so long that he forgot how to stand "at ease." One of the Dutch twins, Klinker, then rises, suggesting that once one of the doublings in 2021 rights itself, a second set of doublings will emerge. The second tin soldier, Private Mack, apparently sees the development and nods his head wisely. So ends the scene. The little play begins with renewal and ends with wisdom—a highly positive outlook!
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How the Mysteries of The Prisoner Series
Are Clarified by The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Though there are seemingly infinite theories to explain the cult TV series The Prisoner, we would suggest that the most elegant, comprehensive understanding is that the series deliberately illustrates the soul’s journey through the “Bardo” liminal state after death, as depicted in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the netherworld, when one is about to initiate a new birth, The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s first instruction for closing off a womb is to tranquilly meditate upon one’s tutelary deity until the deity melts away into clear light (Book II, p. 176). The Prisoner, in this still, is confronted by a choice: an egg or a Buddha.
The Prisoner repeatedly resists fertilization throughout the series, prolonging his time in the liminal state until his true awakening. The green dome of Number Two’s office symbolizes a womb, and it also grandly depicts Tibetan cosmology: “Each universe, like a great cosmic egg, is enclosed within [an] iron-wall shell, which shuts in the light of the sun and moon and stars, the iron-wall shell being symbolical of the perpetual darkness separating one universe from another” (W. Y. Evans-Wentz, in the introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead).
In turn, the dome contains a smaller womb (symbolic of nesting rebirths) in the form the Ball Chair by Finnish designer Eero Aarino. Here we even see the womb chair holding an egg:
By the end of the series, the Buddhist cycle of rebirth calls so strongly that the Prisoner is sealed into a womb made of steel:
The beneficent and wrathful deities one encounters in the netherworld are, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, generated by one’s own psychology. “Fear not the bands of the Peaceful and Wrathful, Who are thine own thought-forms” (p. 204). In these stills, the Prisoner confronts his greatest enemy and warden, “Number One,” the numeral 1 doubling as the first-person pronoun. He removes the mask to discover himself.
From the first episode, the Prisoner has been dead—he even goes down the classic long tunnel seen in near-death experiences:
And the events of his former life flash before his eyes:
However, he is not conscious of being dead. The externalized aspects of his mind, the “wrathful deities” in control of his netherworld prison, ceaselessly confront the Prisoner with his condition. Their eternal question, “Why have you resigned?” translates as “Why are you dead?” (In Tibetan as in Celtic lore, “no death is natural, but is always owing to interference by one of the innumerable death-demons,” as W. Y. Evans-Wentz notes in his introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead). Here is an explicit example of the Buddhistic understanding of the cycle of rebirth, with “resign” being a euphemism for “die”:
Throughout the series, we find the Prisoner being reminded that he is in the Bardo:
When the Prisoner becomes attached to this illusory existence, he is chastised in this Buddhistic way:
There’s a very subliminal hint in the title sequence of the series that the Prisoner’s entire journey takes place within his own consciousness: as he enters the subterranean parking garage to announce his resignation, there’s a flash of a sign: “headroom.” He’s confronting the underworld of his own headspace.
In this underworld described by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the pangs of the deceased’s conscience rise up as a Good Genius and Evil Genius, personifications of a human being’s lower and higher natures:
The Lord of Death, who consults the Mirror of Karma (the memories of one’s good and evil deeds in life) is confronted repeatedly in the series. Here he is in one of his stern aspects:
Perhaps the primary guidance of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is which netherworld lights to avoid and which to follow. A dull yellow light lures one back into the world of humans, and such a light attempts to snare the Prisoner repeatedly:
A blue light lures one into the “Brute world” of stupid mentality:
A dull red light lures one into the realm of “hungry ghosts” who suffer insatiable addictions worse than humans do:
A green light lures one into the world of jealous warriors, the Titan-like “Asuras”:
A dull white light lures one into the worlds of angel-like “Devas”:
A smoke-colored light leads directly to the Hell-world:
No matter what, the Tibetan Book of the Dead promises that “the All-Good Mother … will come to shine … from eternity within the faculties of thine own intellect” (Book I, pp. 121-22):
As the Buddha says in “The Immutable Sutra,” “the phenomena of life may be likened unto … a shadow”:
As an aside, a near-subliminal detail in the title sequence recalls an insight by Philip K. Dick in his Exegesis. Behind the car of the Prisoner’s pursuer there is a dumpster that says “St Mary’s.” As Dick put it, "Lowly trash ... match folders ... tawdry commercials—therein lie the divine messages. … Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is … in the trash in the alley."If you’ll be back, we wish you many happy returns …
… until you find your Way Out:
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"[O]nce you see past the mechanistic worldview beaten into our brains from a very early age you realize the world is constantly speaking to us in a language we seem to have forgotten. Or at least most have forgotten." –Christopher Knowles, "Foresight is 2020"
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We noticed an unusual set of ESP cards in the extrasensory newsletter L'Insolite, 1980. Instead of the classic Zener symbols of hollow circle, plus sign, three vertical wavy lines, hollow square, and hollow pentagram, here we find a checkerboard, a circle with eight rays, three overlapping rings, two V's forming an X, and a hollow rectangle. We attempted to restore these alternative symbols in a print-resolution file for you to download.
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Eerie prescience! And yet in this particular case we must credit the mysteries inherent in words more than our own arcane powers. Back in 2011 [ original post here], we created an anagram in honor of the poet Geof Huth, in which we found that the letters of his name, when scrambled in front of his name, spelled "The hug of Geof Huth." Just over 8 years later, the poet revealed in his own blog post that in fact the issue of a hug was the defining moment of his entire life, the day that he became his own person. Huth revealed in May 2019:
By the time I was eight or nine, I was opposed to hugging my parents, not because I was opposed to hugging (though I was and still am), but because I knew hugging my mother was a lie, and I tried not to lie. After refusing to hug her at her insistence and then my father’s, my father was forced to hit me strenuously with a belt upon my bare bottom, over and over, while my mother cried at the necessity of such punishment.
That was my proudest moment, the day I became myself. I did not cry. I remained stoic. I took the punishment as a badge of honor, and I spent about the next decade learning never to cry. My mother and father helped me see I had to hide my self and any sadness—merely to survive. So I shut down.
Although we are happy to take credit for our various mystical feats, in truth it was only a queer instinct that led us to explore the meanings hidden with the letters of Geof Huth's name. The rest was self-working, as it were -- the profoundest and proudest moment in Huth's life was embedded within his name. We merely unlocked it and took the trouble to present it. Had we predicted just how remarkably siginicant the word "hug" was to Huth, we might very well never have gifted him the anagram. Some things are simply too personal. Now that we know, eight years later, just how visionary our anagram was, we formally apologize. Incidentally, there's some relief for us in all this -- our occasional anagram gifts to people we admire are sometimes received less enthusiastically than we would have expected, and we now increasingly realize that the mysterious insights we unlock may simply hit too close to home. The phenomenon is a very serious issue for the field of divination -- for all one's intuition and foresight, one cannot always predict today's consequences of prescient information.
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Cards from a hitherto unseen Cactus Tarot appear in the choose-your-own-adventure puzzle book entitled This Book is a Cactus. Indeed, a tarot reading got planted among prickly logic puzzles, riddles, mathematical conundrums, and word enigmas.
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Thank you Adam, who writes: "And what a fun book this is! It’s great exercise for the brain to participate and interact with something that doesn’t require batteries or an internet connection. Oddly, I still haven’t killed my cactus. Though I have been tempted a few times. Ha ha ha…"
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The reverse-engineer of horoscopes, Phil Maggitti, suggests that it's untrue you share character traits with other people born under the same sign. "The people who are getting off the bus the same day you are getting on wield a much greater influence on your development." So, if today is your birthday, you were born on the same day that all sorts of famous people croaked. "Read their obituaries carefully. You'll learn a lot more than you will from reading stupid predictions."
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Intrigued by our new publication about esoteric computations one can perform on the spot, The Pencil Witch, alphabet diviner Jim Girouard scattered letters into a grid to see what message might be hidden there. In the scan of his reading, the very bottom shows the list of words he saw in the letters (including "Hollywood," so is a film adaptation in our future?) and the very top shows the sentences he formed: Oddfellow writes new booklet Pencil Witch. It is a wonderful writ full of really great ideas and expressions and sigils. The professor of single letter phenomena lit the fire under our imaginations with playful rolypoly anagrams and animated characters and spellcraft images. Professor Oddfellow meets our expectations at the crossroads of perception and regal oracle that breathes life into the blank space of boredom which detours from problems and extends the imagination of the here and now. For Oddfellow the eagle has landed on the eternal timeline of timeless expression.
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Due to our mysteriously esoteric studies, we're often asked for oracular predictions about Hallowe'en. For this year's holiday, we consulted our own Mimetic Oracle, and here's why: Hallowe'en is a grand pageant, and it's been said that theatre reveals what is behind so-called reality. Our Mimetic Oracle draws from 92 characters in six vintage plays, with 166 spoken lines and 31 stage directions in the mix. With the system, one randomly draws five characters and generates a script to illuminate the current drama of life. (There’s a detailed F.A.Q. which explains how the scripts are created, how to make sense of the dialogues, how to determine whether a reading is positive or negative, what to make of the various characters, and why these specific 6 plays were chosen for the system: http://www.mysteryarts.com/play/.)
Here's the scenario that the oracle generated when asked about this year's Hallowe'en:
The first three characters all have names beginning with M, indicating that folks will be well in synch. The first two lines of the script feature boisterous voices and laughter, both very favorable. The third line mentions an elephant in the room, but there's no elephant in the cast, so it's either a case of inebriation or a controversial issue that no one will wish to discuss (you'll recall the old idiom about "the elephant in the room"). It's okay -- the controversy will be tactfully avoided, in spite of one person awkwardly bringing it up. The fourth character is called "Wait" after an archaic British term for a street singer, so expect some singing as well. The scene ends most intriguingly, with a remarkable vow: "I will live in the past, the present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me." The message seems to be that your holiday will have a timeless quality, that it will turn out to be one for the ages, harking back to Hallowe'ens past but somehow also setting the stage for future holidays. The very final detail, that "all disappear under sheet," is the best of all, recalling as it does the sheet ghosts of Hallowe'en. Will you finally pass out, taking the events of Hallowe'en into the mysterious realm of the unconsious? Is there an erotic implication? In any case, it's a very favorable prediction for your Hallowe'en.
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For Mystics and Skeptics Alike:
Real Tools for Disenchanting
Our Ghost-Ridden Existence
Whether or not we define ghosts as living memories that share the circulations of our bodies (though why not?), we are all of us, no matter how skeptical or credulous, haunted. We are perhaps more haunted and overburdened by ghosts than we care or dare to face. But there are physical tools, not merely placebos or talismans, not devices of the imagination, that verifiably repel ghosts, disenchanting us from oppressive hauntings. Advertisers and major corporations employ such tools to magnetically draw clients, dispelling the old ghosts so as to clear the way for new charms and jingle-borne incantations. Yet anyone can wield these tools to battle restless nights with ever-greater peace of mind.
In 1901, Alfred Noyes offered evidence that we are all haunted people, mystics and skeptics alike. His substantiations are so compelling that we can't resist quoting a few of them. He said that all of us haunted folk have heard strange things in music, in the wind, and in the dead stillness of the night. "It may be that all the great sages, the great world-poets, Aeschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, Shakespeare, have been haunted men; for they, too, tell us what they heard in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years; and they, too, seem often strangely and bitterly eager to cast away their memories and their delusions." Noyes noted that we all are poets nowadays, seeing "a thousand million apparitions, woven from such stuff as dreams are made of, walking the earth openly at noontide; surely we are all haunted." Some of us, he explained, "are haunted by the sound of one set slow bell, tolling, a great way off, in the spiritual forests that beset all pilgrim souls." Others of us "struggle in the shadowy places of despair with the clutching white fingers of a decayed ancestry, the ghosts of sins that are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." Still others are "haunted by the homeless cry of the sea, the cry that is like the voice upon the wintry mountains uttering the old Promethean moan of man. Night and day that cry goes up to heaven so long as the universal sea breaks itself against the iron shores of time." Noyes grants that some of us "are only haunted at certain times and seasons, or at the performance of certain rites." We'll come back to that shortly. ("The Romance of Christmas," Literature: Christmas Supplement, Dec. 7, 1901.)
Looked at another albeit more horrific way, we are all haunted because "the dead are all around us, in substance and in spirit," as Brian Stableford proves. "Every breath we take draws in carbon atoms that were once incorporated into the bodies of other men; with every mouthful of food we engulf the remains of our ancestors. As we devour them they devour us, fueling the slow fire of life—the fire whose ashes are absorbed, in the end, into the earth and her fruits, or lost on the wings of the wind. Our inescapable fate is to be eaten and breathed in our turn." Stableford adds that "Once we are conscious of the everpresence of the dead we can easily feel their nearness. To see them, and to hear their voices, is only a little more difficult." ( The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions, 2007).
So, if we're all haunted and all eager to cast away our ghostliest memories and delusions, what technologies are available to us? Indeed, there's an entire doctor's bag full of tools. It's worth mentioning that a "doctor's bag" is appropriate, since ghosts and gauzes seem inseparable. The poet-novelist Gary Barwin, in a work-in-progress, explains that ghosts are associated with gauze because memories are living wounds, and haunting ghosts are symbiotic dressings to those wounds. First, Barwin notes that "The remembering mind [is] a kind of ghost, drifting, no longer bound by time or gravity, as if twilight or reality had gathered into a cloud." Barwin imagines a ghost returning to the place where it once lived: "That place would seem a ghost to that ghost. Nothing the same. Everything haunted. As if seen through gauze. Of course it would seem that way: it’d be seen through a ghost. But gauze is apt, for a ghost’s past is a wound and the ghost is a dressing, a consolation, instead of us returning with no veil, the past in full colour." Barwin notes that though a haunting may be unsettling, it does not excoriate (in the medical sense of a stuck bandage removing part of the skin) in the way that imaginative reliving does. He suggests that the gauze of a haunting memory is more akin to a skin graft than a bandage, as it "shares a circulation with the body, with the lived life, with the present." ("Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted," an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, 2018.) Yes, we need a doctor's bag of tools, and such tools are revealed by Tim Powers in Alternate Routes (2018). Though Powers' book is presented as fiction, we're reminded by E. M. Forster that "fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence" ( Aspects of the Novel, 1927). Let's look at each tool in turn and explore why each is obviously valid and crucial to bring into play. Mathematics. Recite the multiplication tables or even simple addition in a loud voice to repel ghosts. As Tim Powers notes, "Math is deterministic, and ghosts are an effect of possibility extended beyond reason." You might recall that since ancient times in Japan, the mantras of Shinto meditation have involved reciting numbers in order. Similarly, a Catholic's rosary beads might be compared to an abacus. In both religious systems, counting is used to engender peace of mind. Mathematics dispels the ghosts of irrationality. If a ghost approaches, Powers suggests saying this: "Six and six is twelve, squared is a hundred-and-forty-four, squared is twenty-thosand-seven-hundred-and-thirty-six!" If that isn't immediately effective, say, "One from one is nothing. Don't take my word for it, do the math. Nothing." Though Powers doesn't mention it, another mathematically-based ghost-neutralizing tool is Feng Shui's bagua, festooned with eight trigram figures from the iChing (having binary values). If mathematics is not your forte, reciting metered verse will be efficacious.
The uncanny valley. Mannequins, waxworks, robots, CGI characters -- when artificial faces look too realistic, when they seem genuinely human but you can sense that they're not, the creepy feeling is called the "uncanny valley." Ghosts are repelled by the contradiction. Powers doesn't mention the obvious, that advertisers and retail stores bank on this phenomenon. When you approach a clothing store's display mannequin, you're meant to associate the sudden feeling of inner peace with the need to purchase those clothes. But it's not the clothes that do the trick -- it's the mannequin. You'll apprehend all the other ways this technique is used in sales; it's why the models on magazine covers are airbrushed into oblivion; it's why Disneyland (brimming with uncannily lifelike animatronics) is called "the happiest place on earth." Wear a necklace or carry a keyring featuring a lifelike figurine. Put stickers on your car or bicycle or skateboard that sport realistic but artificial faces. Collect mannequin heads as bookends.
Spirit level stars. Powers suggests using a hot glue gun to arrange eight spirit levels (also known as bubble levels, the sealed glass tubes partially filled with liquid that reveal whether a surface is plumb) like spokes on a wheel, upon a circle of cardboard. More than a talisman, the confusing readings of the levels will induce a negating z-axis spin in an attentive ghost. You may wear a spirit level star as a necklace. Powers says that if you are approached by a ghost, hold up the star and ask, "Why are you tilting?" Again, a tool with a similar purpose is Feng Shui's octagon-framed concave bagua mirror, which warps and thereby neutralizes poisonous energies from one's home.
Fixed compass. A pocket compass, equipped with a magnet on the back, will have its needle in a fixed position. "Swing the compass around in a circle," Powers suggests, "and the apparent shifting of north might induce a terminal y-axis spin in a ghost."
Personal aspects. Change personal aspects that ghosts of your past might recognize. Powers recommends parting your hair on the other side or, if you aren't bald, shaving it off. Reinvent your fashion sense, especially with used/vintage clothes. Alter your jewelry, your scents. Wear a watch on the other wrist. While eating, teach yourself to hold cutlery in your non-dominant hand. Change your shoes regularly. Wear your clothes inside out and/or backwards. Hop on one foot whenever possible. The point of all these techniques will be fairly obvious -- by getting out of your habits, you can escape cul-de-sacs of life in which ghosts accumulate. Hopping on one foot may sound silly, until one recalls the hops, skips, and jumps of carefree childhood; children at play instinctively perform rituals that dispel ghosts. Backwards clothing may sound silly, too, but recall that Chris Kelly of the hip-hop band Kris Kross wore his pants back-to-front every day from 1991 until his sudden death in 2013. He revealed in an interview, "Even if I put on a suit, I put my suit pants on backwards. It’s just a way of life for me." It seems that celebrities and personal demons go hand in hand. Temporal anomalies. Sporting the wrong time, Powers says, is good for confusing ghosts. Set your watch, computer, phone, and household clocks to different time zones. This technique also happens to be good for keeping you alert, as you'll need to calculate the correct time with every glance at a clock face. Yet, just because it might be happy hour in France, don't imbibe. (See next item.)
Teetotaling. Ghosts tend to miss alcohol and are drawn to the smell of it. That's why Powers cautions one to avoid all liquor. You know about alcoholics who fall into the "sad drunk" cliché, but consider whether it might not be the alcohol that's the problem as much as the ghosts drawn to that alcohol. So many miserable drunks are overwhelmed by spirits of another sort.
Alkalinity. Because ghosts are compatible with alkaline bloodstreams, Powers suggests, an acidic diet is recommended: coffee, roasted nuts, blueberries, prunes, pickles, chocolate. This insight would appear to be rather little-known. Yet on a microscopic level, there is a connection between alkaline blood and transparent cellular " ghosts" (that's the scientific term, used by hematologists). Presumably, as in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm. Garden decorations. We've all seen and presumably visited peaceful gardens. Envision one that you particularly liked. Did it happen to feature a little statue (like a gnome or a saint or nature deity), perhaps a pinwheel or other wind-driven spinning object, a reflective sphere, or dangling prisms that cast rainbows? Powers identifies such objects as spirit distractors, protecting the garden from unwanted hauntings. Tools like these have been known for centuries upon centuries to dispel dark energies; they are vital components of the sense of peace that the garden engenders. Peacefulness doesn't merely happen of its own accord. Indeed, an unequipped garden can feel quite ominous, unwelcoming, or otherwise disconcerting.
Headed metronomes. Powers recommends using metronomes affixed with heads as ghost detectors and traps. The head should be of an organic material (for example, bone, wood, or even a pine cone) and should be painted with a human face. Fatigued spirits, inhabiting the head so as to rest, will find themselves trapped and will cause the metronome to tick back and forth, thereby alerting you of their capture. Though Powers doesn't refer to it, in the traditional folkways of Japan, a different sort of headed doll is employed. The "teru teru bozu" ("shine shine monk") is a handmade doll constructed of white paper or cloth that is hung on a string by a window. The doll is inhabited by a wandering spirit, and a chant is spoken, essentially a contract: if the "monk" ensures good weather, it will be allowed to remain and will be soaked with alcohol as a reward, but if the weather turns foul, its head will be cut off as punishment.
Two radios. Play two radios simultaneously, each tuned to the same station. Powers notes that any desynchronization of the audio will be instantly noticeable and will alert a disturbance in the field. If you play digital music on a laptop through your stereo system's speakers, set your music player to also play through your laptop's speakers. There will be times when the audio in one set of speakers begins to pop, cut out intermittently, or silence altogether, and that's your early warning to be on your guard.
Artificial trees. As they abhor mannequins, ghosts abhor the contradiction of artificial evergreens. Powers mentions this in passing, but we can extrapolate from that a useful tool: install a year-round aluminum ornament tree in your living space. A great many people who celebrate Christmas avoid artificial trees as archetypes of soullessness, as not only poor substitutes for the original concept but also as perversions of tradition, because the inorganic aluminum is felt to lack a "spiritual content" and therefore reflects an environment of alienation (George Nash, Old Houses, 1980). An organic ornament tree draws spirits to it, which is why the age-old Christmas ritual creates an atmosphere of homecoming, gathering as it does the ghosts of lost loved ones. Such spiritual homecomings, of course, are also why so many people find Christmas a melancholic or even depressing time. Importantly, in his essay on "The Romance of Christmas," Noyes wrote that between the moonlight and fire in a winter twilight, when the shadows come out to dance upon the walls and ceilings, everyone is haunted by the ghosts of Christmastide. As modern poets, Noyes said, whatever our views of finite faiths may be, and no matter how many years have rolled away with crumbling creeds and dogmas, we poets have "looked into the fundamental paradox" and have "understood that everything is true, everything exists, and the earth is only a little dust beneath our feet." Noyes explained that "the crude spiritualism of the ancient season of Christmas is dead; yet agnostic and scoffer, Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist, ascetic and mystic, are all alike taking up and fulfilling the prophecy of Matthew Arnold concerning poetry [replacing religion], and the whole of the West is looking towards the light that never was on sea or land."
Self portraits. A self portrait allows a wandering spirit to remain anchored on this side, Powers notes. When you encounter a "selfie," you've likely encountered a ghost. Researchers at Ohio State University, Nottingham Trent University, and other institutions linked selfie-taking to narcissism, psychopathy, and anti-social behaviors. Consider how a narcissist's inflated self-image and low self-esteem are, like a bulging balloon, evidence of an insubstantial interior. Selfie-takers' self-objectification is very literally that -- objectifying in a desperate measure to physically exist, to have proof that they were here, regardless of what form it took. A psychopath's lack of empathy is additional evidence of ghostly inhumanity. To avoid more ghosts, prevent exposure to selfies. If it's true that the spirit of our age is one of transformation, "our imperative is to think anew, to disenchant ourselves" from lost relics and illusions, and to enchant ourselves once again with aspirations of progress (Patrick J. DeSouza, 2000). Oliver Optic once said that if it is hard to enchant others, it is still more so to disenchant ourselves; for although we stand out in bold relief, and our faults are glaring, we too rarely introvert our gaze or hold a mirror (except for vanity's sake) before our faces; and so, for the most part, we are invisible to ourselves. Optic noted that most of us practice some sort of disguise or pretense to cover up our motives, while others carry out our machinations in the dark or beneath a cloak of hypocrisy. With our eyes in our heads, we can but look outwardly, and we are thus conscious of everything but that which is passing within. It seems to require some magic to endow us with that self-knowledge, Optic suggested, without which all other knowledge may avail nothing. We must learn to gauge or measure our own capacities, to probe our own motives, and to understand the principles by which we act. As in the classic story of the shepherd Gyges who found the magic golden ring of invisibility, we must turn the bezel so as to be no longer invisible to ourselves. (Oliver Optic, "The Ring of Gyges," Our Boys and Girls Magazine, 1867.)
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One of our greatest pleasures lies in capturing on film the mysteries of crystal balls. These eight examples are of favorite crystal balls within cabinets of curiosities, all located within ... well, many will recognize the location! (Anyone who doesn't know but would like to should drop us a line, and we'll gladly reveal all.) The first six of these photos were taken in near complete darkness, the balls themselves nearly undetectable by the naked eye. On occasion we take portraits of crystal balls in the collections of seers and aficianados (or "buffs," as they might better be called).
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The Trump L’Oeil Tarot of Portmeirion is an exciting Tarot experiment that cannot be missed in your deck collection. It’s an invitation to delve into those elements that day by day challenge us to think about the coincidences that manifest the archetypal energy contained in the world of men. Do you dare to find the archetypes that govern your life? You can see them in Portmeirion, that’s for sure.
Here are some additional snippets from the insightful review:
Any tarot deck is a journey, but Trump L’Oeil Tarot of Portmeirion represents an adventure of multiple nuances and layers. In this card set, you will find a photographic trip through the streets of Portmeirion, a small but very peculiar Village located in the north of Wales. ...
Craig Conley, the author of Trump L’Oeil, is a multifaceted artistic documentarian, with a passion for literature, arts, photography and, of course, Portmeirion. Conley is dedicated to spiritual growth, transformation, and study from the most diverse perspectives. In some sense, his personality is as baroque as that of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, the visionary who built Portmeirion. With great achievements in the world of music and technology, this hard working artist was captivated by the charm of Portmeirion village and fell into the psychic spell of the archetypes that abound in its streets. ...
Walking through Portmeirion inch by inch we will find those little miracles of the collective unconscious that let us glimpse the depth of Jung’s research. Each corner holds a powerful relic that immediately takes us back to think about a Major trump and its important guidance towards personal enrichment. The statue of a cherub on the verge of falling from a cliff is one of the most touching and impressive interpretations that we can confer to the Fool Major Trump. Usually portrayed as an older man being chased by the intuitive dog that protects him, we can easily connect with the erratic energy of this little angel who sloppily throws himself into the world of mortals in a decision that could change his life, isn’t that a perfect analogy for our dear Fool? Of course, the Magician cannot be other than Sir Williams-Ellis, the alchemist who took all the elements at his disposal during a construction and reconstruction process that took him 50 years to complete. The minor Trumps are symbolized in relation to the elements with which they have traditionally been associated.
See the full review here. The deck is also available at GameCrafter. Look inside the book over at Amazon.
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Let Them Come To Me:
Why Fortune Telling Automata Are So Uncanny
and Why You'll Hereby Question the Humanity of Everyone You Encounter
It's technically impossible to separate an automaton fortune teller from the world of myth and dark fairy tales, not only because automata are from that world, but also because their makers were touched by stories that they heard or invented themselves and then tinkered and carved and clockworked their creations to open the eyes of their audience. The Devon Guild of Craftsmen has noted that "making automata is difficult. Making other sorts of three dimensional objects can also be hard, but the extra dimension of movement seems to add a disproportionate amount of difficulty. Moving parts involve principles (physics, not morals), levers, shafts, cranks, cams, springs, linkages, ratchets, drives and gearing. No wonder some of our makers have built whole, imaginary worlds around their pieces." [8] We would disagree that moral principles are not involved, but we can't scientifically prove that and so will let the point go.
Lady Audley is currently in the collection of Bruce Toriello, host of "Tales of Midnight."
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Take just one look at the fortune telling automaton Lady Audley, and a dark story already begins to unfold. Her history has been traced back to a New Jersey boardwalk's penny arcade in the 1920s. From the very beginning, visitors sensed that Lady Audley had a life of her own. The cards she dispensed not only predicted the future but also seemed to know the present uncannily well. Lady Audley notoriously wouldn't respond to questions she felt were superfluous, and on occasion she would even volunteer information about subjects she felt important, without having been activated. One of the strangest rumors was that no one was ever seen refilling the fortune cards disepensed by the machine, which begged the question of where exactly they came from. In 1964, the boardwalk was set ablaze and nearly three dozen people were unable to escape. The arcade was the first to burn, and its sole survivor was Lady Audley. The arsonist turned out to be one of many who claimed to be held under her strange mystique. He felt a slave to her predictions and would travel nightly to the boardwalk, desperate to know what tomorrow might harbor. He eventually determined that the only way to break the spell was through the cleansing power of fire. When he discovered that Lady Audley survived the flames, he went into a blind rage and took a bullet in the heart by police detectives. A fortune card dispensed by Lady Audley was recovered from his pocket. It read, "From six chambers will come the stillness of life's regret. Four chambers in a cage will be broken but never will forget." If it sounds like something out of an urban legend, remember that the truth tends to be stranger than fiction. Lady Audley's history is likely not just stranger than we know but stranger than we can know.
Unlike the palm reader in Caravaggio's famous painting, who slyly slips off a querent's ring and so simultaneously reads and steals his fortune, an automaton behind glass cannot be a trickster. Indeed, the automaton behind glass does not cajole but rather sits still and quiet. If it embodies a motto, perhaps it is, "Let them come to me." The automaton does not and in fact cannot hawk superstition, nor can it make false claims. Gullibility or conviction is wholly upon the shoulders of those who would cross silver into the cabinet's coin slot. If the questions are self-centered, it is the querent who has trivialized the proceedings, not the automaton. If the prediction is laughed off, that's the querent's error and not the fortune teller's, for all oracles are true, as proven in Marie-Louise von Franz's On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance (1980). If the consultation is to be called a folly, recall that word's French meaning, "delight," and that foolishness is "wooden-headed" (reiterating that an automaton puts on no airs). If one would call the consultation anything, perhaps it should be deemed a sin, for that is to imply that the automaton can reveal what God has wisely concealed and expressly forbidden, and what higher tribute could a fortune teller receive?
The Lady Audley automaton seemingly attracting ghostly orbs, as revealed by our custom "Uncanny Detector" app (seen in operation in our video about exploring a ruined wizard's museum.)
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Lady Audley negotiates a boundary between rational mechanism and legendary magic and thereby speaks of a double world. [2] "The hard border between the natural and the artificial evaporates when machines are animated with life." [3] She sits within a booth, the glass panels suggesting the hazy fringe between life and nonlife, the human and spirit worlds, possibility and probability, old wives' tales and unvarnished truths. For all her answers, Lady Audley's "undecidables and ambiguities" [4] spark even more questions … about her own cognitive autonomy, her immortality, her accountability, her imprisonment. [1] Is she walled in, or are we? Does she act mechanically, or do we? Is she unsettling, or is there strangeness in everyday life? [5] Indeed, the automaton that tells our fortune is uncanny not for its weirdness or otherness but, as Freud described, for its familiarity.
In the lingo of information science, "every automaton has a nonempty set of fair behaviors." [7] That word "nonempty" is fascinating, for it's not quite the same as "full." Non-emptiness sounds like the opposite of Zen enlightenment, and it implies a transcendent state of release from death and rebirth that yet escapes utter annihilation. One recalls the "unpeopled space with presence" of Denise Levertov. [9] "Nonempty" also recalls the "not zero" concept of fuzzy logic. A card-offering automaton may "not be playing with a full deck," as the idiom goes, but neither is it an empty deck or a zero-sum. That other word, "fair," is also crucial. It means unbiased and trustworthy.
Then there's this question: is Lady Audley inhuman, and how can we know who isn't? For to call Lady Audley an automaton is to introduce a disquieting implication, since anyone else we encounter could be a perfected automaton, an android, a golem, or some other alien impersonator of the human. As Stanley Cavell has rationalized in The Claim of Reason (1979), "Obviously, you can never be certain that other human beings exist, for any one you single out may, for all you know, be something other than you imagine, perhaps a human, probably a human if you like, but possibly a mutation, and just possibly an automaton, a zombie … The world is what it is. And whatever it is, so far as you take it as inhabited by candidates for the human, you are empathetically projecting. This means that you cannot rule out the non-human (or human non-being) possibility."
More than a fortune teller, is Lady Audley a votive object, a prophylactic talisman, a promise, a petition, or a phantom? [2] Is she haunted or a projection of our own haunted selves?
And can every single one of these admittedly profound questions be answered for merely a quarter? A quarter is half of a half, and it's one of the thousand paradoxes: "you can slice something into forever, halving" [6].
Notes:
1 Thanks to Michael Davidson in "Attended with Trouble," The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, 2017
2 Thanks to Elizabeth King in "Perpetual Devotion," Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, 2010
3 Richard Hardack, Not Altogether Human: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance, 2012
4 Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, 2001
5 Thanks to Katie Model, "Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny in the Horror Film: The Shining," 2012
6 Elana Dykewomon, Risk, 2012
7 Proceedings of the Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, 1988
8 P. de Burlet, "Tall Stories," The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, 2010
9 Denise Levertov, "A Ring of Changes," With Eyes At the Back of Our Heads, 1959
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The Most Exclusive Seance Parlor Outside Hollywood
What parlor is more exclusive than the Houdini Seance Chamber in Hollywood's Magic Castle? (As difficult as it is to get into the Magic Castle, of those select few who know the secret word to whisper to the carved owl on the sliding bookcase, only a smaller fraction ever see the Houdini Seance Chamber.) More exclusive than that is the macabre sitting room where the host of "Tales of Midnight," Spooky Brucey, divines the truths behind the most sinister legends on record.
Through our network of masked contacts in arcane circles, we came into possession of previously uncirculated blueprints and photos of the Tales of Midnight parlor. As this room is filled with age-old secrets, we thought to analyze it through the sage-colored glasses of ancient Chinese necromancy, as detailed in Seance Parlor Feng Shui. And we discovered more than a few surprises. 
The old wizards of Feng Shui overlaid an esoteric map onto an area to see how the arrangement harmonized with the elemental flow of existence. When we overlap that map upon Spooky Brucey's parlor, we see a stroke of genius right off — the placement of the fortune telling automaton, Lady Audley, in the room's upper left corner, exactly where the Chinese ancients identified the space of "Fortune." Lady Audley is not merely at home in this corner; it is here and only here that she can truly thrive as a prophesier. Incidentally, this automaton survived a boardwalk fire in 1964, the blaze having been set by a man who felt that Lady Audley enslaved him with a strange power and who sought to break the spell via purifying flames.
A most intriguing revelation is the location of the "Beast's Hole in the Wall." This niche, partially sealed off with weathered boards, contains a carnival sideshow abomination that was rescued after being swallowed by a sinkhole in Florida. This beast sits in the "Wisdom" section of the room, prompting the startling suggestion that Spooky Brucey acquires knowledge from a seven-foot tall monstrosity that was first captured while it scavenged in a ruined Turkish necropolis dedicated to the god of the dead. This insight is perhaps one that Spooky Brucey would prefer to remain private, so we'll take that particular issue no further.
The crystal ball and its table are positioned in the "Career" area of the map, which indicates that Spooky Brucey has a calling to foresee, to foretell, and perhaps to forewarn. Interestingly, the two chairs at the seance table cross over into the "Wisdom" and "Mentors" areas. Whichever chair Spooky Brucey himself may sit in is therefore auspicious — if the "Wisdom" chair, his crystal ball readings will be shrewd, and if the "Mentors" chair, his interpretations will be strengthened by the guides and confidants at whose feet he has studied. Note that the "Mentors" section also features the door to the parlor, meaning that Spooky Brucey is open to learning from new sources that enter into his life.
A table holding occult objects lies in the "Creativity" area, meaning that Spooky Brucey's original ideas are inspired by rarefied dinguses (or dingi). But more intrigue is found in the "Partnership" zone, where we find a wooden crate. Dare we wonder who — or what — constitutes Spooky Brucey's partner? Is the crate newly arrived from some exotic locale, is it being prepped for shipment, or is it a permanent fixture and merely cracked open occasionally? These are questions we may not ask.
We mustn't overlook a rather profound paradox that exists in the Tales of Midnight parlor. The fireplace is in the "Career" zone, whose ruling element is water. This suggests that the fireplace is perhaps ornamental or that the chimney is so corroded that it's unsafe for burning. Yet things are decidedly odder, for opposite the fireplace, in the "Reputation" zone ruled by fire, sits a vaudevillian magician's ventriloquism dummy found nailed in a trunk at the bottom of a lake. And so in this seance parlor, fire and water are inverted. There may be some sly technique behind this inversion, for if Spooky Brucey has concerns that incendiary gossip by tricky dummies may harm his reputation, he has dampened such fires with something decidedly soggy. And if the flow of his Water-ruled career is intended to get steamier, wasn't it the three witches in Macbeth who said, "Fire burn and cauldron bubble"? So even these two seeming violations of Feng Shui betray a seance parlor "on the ball," as it were.
Only two zones remain. "New Beginnings" auspiciously features a window, symbolically a portal to another world. The center of "Well-Being" is the only zone bereft of objects, suggesting that the dead center of the room is where Spooky Brucey finds the most happiness, encircled as he is by the uncanny artifacts he has curated. The center of the room, being ruled by the Earth element, is here surrounded by its own zodiacal constellations, each with a unique story and intrigue.
(To learn how to create your own magical seance parlor, see Seance Parlor Feng Shui.)
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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