Many of today’s “complementary” or “alternative” systems of healing involve magical beliefs, manifesting ways of thinking based in principles of cosmology and causality that are timeless and absolutely universal. So similar are some of these principles among all human populations that some cognitive scientists have suggested that they are innate to the human species, and this suggestion is being strengthened by current scientific research. Any efforts to correct such thinking should begin with understanding of the nature of the principles involved. When we ask “why people believe weird things” (as has Shermer 1997) we might consider that at least some beliefs derive from a natural propensity to think in certain ways.

This article considers those aspects of belief that accord with the best anthropological meanings of “magic” and “magical thinking.” It defines these terms far more specifically than have others.¹ I will first survey the wide range of popular meanings of magic, then elucidate underlying principles involved in the belief system most appropriately labeled “magic.” I will identify some popular belief systems that involve magical thinking and indicate some recent scientific studies that suggest that we are dealing with innate principles of cognition.

Meanings of “Magic”

The terms magic and magical have a wide range of meanings, both among scholars and the general public. In no significant order, the terms can mean: the tricks and illusions of a stage magician; ability to change form, visibility, or location of something, or the creation of something from nothing; spirit invocation and command; having romantic, awe-inspiring, or wondrous quality; the “high” or “Hermetic” magic of late medieval and Renaissance times, including astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and other systems involving complex calculations and/or written notations and formulas; anything “mystical,” “psychic,” “paranormal,” “occult,” or “New Age"; some of the beliefs and practices of Wicca and other neo-pagan religions, often spelled “magick"; any of the many meanings of “sorcery” or “witchcraft,” or other referents of “black magic"; anything seeming mysterious or miraculous; and the terms can be used as a general reference to supernatural power. I have elaborated on these meanings elsewhere (Stevens 1996a).

Even among scholars there is not general agreement, and any of the above meanings may be evident in different anthropological writings. But there are distinct ways of thinking and corresponding ritual practices that are similar among all peoples in the world and at all stages of recorded history - including prehistory - which most anthropologists, and many other scholars, refer to as magic. In this universal sense, as I have indicated in more detail elsewhere (Stevens 1996b), magic operates according to any or all of five basic principles:

1. Forces. Most peoples seem to believe in forces in nature that are separate from and operate independently of any spiritual beings and are also separate from those forces identified and measured by science, e.g., gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The forces are inherently programmed, apparently since the Creation, to do specific things, either alone or in concert with others, and if left alone they will do those things. Farmers recognize them; poets have written about them ("The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"-Dylan Thomas, 1934).

2. Power. The forces, and everything else, are energized by a mystical power that exists in varying degrees in all things. The power in higher-order things, spiritual beings, and people of high status, like African and Polynesian kings, may be dangerous to ordinary people. Power is transferable, through physical contact, sensory perception, or mere proximity. The idea is exemplified in the biblical concept of divine “glory,” as halos over the heads of saints in medieval art, and in contemporary New Age “auras” and “psi energy.” It is belief in supernatural power that defines the concept of “sacred,” and that distinguishes holy water.

   In some belief systems, “forces” and “power” may seem to merge; e.g., in the concept of “vital force” that exists in so many forms: Polynesian and Melanesian mana, Iroquois orenda, Algonqian manitou, Sioux wakan, Malay kramat, Indian brahma, Greek dynamis, Chinese qi, ashé among the Yoruba of West Africa and its Caribbean derivatives (aché, axé), “karma” and “chakras” in Hindu and Buddhist healing systems, the alleged “energies” in Therapeutic Touch and Reiki, etc.; and ideas of flowing streams of power in Earth, like “leylines” in Britain and Europe and earth energies addressed in the Chinese geomantic system of feng shui.

3. A coherent, interconnected cosmos. It is widely believed that everything in the cosmos is actually or potentially interconnected, as if by invisible threads, not only spatially but also temporally-past, present, and future. Further, every thing and every event that has happened, is happening, or will happen was pre-programmed into the cosmic system; and after it has happened, it leaves a record of itself in the cosmic program.

4. Symbols. Symbols are words, thoughts, things, or actions that not only represent other things or actions but can take on the qualities of the things they represent. The American flag is a good example; if the flag is mistreated it is more than the material that is damaged. If the thing the symbol stands for has power, the symbol will become powerful. Some symbols with power appear to be universal, e.g., eggs, horns, and the color red; most are understandable only in their specific cultural contexts.

   Words are extremely powerful, as they embody their own meaning, and speech is usually part of the magic act. It is universally believed that spoken words, activated by the life force and the intent of the speaker and borne on his or her breath, carry the power of their own meaning directly to their intended target. Unspoken thoughts can do the same, although less effectively. Telepathy, telekinesis, and the projection of “psi energy” are thus explained.

5. Frazer’s principles. Sir James George Frazer, in his monumental work on religion and kingship, The Golden Bough, explained his famous principles of sympathetic magic in most detail in the third edition, 1911-1915. Heir to the eighteenth-century Positivist assumption of “laws” governing nature and society, Frazer said that sympathetic magic was of two types. “Homeopathic” magic works according to the “law of similarity"-things or actions that resemble other things or actions have a causal connection. “Contagious magic” obeys the “law of contact"-things that have been either in physical contact or in spatial or temporal association with other things retain a connection after they are separated. Frazer is rightly credited for his detailed explication of sympathetic magic and his collection of numerous examples from world ethnology. But ideas of causality based in similarity and contact had been expressed by philosophers since Classical times (e.g., Hippocrates), were integral to the medieval and Renaissance Hermetic systems (e.g., Paracelsus), and had been noted, and dismissed as lazy thinking, by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum, 1608-1620.

Note that spirit beliefs are not involved in the above principles. Many uses of “magic” mean spirit invocation and command, but probably all peoples conceive of spirits as sentient and willful beings who may choose not to respond to human command-as Shakespeare’s Hotspur famously responded to Glendower’s boast that he could “call spirits from the vasty deep,” in King Henry IV, Part I.² The forces and powers addressed and manipulated in magic are insentient and passively responsive (if the rite is performed correctly). Magic should be distinguished from supplication of a deity, as through prayer; but all scholars recognize that magical principles are intertwined with and complementary to religious ritual.

So, magic involves the transfer of power in nature, or the human effort to manipulate natural forces along the network of cosmic interconnections by symbolic projection of power. Magical principles are evident in intentional magic, in which symbols are consciously used, through principles of similarity or contact, for beneficial or harmful results; in taboo, which is the avoidance of establishing an undesirable magical connection; in the direct use of words to achieve results, as in blessing or curse; in some forms of divination, “reading” answers to questions by tapping into the cosmic program through mechanical or clairvoyant means; in harnessing the power of symbols for personal good fortune or protection, as in talismans and “lucky” charms; etc. Indeed, ideas of “luck” and “jinx” are magical concepts. Most “superstitions” are readily explainable by the principles of magical thinking.

Homeopathy and Other Magical Belief Systems

Some of the principles of magical beliefs described above are evident in currently popular belief systems. A clear example is homeopathy. Fallacies in homeopathic claims have been discussed by many, including Barrett (1987) and Gardner (1989) in this journal; but it is curious that this healing system has not been more widely recognized as based in magical thinking.³ The fundamental principle of its founder, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), similia similibus curentur ("let likes cure likes”), is an explicit expression of a magical principle. The allegedly active ingredients in homeopathic medications were “proved” effective against a particular disease when they produced in healthy people symptoms similar to those caused by the disease.

Hahnemann was well aware, says sympathetic biographer Martin Gumpert, that his theories might be relegated to the realm of “mere magic” (1945, 147), and he sought to explain homeopathy’s alleged effects by reference to established science of the time. He was impressed by Anton Mesmer’s (1734-1815) concept of “animal magnetism,” and by the “dynamism” of philosopher Friederich Schelling (1775-1854) who taught that matter is infinitely divisible, and that “the more unsubstantial the matter became by dilution, the purer and more effective could be its 'spirit-like' and 'dynamic' functions” (Gumpert 1945, 147). So Hahnemann insisted that a “vital force” was present both in the human body and in the medications. He recognized that his successive dilutions ("potentizations”) of the allegedly active substance in water inevitably reduced the amount of the original substance to none; but the water carried the essence of the active substance, with which it had been in contact; and that essence worked on the vital force of the patient. Moreover, the power of the medication-its “potency” or “dynamization,” terms borrowed from Schelling-was increased by grating or pulverizing the original material and by shaking the solution ("succussion”).

Hahnemann’s appeal, then and today, was enhanced because he was a well-educated physician and made legitimate criticisms of certain medical practices of his day; but much in his contemporary scientific worldview was still magical. Three fundamental principles of magic are involved in homeopathy: similarity, power, and contact.

According to a survey about alternative medicine in the November 11, 1998, Journal of the American Medical Association, Americans’ use of homeopathic preparations more than doubled between 1990 and 1997 (Eisenberg et al. 1998).⁴ Most modern homeopathic texts are careful to emphasize homeopathy’s limitations and to advise consultation with a physician if symptoms persist. But most insist that homeopathy accords with proven principles of science, citing its basis in experimentation, principles of vaccination (Edward Jenner was a contemporary of Hahnemann), and its apparent parallels to discoveries in symptomatology and immunology and the body’s reactions to various physical and emotional stressors. A popular meaning of “science,” apparently, is “complicated” and Dana Ullman (1988, 10) asserts that homeopathy is “too scientific” for ordinary people to figure out. Ullman goes on to argue at length for biological and physical explanations for the concepts of “resonance” and “vital force” and compares them with some of the cultural ideas of mystical “power” I discussed earlier, and even more: Chinese chi, Japanese ki, what “yogis call prana, Russian scientists call 'bioplasm,' and Star Wars characters call 'The Force'” (p. 15); and (p. 34, n. 1) he cites Frazer’s classic study of magic for cross-cultural parallels to “the law of similars!” Later, he and Stephen Cummings (Cummings and Ullman 1991) are more careful, and conclude that science has yet to explain just how it “works.” For now, the best explanations for claimed successes with homeopathic cures-assuming the original ailment was clinically genuine-are 1) as they are completely inert, homeopathic remedies allow nature to run its course, as Duffy (1976, 112ff.) has indicated;⁵ and/or 2) the placebo effect, which currently is the subject of renewed interest in medical research.⁶ Indeed, when anthropologists indicate beliefs and cultural/psychological expectations as responsible for magical cures-or for the deleterious personal effects of hexes or taboo violations-it is the placebo effect they are talking about.

Various other “alternative” and “New Age” beliefs are obviously magical; many are ancient and widespread. Crystals have long been believed to contain concentrated power; colored crystals have specific healing effects, as certain colors are associated with parts of the body-as they have been in the West for centuries. Colors enhance powers ascribed to candles and other ritual devices. In the early 1980s I gave accommodation in my home to a young New Age enthusiast. Tom, as I shall call him, for some weeks wore a small cloth bag of crystals pinned inside his shirt, over his heart. One morning I noticed that among the items he had laid out for his day was a small brown bottle of liquid, bearing the label “Tom’s Red Water.” He explained that a member of his therapy/discussion group produced this for all who wanted it: he wrapped a large glass jug of water in red cellophane and placed it in sunlight all day long. Each person carried a small bottle of this energized liquid and sipped from it four times a day.

But the magical healing power of colors seems universal. My colleague Ana Mariella Bacigalupo informed me that health workers among the Mapuche of Chile found that their patients were indifferent to the standard white antibiotic pills; but they willingly took red-colored pills because red is culturally associated with exorcism (as it is elsewhere, and was in early Europe and England; see Bonser 1963, 219). Six studies reviewed in the British Medical Journal in 1996 confirmed popular European and American expectations about the color of pills: red, yellow, or orange pills are expected to have a general stimulant effect, blue or green are sedative; and specifically, red is cardiovascular, tan or orange is skin, white is all-purpose. The authors correctly point out that cultural associations may vary, though red, for blood, hence vitality, is probably universal (de Craen et al. 1996).

Social-psychological explanations for people’s continued use of magic in an increasingly scientific and technological age agree that it gives individuals a sense of control, hence an important increase in self-confidence in a confusing and impersonal world. When the objective is relief from some personal ailment, such confidence may generate feelings of improvement, albeit perhaps temporary, through the placebo effect.

The physiological effects of cultural expectations-an explanation for the placebo effect-were indicated in the 1970s, in a number of Swedish/Thai studies that showed that people who liked the appearance, and the taste, of what they were eating absorbed more nutrients from it. This was explained in reference to the “cephalic phase” of the digestive process, affecting the flow of enzyme-laden salivary, gastric, pancreatic, and intestinal secretions. Thai and Swedish diners were indifferent to each others’ cuisines, and neither group was interested in one of its own favorite meals whose components had been blended in a high-speed mixer. In such cases, iron absorption fell by 70 percent (see Hallberg et al. 1977; reported in Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter, October 2000).

Neurobiological Bases for Magical Thinking

Of all the principles of magical thinking I discussed earlier, Frazer’s principle of similarity is most basic. This is the basis for the universal and timeless beliefs and practices involving notions of resemblance, falling under the general rubric of “imitative magic,” and the principle that has most persuaded scholars to suggest that a basic mechanism of human cognition may be at work. It has long been understood that imitation lies at the basis for learning among higher primates and humans. Specific brain mechanisms involved in imitation among monkeys have recently been identified, and their implications for primate and human perception, symbolism, communication, and action have been recognized (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998). Therefore, a 1999 discovery among human subjects by brain scientists is especially exciting. Marco Iacoboni and his colleague (Iacoboni et al. 1999) asked healthy participants to observe pictures of specific finger movements, and to imitate those movements while their brain activity was measured; and later to move the appropriate finger when shown only pictures of simple cross marks spatially representing the fingers involved in the earlier movements. Their experiments showed that specific areas of the human brain are involved in imitation, both when the stimuli are actions and symbolic representations of actions. The implications for magical thinking are huge.

But the vast majority of the world’s peoples, including many highly educated research scientists,⁷ obviously believe that there are real connections between the symbol and its referent, and that some real and potentially measurable power flows between them. Elisabeth Targ, M.D., and her colleagues recently had “a randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing” published in a leading American medical journal, the Western Journal of Medicine (Sicher et al. 1998). (Elisabeth is the daughter of “psi energy” proponent Russell Targ.) Martin Gardner (2001, 14) reports that Elizabeth Targ is the recipient of over two million dollars of public funds from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health for two studies of “distant healing,” one over three years on 150 HIV patients, and one over four years on persons with glioblastoma. Methods in her 1998 study involved forty American “experienced distant healers” from several different traditions ("Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American, and shamanic;” p. 359), who were given five “subject information packets” containing personal data: subject’s first name, a current color photograph, and written notations on blood count and current symptoms. Healers were instructed to open their packets on certain dates and “to work on the assigned subject for approximately one hour per day for six consecutive days with the instruction to 'direct an intention for health and well-being' to the subject” (p. 359). Assuming that Targ’s current methods are similar, we can now recognize that her generous government grants support testing of a modern form of ancient and universal image magic, involving at least four classic principles of magical thinking: power, interconnections in nature, symbols, and similarity.⁸

Notes

1. For example, L. Zusne and W.H. Jones, whose studies (Zusne 1985, Zusne and Jones 1989) have set standards for some subsequent investigations (e.g., Krippner and Winkler 1996, Thomas 1999).

2. Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
   Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
   But will they come when you do call for them?

3. Some writers, e.g., Planer (1988, 189-191), do categorize homeopathy as magic; but folklorist Wayland Hand is the only scholar I have found who explicitly identifies it as based in specific principles of magical thinking. In his widely reprinted essay “Folk Magical Medicine and Symbolism in the West,” he discusses the ancient and well-known principles of similarity in medicine and refers to homeopathy as “analogic magic” (1980, 306). Hand collected at least as many instances of magical practices among modern populations throughout Europe and North America as Frazer had for the traditional world; see his Magical Medicine, 1980.

4. “The largest increases were in the use of herbal medicine, massage, megavitamins, self-help groups, folk remedies, energy healing, and homeopathy” (Eisenberg et al. 1998, 1571). Of “energy healing,” magnets were the most commonly used method; others most frequently cited were Therapeutic Touch, Reiki, and energy healing by religious groups. In terms of preference, homeopathy ranked thirteenth of sixteen alternative therapies in the survey, all of which showed appreciable increase between 1990 and 1997. It is interesting to note, however, that under the heading “saw a practitioner in past 12 months,” acupuncture and homeopathy declined, whereas all others increased. I know that many do-it-yourself acupuncture devices have appeared on the market. Visits to homeopathic practitioners declined by half, no doubt because of the flood of ready-to-use homeopathic preparations that became available; apparently homeopath Dana Ullman’s (1988, 10; see below) warning to people not to self-prescribe was prescient.

5. Duffy pointed out this value for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when standard treatments such as blood-letting, purging, harsh emetics, applications of heat or cold, etc., might actually harm the patient. “Natural” recovery from any disorder might be temporary or illusory, due to a cyclical nature of the disease or its symptoms, or spontaneous remission, as well as a host of psychological factors (e.g., self-delusion), reporting errors, etc., as Beyerstein (1997) has indicated. And, the original ailment may have been psychosomatic.

6. The “placebo effect,” apparent physiological improvement by ailing people who unwittingly receive ineffectual ("sham”) treatment, has been considered especially powerful, attributed to the strength of the “mind-body connection.” In the 1990s many studies attempted to determine any clinical efficacy of homeopathy; determining the role of placebo in its relatively narrow clinical sense proved difficult, as many subjective factors may be involved (such as beliefs!-see Linde et al. 1997). On May 24, 2001, while this paper was being revised, news reports blared the debunking of the placebo effect, calling it “myth,” and predicting radical reassessment of medical assumption. But that research (Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche 2001) in fact supports my use of the term here. The cases in which placebo was deemed ineffectual were clinical trials involving “binary outcomes” (e.g., nausea, smoking relapse) measured by objective standards. In cases involving “continuous outcomes” (e.g., hypertension, pain) and subjective assessment, the researchers found placebo to be beneficial. Psychologists and anthropologists recognize that this is exactly the type of case in which faith healing, which homeopathy really is, “works.”

7. Eisenberg et al. (1998) found that “alternative” or “complementary” medicine use was significantly more common among people with some college education (50.6 percent) than with no college education (36.4 percent), among people aged 35-49 than older or younger, and among people with annual incomes above $50,000.

8. And we can be justifiably outraged at this expenditure of taxpayers’ money. But Eisenberg, et. al. (1998) calculated that between 1990 and 1997 visits to alternative medicine providers exceeded total visits to all primary care physicians; and several other surveys have shown the increasing use of alternative medicine across the country and throughout the world. So perhaps our outrage might be tempered by the realization that, given the huge numbers of Americans who have consulted “alternative” or “complementary” medical practitioners, the government has an obligation to support research into their effectiveness. Still, any traditional person in any region of the world could advise Dr. Targ that her chances of success would be greatly increased if she had added to her “subject information packets” items that had been in direct intimate contact with the subjects, such as hair or nail clippings or any bodily fluids, or just a fragment of an item of unwashed underwear.

References

• Barrett, Stephen. 1987. Homeopathy: Is it medicine? Skeptical Inquirer (12)1, Fall: 56-62.
• Bonser, Wilfrid. 1963. The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study in History, Psychology, and Folklore. London: Oxford University Press.
• Beyerstein, Barry L. 1997. Why bogus therapies seem to work. Skeptical Inquirer (21)5, September/October: 29-34.
• Cummings, Stephen, and Dana Ullman. 1991. Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
• de Craen, Anton J.M., Pieter J. Roos, A. Leonard de Vries, and Jos Kleijnen. 1996. Effect of Colour of Drugs: Systematic Review of Perceived Effect of Drugs and Their Effectiveness. British Medical Journal 313:1624-6.
• Dubisch, Jill. 1981. You are what you eat: Religious aspects of the health food movement. In The American Dimension: Culture Myths and Social Realities ed. Susan P. Montague and W. Arens. Second edition. Palo Alto, California: Mayfield.
• Duffy, John. 1976. The Healers: The Rise of the Medical Establishment. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Eisenberg, David M., Roger B. Davis, Susan L. Ettner, Scott Appel, Sonja Wilkey, Maria Van Rompay, and Ronald C. Kessler. 1998. Trends in Alternative Medicine Use in the United States, 1990-1997. Journal of the American Medical Association 280:1569-1575.
• Frazer, James George. 1911-1915. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Third edition. London: Macmillan.
• Gardner, Martin. 1989. Water with memory? The dilution affair. Skeptical Inquirer 12(2):132-141.
• —. 2001. Distant Healing and Elisabeth Targ. Skeptical Inquirer 25(2):12-14.
• Gumpert, Martin. 1945. Hahnemann. Claud W. Sykes, trans. New York: L.B. Fischer.
• Hallberg, L., E. Björn-Rasmussen, L. Rossander, and R. Suwanik. 1977. Iron absorption from Southeast Asian diets: II. Role of various factors that might explain low absorption. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 30, April, pp. 539-548.
• Hand, Wayland D. 1980. Folk Magical Medicine and Symbolism in the West. In Magical Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 305-319.
• Hróbjartsson, Asbjørn, and Peter C. Gøtzsche. 2001. Is the placebo powerless? New England Journal of Medicine 344:1594-1602.
• Iacoboni, Marco, Roger P. Woods, Marcel Brass, Harold Bekkering, John C. Mazziotta, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 1999. “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation.” Science 286:2526-2528.
• Krippner, Stanley, and Michael Winkler. 1996. The “Need to Believe.” In Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. Gordon Stein, ed. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 441-454.
• Linde, Klaus, Nicola Clausius, Gilbert Ramirez, Dieter Meichart, Florian Eitel, Larry V. Hedges, and Wayne B. Jonas. 1997. Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? The Lancet 350:834-843; erratum 351, Jan. 17, 1998, p. 220.
• Planer, Felix E. 1988. Superstition. Revised ed. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Rizzolatti, Giaciomo, and Michael A. Arbib. 1998. Language within our grasp. Trends in Neuroscience 21(5):188-194.
• Shermer, Michael. 1997. Why People Believe Weird Things. New York: W.H. Freeman.
• Sicher, Fred, Elisabeth Targ, Dan Moore II, and Helene S. Smith. 1998. A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS. Western Journal of Medicine 169:356-363.
• Stevens, Phillips, Jr. 1996a. Black Magic. In Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. Gordon Stein, ed. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 129-133.
• —.1996b. Magic. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. David Levinson and Melvin Ember. New York: Henry Holt, pp. 721-726.
• Thomas, Sherilyn Nicole. 1999. Magical Ideation in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Psychology, SUNY at Buffalo.
• Ullman, Dana. 1988. Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.
• Zusne, L. 1985. Magical Thinking and Parapsychology. In A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology, ed. P. Kurtz. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 685-700.
• Zusne, L., and W.H. Jones. 1989. Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. Second edition. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Schwartz, Russek, Nelson, and Barentsen (2001) recently reported two studies in which mediums appeared to be able to produce accurate information about the deceased under conditions that the authors believed “eliminate the factors of fraud, error, and statistical coincidence.” Their studies were widely reported in the media as scientific proof of life after death (e.g., Matthews 2001; Chapman 2001). This paper describes some of the methodological problems associated with the Schwartz et al. studies and outlines how these problems can be overcome in future research.

Schwartz et al.'s first experiment was funded and filmed by a major U.S. television network HBO making a documentary about the survival of bodily death. The study involved two participants (referred to as “sitters”) and five well-known mediums. The first sitter was a forty-six-year-old woman who had experienced the death of over six people in the last ten years. Schwartz et al. stated that this sitter was recommended to them by a well-known researcher in ADCs (After Death Communication) who “knew of the sitter’s case through her research involving spontaneous ADCs.” The second sitter was a fifty-four-year-old woman who had also experienced the death of at least six people in the last ten years.

During the experiment, the sitter and medium sat on either side of a large opaque screen. The medium was allowed to “conduct the reading in his or her own way, with the restriction that they could ask only questions requiring a yes or no answer.” Each sitter was asked to listen to the reading and respond to the medium’s questions by saying the word “yes” or “no” out loud. The first sitter was given a reading by all five mediums; the second sitter received readings from only two of the mediums.

A few months after the experiment, both sitters were asked to assign a number between -3 (definitely an error) to +3 (definitely correct) to each of the statements made by the mediums. The sitters placed 83 percent and 77 percent of the statements into the +3 category. Schwartz et al. also reported their attempt to discover whether “intelligent and motivated persons” could guess the type of information presented by the mediums by chance alone. The investigators selected seventy statements from the readings given to the first sitter and turned them into questions. For example, if the medium had said “your father loved dancing,” the question became “Who loved to dance?” Sixty-eight undergraduates were shown these questions, along with a photograph of the sitter, and asked to guess the answer. Schwartz et al. reported that the average number of items guessed correctly was just 36 percent, and argue that the high level of accuracy obtained by the mediums could not be due to chance guessing.

The first sitter was then invited back to the laboratory to take part in a second experiment. In this experiment she received readings from two of the mediums who also participated in the first study. Rather than being separated by an opaque screen, the sitter sat six feet behind the medium. In the first part of these two readings the sitter was instructed to remain completely silent. In the second part she was asked to answer “yes” or “no” to each of the medium’s questions. After reviewing the readings, the sitter rated 82 percent of the mediums’ statements as being “definitely correct.”

The Schwartz et al. studies suffered from severe methodological problems, namely: (1) the potential for judging bias, (2) the use of an inappropriate control group, and (3) inadequate safeguards against sensory leakage. Each of these problems will be discussed in turn.

Judging Bias

During a mediumistic reading the medium usually produces a large number of statements and the sitter has to decide whether these statements accurately describe his/her deceased friends or relatives. It is widely recognized that the sitter’s endorsement of such statements cannot be taken as evidence of mediumistic ability, as seemingly accurate readings can be created by a set of psychological stratagems collectively referred to as ”cold reading” (Hyman 1977; Rowland 1998). It is therefore vital that any investigation into the possible existence of mediumistic ability controls for the potential effect of these stratagems. Unfortunately, the Schwartz et al. study did not contain such controls, and thus it is possible that the seemingly impressive results could have been due to cold reading.

Schwartz et al. reproduced a small part of one reading in their paper, and this transcript can be used to illustrate how cold reading could account for the outcome of the studies. In the first line of the transcript the medium said, “Now, I don't know if they [the spirits] mean this by age or by generation, but they talk about the younger male that has passed. Does that make sense to you?” The sitter answered “yes.” The medium’s statement is ambiguous and open to several different interpretations. When the medium mentioned the word “younger” he/she could be talking about a young child, a young man, or even someone who died young (e.g., in their forties). The sitters may be motivated to interpret such statements in such a way as to maximize the degree of correspondence with their deceased friends and relatives if, for example, they had a strong belief in the afterlife, a need to believe that loved ones have survived bodily death, or were eager to please the mediums, investigators, and the HBO film crew.

In addition, the sitters may have endorsed the readings because some statements caused them to selectively remember certain events in their lives. As a hypothetical example, let us imagine that the medium had said, “Your son was an extrovert.” This statement may have caused the sitter to selectively recall certain life events (i.e., the times that her son went to parties and was very outgoing), forget other events (e.g., the times that he sat alone and didn't want to be with others), and thus assign a spuriously high accuracy rating to the statement.

Biased interpretation of ambiguous statements and selective remembering can lead to sitters endorsing contradictory statements during a reading. Interestingly, the short transcript reproduced by Schwartz et al. contains an example of exactly this happening:

Medium: . . . your dad speaks about the loss of child. That makes sense?

Sitter: Yes.

Medium: Twice? 'Cause your father says twice.

Sitter: Yes.

Medium: Wait a minute, now he says thrice. He’s saying three times. Does that make sense?

Sitter: That’s correct.

Some of the statements made by the mediums may also have been true of a great many people and thus had a high likelihood of being endorsed by the sitters. For example, in the transcript the medium stated that one of the spirits was a family member, and elsewhere Schwartz et al. stated that the mediums referred to “a little dog playing ball.” It is highly probable that many sitters would have endorsed both of these statements. Research has also revealed that many statements that do not appear especially general can also be true of a surprisingly large number of people. Blackmore (1994) carried out a large-scale survey in which more than 6,000 people were asked to state whether quite specific statements were true of them. More than one third of people endorsed the statement, “I have a scar on my left knee” and more than a quarter answered yes to the statement “Someone in my family is called Jack.” In short, the mediums in the Schwartz et al. study may have been accurate, in part, because they simply produced statements that would have been endorsed by many sitters.

Other factors may also increase the likelihood of the sitter endorsing the mediums’ statements. Clearly, the more deceased people known to the sitter, the greater chance they will have of being able to find a match for the medium’s comments. Both sitters knew a relatively large number of deceased people. Both of them had experienced the death of six loved ones in the last ten years, and the first sitter reported that she believed that the mediums had contacted an additional nine of her deceased friends and relatives. Thus, the sitters’ high levels of endorsement may have been due, in part, to them having a large number of deceased friends and relatives.

Control Group Biases

Schwartz et al. attempted to discover whether the seemingly high accuracy rate obtained by the mediums could have been the result of chance guesswork. However, the method developed by the investigators was inappropriate and fails to address the concerns outlined above. They selected seventy statements from the readings given to the first sitter in the first experiment and turned them into questions. For example, if the medium had said “your son is very good with his hands,” the question became “who was very good with his hands?” These questions were presented to a group of undergraduates, who were asked to guess the answers. Schwartz et al. reported that the average number of items guessed correctly was just 36 percent. However, it is extremely problematic to draw any conclusions from this result due to the huge differences in the tasks given to the mediums and control group. For example, when the medium said, “your son was very good with his hands,” the sitter has to decide whether this statement matches the information that she knew about her deceased son. However, as noted above, this matching process may be biased by several factors, including her selective remembering and the biased interpretation of ambiguous statements. For example, the sitter may think back to the times that her son built model airplanes, endorse the statement, and the medium would receive a “hit.” However, the control group were presented with a completely different task. They were presented with the question “Who was good with his hands?” and would only receive a “hit” if they guessed that the answer was the sitter’s son. They therefore had a significantly reduced likelihood of obtaining a hit than the mediums.

Conceptually, this is equivalent to testing archery skills by having someone fire an arrow, drawing a target around wherever it lands and calling it a bullseye, and then testing a “control” group of other archers by asking them to hit the same bullseye. Clearly, the control group would not perform as well as the first archer, but the difference in performance would reflect the fact that they were presented with very different tasks, rather than a difference in their archery skills.

Psychical researchers have developed various methods to overcome the problems associated with “cold reading” when investigating claims of mediumistic ability (see Schouten 1994 for an overview). Most of these methods involve the concept of “blind judging.” In a typical experiment, a small number of sitters receive a reading from a medium. The sitters are then asked to evaluate both his or her own reading (often referred to as the “target” reading) and the readings made for other sitters (referred to as “decoy” readings). If the medium is accurate then the ratings assigned to the target readings will be significantly greater than those assigned to the decoy readings. However, it is absolutely vital that the readings are judged “blind"-the sitters should be unaware of whether they are evaluating a “target” or “decoy” reading. This simple safeguard helps overcome all of the problems outlined above. Let us suppose that the medium is not in contact with the spirit world, but instead tends to use cold reading to produce seemingly accurate statements. These techniques will cause the sitters to endorse both the target and decoy readings, and thus produce no evidence for mediumistic ability. If, however, the medium is actually able to communicate with the spirits, the sitters should assign a higher rating to their “target” reading than the “decoy” readings, thus providing evidence of mediumistic ability.

It is hoped that future tests of mediumistic ability will employ the type of blind judging methods that have been developed, and frequently employed, in past tests of mediumistic ability.

However, blind judging is only one of several methodological safeguards that should be employed when testing mediumistic ability. Well-controlled tests should also obviously prevent the medium from being able to receive information about a sitter through any normal channels of communication. Unfortunately, the measures taken by Schwartz et al. to guard against various forms of potential sensory leakage appear insufficient.

Sensory Leakage

Throughout all of the readings in the first experiment, and the latter part of the readings in the second experiment, the sitter was allowed to answer “yes” or “no” to the medium’s questions. These answers would have provided the mediums with two types of information that may have helped them produce more accurate statements in the remainder of the reading. First, it is very likely that the sitter’s voice would have given away clues about her gender, age, and socioeconomic group. This information could cause the mediums to produce statements that have a greater likelihood of being endorsed by the sitter. For example, an older sitter is more likely to have experienced the death of their parents than a younger sitter, and certain life events are gender-specific (e.g., being pregnant, having a miscarriage, etc.). Second, the sitters’ answers may have also given away other useful clues to the mediums. For example, let us imagine that the medium stated, “I am getting the impression of someone male, is that correct?” If the sitter has recently lost someone very close to her, such as a father or son, then she might answer a tearful “yes.” If, however, the deceased male was an uncle that sitter didn't really know very well, then her “yes” might be far less emotional. Again, a skilled medium might be able to unconsciously use this information to produce accurate statements later in the reading. Any well-controlled test of mediumistic ability should not allow for the sitter to provide verbal feedback to the medium during the reading.

In the first part of the readings in the second experiment, the sitter was asked not to answer yes or no to any of the medium’s statements. However, the experimental set-up still employed insufficient safeguards against potential sensory leakage. The medium sat facing a video camera and the sitter sat six feet behind the medium without any form of screen separating the two of them. As such, the sitter may have emitted various types of sensory signals, such as cues from her movement, breathing, odor, etc. Parapsychologists have developed elaborate procedures for eliminating potential sensory leakage between participants (e.g., Milton and Wiseman 1997). These safeguards frequently involve placing participants in separate rooms, and often the use of specially constructed sound-attenuated cubicles. Schwartz et al. appeared to have ignored these guidelines and instead allowed the sitter to interact with the medium, and/or simply seated them behind one another in the same room. Neither of these measures represent sufficient safeguards against the potential for sensory leakage.

The investigators also failed to rule out the potential for sensory leakage between the experimenters and mediums. The second sitter in the first experiment is described as being “personally known” to two of the experimenters (Schwartz and Russek). The report also described how, during the experiment, the mediums were allowed to chat with Russek in a courtyard behind the laboratory. Research into the possible existence of mediumistic ability should not allow anyone who knows the sitter to come into contact with the medium. Schwartz allowed such contact, with their only safeguard being that the mediums and Russek were not allowed to talk about matters related to the session. However, a large body of research has shown that there are many ways in which information can be unwittingly communicated, via both verbal and nonverbal means (e.g., Rosenthal and Rubin 1978). As such, the safeguards employed by Schwartz et al. against possible sensory leakage between experimenter and mediums were insufficient.

In short, the Schwartz et al. study did not employ blind judging, employed an inappropriate control group, and had insufficient safeguards against sensory leakage. As such, it is impossible to know the degree to which their findings represent evidence for mediumistic ability. Psychical researchers have worked hard to develop robust methods for testing mediums since the 1930s (see Schouten 1994). It is hoped that future work in this area will build upon the methodological guidelines that have been developed and thus minimize the type of problems discussed here.

References

• Blackmore, S. 1994. Probability Misjudgement and belief in the paranormal: Is the theory all wrong? In D. Bierman (Ed.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association 72-82.
• Chapman, J. 2001. Is there anybody there? Mediums perform well in scientific séance test. The Daily Mail, March 5.
• Hyman, R. 1977. Cold reading: How to convince strangers that you know all about them. Skeptical Inquirer 1(2): 18-37.
• Matthews, R. 2001. Spiritualists’ powers turn scientists into believers. The Sunday Telegraph, March 4.
• Milton, J., and R. Wiseman. 1997. Guidelines for extrasensory perception research. University of Hertfordshire Press: Hatfield, England.
• Rosenthal, R., and D.B. Rubin. 1978. Interpersonal expectancy effects: The first 345 studies. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 3, 377-386.
• Rowland, I. 1998. The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading. Ian Roland Limited: London, England.
• Schouten, S.A. 1994. An overview of quantitatively evaluated studies with mediums and psychics. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 88:221-254.
• Schwartz, G.E.R., L.G.S. Russek, L.A. Nelson, and C. Barentsen. 2001. Accuracy and replicability of anomalous after-death communication across highly skilled mediums. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 65(862):1-25.

Paranoia was the mantra, and the late-night radio talk show maven Art Bell the high priest. The world in which these people live is a truly frightening place. Mind control assaults us, and chemtrails poison us from above. Supposedly health-giving vaccines are deliberately poisoned, the energy crisis is a sinister fraud, and even microwave ovens are dangerous. Worst of all, some shadowy, sinister group is doing everything for its own selfish gain.

Mark Philips and Cathy O'Brien started the conference with a bang, giving their talks on MK-Ultra Mind Control (see trance-formation.com/). Philips told how this type of sinister mind control was first studied, then perfected, by the Third Reich under the direct orders of Hitler. The Nazis found that it was possible to create robotlike people with superhuman powers using a sinister program of early childhood sexual abuse. Not only would these people obey orders unquestioningly, they developed “forty-four times” visual acuity. After the war, ex-Nazi psychiatrists and psychologists came to the U.S. to work for the CIA, where the evil work continued. O'Brien explained that she was one of those unfortunate victims. Her father, who allegedly had abused her since infancy, cooperated with congressman (and future president) Gerald Ford and the governor of Michigan to deliver her up to the MK-Ultra Mind Control group. Her “owner” within this group was a still-prominent U.S. senator. She was controlled on a day-to-day basis by the “harmonics” in the music she was given to listen to, and by TV shows she was made to watch, such as Disney programs and the Wizard of Oz, which contained subliminal messages.

She explained that “my sexuality had been enhanced,” a statement that did not inspire disbelief. She had allegedly spent years as a robotic sex slave for the conspiracy. Nobody asked her if she had developed forty-four times visual acuity. Mark saved her in 1988, and just in the nick of time, because at age thirty the conspiracy was preparing her for “elimination.” Around that age, you see, mind controlees begin to spontaneously recover the “repressed” memories of their abuse, and so they are pre-programmed for self-destruction. Nothing so dramatic as a cyanide capsule is needed: MK-Ultra programs into its victims a capability to go into “respiratory failure” upon receiving the proper signal. Fortunately, Mark rescued her and whisked her off to safety in Alaska. Apparently Alaska is so far away that even MK-Ultra couldn't find her.

After those exciting talks, William Lyne was a big disappointment. He was supposed to talk about “Tesla’s Secret Technologies and Government Suppression,” but he rambled on about a lot of things, mostly about himself. He claims to have led an extremely exciting life, encountering government agents at every turn, who were responsible for things happening to him that might otherwise be interpreted as failures, such as losing a job, his wife leaving, or getting booted out of the armed forces. He says he discovered a Soviet spy ring running the career counseling office at the Lackland Air Force base in Texas. One would have expected that a Soviet spy ring would have concentrated on getting information on weapons and codes, but they apparently thought they could do more damage to U.S. interests by misdirecting Air Force enlistees into inappropriate training programs. However, Lyne’s brilliant discovery upset General Curtis LeMay, who feared that if word leaked out it could endanger Eisenhower’s re-election. This led to Lyne being booted out of the Air Force.

Lyne was the first to find out about the Soviet missiles in Cuba and he warned the CIA, but they didn't tell JFK about it until six months later. He “predicted” the assassination of JFK as soon as he saw the motorcade route in the newspaper the day before. He had met Oswald, who was working for the CIA and was “robotic.” Oswald was actually a right-winger and not a Marxist. One thing Lyne did not spell out was whether or not he believes that Oswald actually did kill Kennedy. If so, he must have been the only person there (besides me) who did. As for Tesla, all we learned was that some Nazi U-boats were powered by Tesla devices, a fact confirmed by a man who claimed to have been a Nazi U-boat commander. We also learned that the real reason that Rommel’s Afrika Korps went into the desert was not to fight the British, but actually to test a neutron bomb. Apparently to test such a thing requires entire armies and thousands of armored vehicles, rather than just a few key scientists and technicians.

Jordan Maxwell (see jordanmaxwell.com/) is a jolly sort of fellow who uses simple, folksy arguments to reach startling conclusions. He informed us that we Americans are still living under a system of government and religion that is “Druidic” in origin, and we are still being ruled by England. All of our law is based on maritime admiralty law. Because you were born from the water breaking in your mother’s womb, under maritime admiralty law this makes you a maritime “product.” We think we are American citizens, but in reality all of us “belong” (literally) to the United States, which is a foreign-owned corporation set up in 1868. When your mother signed your birth certificate, this gave ownership of you to the U.S. corporation. Our birth certificates are traded on the stock exchange, where they serve as collateral for the U.S. corporation’s loans from international bankers. (It’s odd, I have looked at many stock quotes over the years, but have yet to see my birth certificate listed.) Originally sold for $630,000, our birth certificates are now worth more than $1 million each. If you look at your name as it appears on official documents, you will find that it is always in capital letters, just like the letters on a tombstone. This indicates that you are dead, under the law: you belong to them.

There is a way to remedy this, of course, and “repatriate” yourself to become a citizen of “America” instead of a product belonging to the “United States.” You can also get your true name back, using both uppercase and lowercase letters. Among the advantages will be that you do not have to pay income taxes, and are no longer subject to the jurisdiction of the courts. Maxwell and his pals can help you to do this, but (as did not come out until the second day) it’s going to cost you. His “repatriation” package sells for a mere $995. A “mortgage cancellation” package costs $1,200, a true bargain considering the size of mortgages here in California. But not all his services are so expensive. Monetary judgments can be set aside for a mere $125.

Dubious etymology is a specialty of Maxwell’s. For example, the Christian worship of God’s “son,” who is risen, is clearly derived from Roman worship of the “sun,” which rises each morning. Son-sun, he repeats, it’s obvious. (Can his audience truly be so simplistic to believe that these words would sound the same to speakers of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew?) “Christ” is really “cristo” or “crisco,” which means “oil,” not anointed. The “Lord,” originally spelled “Lard,” is simply congealed “crisco.” Passover is when the sun “passes over” the equator which marks the beginning of spring. (According to his resume, Maxwell was an “On-screen Expert and Research Consultant” for the CBS pseudodocumentary series “Ancient Secrets of the Bible.” With “expertise” like his, no wonder that program had the real scholars howling!)

The British conspiracist David Icke (pronounced “Ike”), perhaps the best-known of all the speakers, swaggered out onto the stage, then proceeded to tell a lot of jokes. Eventually moving onto the serious matters, he explained how all hunger and poverty in the world is caused by the conspirators who keep people miserable to promote dependency on them. Multinational corporations are, of course, the cause of poverty in Africa, and not political instability, lack of education, or poor infrastructure.

The Atlantean-Lemurian civilizations were very advanced. Today’s royal bloodlines trace back to them (and indeed much further). The Merovignians, an ancient dynasty, founded Paris, and dug many tunnels and caves under it. One of them was the Pont d'Alma tunnel, where Princess Diana died (although it looks to me suspiciously like an urban traffic underpass of much more recent vintage).

Icke’s most amazing claim is that the bloodlines of Europe’s royal families, which some claim to trace back to a secret union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, are in fact derived from extraterrestrial lizards (see davidicke.com/icke/temp/reptconn.html). As proof of this, you need only look at the prevalence of gargoyles and dragons on all kinds of royal coats of arms. These people can be recognized by their ability to “shape shift” into reptilian form, then back again.

Cathy O'Brien claimed to have seen, during her days as a robotic White House sex slave, George Bush do a “lizard projection” using “harmonics.” Icke claims that the Illuminati lizards need to maintain a vast, global network of satanic cults to perform human sacrifice, sexual molestation, and cannibalism. He explains on his Web site that “to hold their human form, these entities need to drink human (mammalian) blood and access the energy it contains to maintain their DNA codes in their 'human' expression. If they don't, they manifest their reptilian codes and we would all see what they really look like. . . . From what I understand from former 'insiders,' the blood (energy) of babies and small children is the most effective for this, as are blond-haired, blue-eyed people.”

William Thomas, who spoke on “Responding to the Chemtrails Threat” (see island.net/~lbnews/), is the archetype of what a conspiracy theorist is expected to be like. Unlike many of the other speakers his mannerisms are paranoid and intense, his humor wry and unintended. (Maxwell’s delivery had been so light that I seriously wondered if his presentation was entirely farce, although the audience surely didn't think that. However, no one will ever question Thomas’ sincerity.) He lamented that his two-and-a-half-year pursuit of the chemtrails has “just about taken over my life, just about ruined my life.”

Thomas got repeated laughter from the audience when, showing slides of broad, flat jet contrails crossing the skies, he recounted the official explanations he had been given that these are just “normal airline operations.” For the benefit of those who cannot tell chemtrails from contrails, he offered the following explanation: contrails are pencil-thin lines that disappear quite soon, usually within one minute: anything else is a chemtrail, which is both sinister and bad for your health. The chemtrail assault upon us was first noted in November 1998, and has been causing sickness ever since. Thomas does not agree with those who say that it’s a deliberate attempt by the U.S. government to poison us. Instead, he suspects it is a massive, covert government operation to delay global warming by increasing the amount of sunlight that is reflected back into space. (According to a ten-year study by the French climatologist Olivier Boucher, not only do jet contrails sometimes seed the growth of cirrus clouds that can grow to enormous size, but they appear to increase global temperatures by trapping in reradiated heat. See “Air traffic may increase cirrus cloudiness,” Nature 397:30, 7 January 1999). Unfortunately, the aluminum oxide that is allegedly being sprayed has bad health consequences: the particles are causing huge colonies all kinds of bad bacteria, molds, fungi, etc. to precipitate down from the upper regions (where they presumably cavort happily unless disturbed, subsisting on nothing but plain air). Thus people are getting sick wherever chemtrails are seen. “Basically, Chicken Little was right.”

Dr. Leonard Horowitz is an anti-vaccination activist who spoke on “The Toxic Warfare Against Humanity” (see tetrahedron.org/aboutus.html). He explained how vaccines are deliberately contaminated by the Rockefeller-Windsor-Bush cabal, who not only make money selling the killer vaccines, but also off the medical treatments resulting from the diseases the vaccines create. The Rockefellers have invented the American medical monopoly, the cancer industry, and eugenics. The Rockefellers control the Alfred P. Sloan philanthropic foundation, which has created many viruses, including AIDS. The Rockefellers are trying to slowly poison us to reduce the population, making profits all the way. The recent West Nile Virus outbreak in the U.S. was a hoax, concocted to sell vaccines. Alzheimer’s patients are actually suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of Mad Cow disease. The bacteria E. coli is being genetically engineered by the CIA to create killer germs. Wherever WASP-directed capitalism goes, there also goes genocide.

Horowitz takes very seriously the “Report from Iron Mountain” with its claims of a secret government plot to perpetuate war. But this “document” is actually a hoax, as its author has confessed: see museumofhoaxes.com/iron.html. Unlike many of the other speakers, Horowitz, a “Jew for Jesus,” is very religious, his talk interspersed with prayer making him sound much like a revivalist. (Most of the other speakers were quite hostile toward organized religion, viewing it as part of the conspiracy.) Today, he warns, vaccine-induced diseases are fulfilling the dreadful prophecies from the Book of Revelations.

Surprisingly, it never was decided just who is to blame for the mess we are in. The favorite villains were the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Bilderberger network, the Illuminati, the CIA, and according to at least some of the literature being promoted, the Jews. There are also international bankers, the British royal family, Jesuits, multinational corporations, and all the speakers’ favorite villains, the Republicans, especially George Bush the elder, who is imagined to have secretly been running the country for decades. Of course, if he were really as powerful as all that, it seems he would have at least engineered his own re-election, let alone arrange a better than razor-thin electoral college victory for his son and heir.

"Alternative medicine” seems part and parcel of conspiracy claims, here and elsewhere. The speakers and the literature tables refer endlessly to conspiracies promulgated by organized medicine, and I heard a number of people complain about conditions not recognized by mainstream medicine. Conspiracy apparently cannot thrive without hypochondria-presumably those who feel healthy do not look around for someone to blame for their condition, and those who are genuinely sick realize that nobody conspired to create their illness.

As it happened, the conference facility was being shared with the Northern California Conference of Charismatic Catholics. During the breaks, I could hear some people talking about messages they received from the Lord, while others told of receiving threats from the CIA. The Charismatic conference, by the way, had a much greater attendance.

The Old Spiritualism

Today’s spiritualism traces its roots to 1848 and the schoolgirl antics of the Fox sisters, Maggie and Katie. They seemed to communicate with the ghost of a murdered peddler by means of mysterious rapping sounds. Four decades later the foxy sisters confessed how they had produced the noises by trickery (Nickell 1994), but meanwhile others discovered they too could be “mediums” (those who supposedly communicate with the dead).

The “spiritualism” craze spread across the United States, Europe, and beyond. In darkened séance rooms, lecture halls, and theaters, various “spirit” phenomena occurred. The Davenport Brothers conjured up spirit entities to play musical instruments while the two mediums were, apparently, securely tied in a special “spirit cabinet.” Unfortunately the Davenports were exposed many times, once by a local printer. He visited their spook show and volunteered as part of an audience committee to help secure the two mediums. He took that opportunity to secretly place some printer’s ink on the neck of a violin, and after the séance one of the duo had his shoulder smeared with the black substance (Nickell 1999).

In Boston, while photographer William H. Mumler was recycling some glass photographic plates, he accidentally obtained faint images of previous sitters. He soon adapted the technique to producing “spirit extras” in photographs of his clients. But Mumler’s scam was revealed when some of his ethereal entities were recognized as living Boston residents (Nickell 1994).

The great magician Harry Houdini (1874-1926) crusaded against phony spiritualists, seeking out elderly mediums who taught him the tricks of the trade. For example, while sitters touched hands around the séance table, mediums had clever ways of gaining the use of one hand. (One method was to slowly move the hands close together so that the fingers of one could be substituted for those of the other.) This allowed the production of special effects, such as causing a tin trumpet to appear to be levitating. Houdini gave public demonstrations of the deceptions. “Do Spirits Return?” asked one of his posters. “Houdini Says No-and Proves It” (Gibson 1977, 157).

Continuing the tradition, I have investigated various mediums, sometimes attending séances undercover and once obtaining police warrants against a fraudulent medium from the notorious Camp Chesterfield spiritualist center in Indiana (Nickell 1998). The camp is the subject of the book The Psychic Mafia, written by a former medium who recanted and revealed the tricks of floating trumpets (with disembodied voices), ghostly apparitions, materializing “apports,” and other fake phenomena (Keene 1976)-some of which I have also witnessed firsthand.

Mental Mediumship

The new breed of spiritualists-like Edward, James Van Praagh, Rosemary Altea, Sylvia Browne, and George Anderson-avoid the physical approach with its risks of exposure and possible criminal charges. Instead they opt for the comparatively safe “mental mediumship” which involves the purported use of psychic ability to obtain messages from the spirit realm.

This is not a new approach, since mediums have long done readings for their credulous clients. In the early days they exhibited “the classic form of trance mediumship, as practiced by shamans and oracles,” giving spoken “'spirit messages’ that ranged all the way from personal (and sometimes strikingly accurate) trivia to hours-long public trance-lectures on subjects of the deepest philosophical and religious import” (McHargue 1972).

Some mediums produced “automatic” or “trance” or “spirit” writing, which the entities supposedly dictated to the medium or produced by guiding his or her hand. Such writings could be in flowery language indeed, as in this excerpt from one spirit writing in my collection:

Oh my Brother-I am so glad to be able to come here with you and hold sweet communion for it has been a long time since I have controlled this medium but I remember how well used I had become to her magnetism[,] but we will soon get accustomed to her again and then renew the pleasant times we used to have. I want to assure you that we are all here with you this afternoon[-]Father[,] Mother[,] little Alice[-]and so glad to find it so well with you and we hope and feel dear Brother that you have seen the darkest part of life and that times are not with you now as they have been . . . .

and so on in this talkative fashion.

“Cold Reading”

By contrast, today’s spirits-whom John Edward and his fellow mediums supposedly contact-seem to have poor memories and difficulty communicating. For example, in one of his on-air séances (on Larry King Live, June 19, 1998), Edward said: “I feel like there’s a J- or G-sounding name attached to this.” He also perceived “Linda or Lindy or Leslie; who’s this L name?” Again, he got a “Maggie or Margie, or some M-G-sounding name,” and yet again heard from “either Ellen or Helen, or Eleanore-it’s like an Ellen-sounding name.” Gone is the clear-speaking eloquence of yore; the dead now seem to mumble.

The spirits also seemingly communicate to Edward et al. as if they were engaging in pantomime. As Edward said of one alleged spirit communicant, in a Dateline “He’s pointing to his head; something had to affect the mind or the head, from what he’s showing me.” No longer, apparently, can the dead speak in flowing Victorian sentences, but instead are reduced to gestures, as if playing a game of charades.

One suspects, of course, that it is not the imagined spirits who have changed but rather the approach today’s mediums have chosen to employ. It is, indeed, a shrewd technique known as “cold reading"-so named because the subject walks in “cold"; that is, the medium lacks advance information about the person (Gresham 1953). It is an artful method of gleaning information from the sitter, then feeding it back as mystical revelation.

The “psychic” can obtain clues by observing dress and body language (noting expressions that indicate when one is on or off track), asking questions (which if correct will appear as “hits” but otherwise will seem innocent queries), and inviting the subject to interpret the vague statements offered. For example, nearly anyone can respond to the mention of a common object (like a ring or watch) with a personal recollection that can seem to transform the mention into a hit. (For more on cold reading see Gresham 1953; Hyman 1977; Nickell 2000.)

It should not be surprising that Edward is skilled at cold reading, an old fortunetelling technique. His mother was a “psychic junkie” who threw fortunetelling “house parties,” one of the alleged clairvoyants advising the then-fifteen-year-old that he had “wonderful psychic abilities.” He began doing card readings for friends and family, then progressed to psychic fairs where he soon learned that names and other “validating information” sometimes applied to the dead rather than the living. Eventually he changed his billing from “psychic” to “psychic medium” (Edward 1999). The revised approach set him on the road to stardom. In addition to his TV show, he now commands hundreds of dollars for a private reading and is booked two years in advance (Mui 2001).

“Hot Reading”

Although cold reading is the main technique of the new spiritualists, they can also employ “hot” reading on occasion. Houdini (1924) exposed many of these information-gathering techniques including using planted microphones to listen in on clients as they gathered in the mediums’ anterooms-a technique Houdini himself used to impress visitors with his “telepathy” (Gibson 1976, 13). Reformed medium M. Lamar Keene’s The Psychic Mafia (1976) describes such methods as conducting advance research on clients, sharing other mediums’ files (what Keene terms “mediumistic espionage”), noting casual remarks made in conversation before a reading, and so on.

An article in Time magazine suggested John Edward may have used just such chicanery. One subject, a marketing manager named Michael O'Neill had received apparent messages from his dead grandfather but, when his segment aired, he noted that it had been improved through editing. According to Time's Leon Jaroff (2001):

Now suspicious, O'Neill recalled that while the audience was waiting to be seated, Edward’s aides were scurrying about, striking up conversations and getting people to fill out cards with their name, family tree and other facts. Once inside the auditorium, where each family was directed to preassigned seats, more than an hour passed before show time while “technical difficulties” backstage were corrected.

Edward has a policy of not responding to criticism, but the executive producer of Crossing Over insists: “No information is given to John Edward about the members of the audience with whom he talks. There is no eavesdropping on gallery conversations, and there are no 'tricks’ to feed information to John.” He labeled the Time article “a mix of erroneous observations and baseless theories” (Nordlander 2001).

Very Hot

Be that as it may, on Dateline Edward was actually caught in an attempt to pass off previously gained knowledge as spirit revelation. During the session he said of the spirits, “They're telling me to acknowledge Anthony,” and when the cameraman signaled that was his name, Edward seemed surprised, asking “That’s you? Really?” He further queried: “Had you not seen Dad before he passed? Had you either been away or been distanced?” Later, playing the taped segment for me, Dateline reporter John Hockenberry challenged me with Edward’s apparent hit: “He got Anthony. That’s pretty good.” I agreed but added, “We've seen mediums who mill about before sessions and greet people and chat with them and pick up things.”

Indeed, it turned out that that is just what Edward had done. Hours before the group reading, Tony had been the cameraman on another Edward shoot (recording him at his hobby, ballroom dancing). Significantly, the two men had chatted and Edward had obtained useful bits of information that he afterward pretended had come from the spirits. In a follow-up interview Hockenberry revealed the fact and grilled an evasive Edward:

HOCKENBERRY: So were you aware that his dad had died before you did his reading?

Mr. EDWARD: I think he-I think earlier in the-in the day, he had said something.

HOCKENBERRY: It makes me feel like, you know, that that’s fairly significant. I mean, you knew that he had a dead relative and you knew it was the dad.

Mr. EDWARD: OK.

HOCKENBERRY: So that’s not some energy coming through, that’s something you knew going in. You knew his name was Tony and you knew that his dad had died and you knew that he was in the room, right? That gets you . . .

Mr. EDWARD: That’s a whole lot of thinking you got me doing, then. Like I said, I react to what’s coming through, what I see, hear and feel. I interpret what I'm seeing hearing and feeling, and I define it. He raised his hand, it made sense for him. Great.

HOCKENBERRY: But a cynic would look at that and go, 'Hey,' you know, 'He knows it’s the cameraman, he knows it’s DATELINE. You know, wouldn't that be impressive if he can get the cameraman to cry?'

Mr. EDWARD: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Not at all.

But try to weasel out of it as he might, Edward had obviously been caught cheating: pretending that information he had gleaned earlier had just been revealed by spirits and feigning surprise that it applied to Tony the cameraman. (And that occurred long before Time had suggested that an Inside Edition program-February 27, 2001-was probably “the first nationally televised show to take a look at the Edward phenomenon.” That honor instead goes to Dateline NBC.)

In his new book Crossing Over, Edward tries to minimize the Dateline exposé, and in so doing breaks his own rule of not responding to criticism. He rebukes Hockenberry for “his big Gotcha! moment,” adding:

Hockenberry came down on the side of the professional skeptic they used as my foil. He was identified as Joe Nickell, a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which likes to simplify things and call itself CSICOP. He did the usual sound bites: that modern mediums are fast-talkers on fishing expeditions making money on people’s grief-"the same old dogs with new tricks,” in Hockenberry’s words.

Edward claims to ignore any advance information that he may get from those he reads, but concedes, “it’s futile to say this to a tough skeptic” (Edward 2001, 242-243).

Edward may have benefitted from actual information on another occasion, while undergoing a “scientific” test of his alleged powers (Schwartz et al. 2001). In video clips shown on Dateline, Edward was reading subjects-who were brought into the hotel room where he sat with his back to the door-when he impressed his tester with an atypical revelation. Edward stated he was “being shown the movie Pretty in Pink” and asked if there was “a pink connection.” Then he queried, “Are you, like, wearing all pink?” The unidentified man acknowledged that he was. Yet Edward had thought the subject was a woman, and I suspect that erroneous guess was because of the color of his attire; I further suspect Edward knew it was pink, that as the man entered the room Edward glimpsed a flash of the color as it was reflected off some shiny surface, such as the glass of a picture frame, the lens of the video camera, etc. I challenge Edward to demonstrate his reputed color-divining ability under suitably controlled conditions that I will set up.

Inflating “Hits”

In addition to shrewd cold reading and out-and-out cheating, “psychics” and “mediums” can also boost their apparent accuracy in other ways. They get something of a free ride from the tendency of credulous folk to count the apparent hits and ignore the misses. In the case of Edward, my analysis of 125 statements or pseudostatements (i.e., questions) he made on a Larry King Live program (June 19, 1998) showed that he was incorrect about as often as he was right and that his hits were mostly weak ones. (For example he mentioned “an older female” with “an M-sounding name,” either an aunt or grandmother, he stated, and the caller supplied “Mavis” without identifying the relationship; see Nickell 1998.)

Another session-for an episode of Crossing Over attended by a reporter for The New York Times Magazine, Chris Ballard (2001)-had Edward “hitting well below 50 percent for the day.” Indeed, he twice spent “upward of 20 minutes stuck on one person, shooting blanks but not accepting the negative responses.” This is a common technique: persisting in an attempt to redeem error, cajoling or even browbeating a sitter (as Sylvia Browne often does), or at least making the incorrect responses seem the person’s fault. “Do not not honor him!” Edward exclaimed at one point, then (according to Ballard) “staring down the bewildered man.”

When the taped episode actually aired, the two lengthy failed readings had been edited out, along with second-rate offerings. What remained were two of the best readings of the show (Ballard 2001). This seems to confirm the allegation in the Time article that episodes were edited to make Edward seem more accurate, even reportedly splicing in clips of one sitter nodding yes “after statements with which he remembers disagreeing” (Jaroff 2001).

Edited or not, sessions involving a group offer increased chances for success. By tossing out a statement and indicating a section of the audience rather than an individual, the performing “medium” makes it many times more likely that someone will “acknowledge” it as a “hit.” Sometimes multiple audience members will acknowledge an offering, whereupon the performer typically narrows the choice down to a single person and builds on the success. Edward uses just such a technique (Ballard 2001).

Still another ploy used by Edward and his fellow “psychic mediums” is to suggest that people who cannot acknowledge a hit may find a connection later. “Write this down,” an insistent Edward sometimes says, or in some other way suggests the person study the apparent miss. He may become even more insistent, the positive reinforcement diverting attention from the failure and giving the person an opportunity to find some adaptable meaning later (Nickell 1998).

Debunking Versus Investigation

Some skeptics believe the way to counter Edward and his ilk is to reproduce his effect, to demonstrate the cold-reading technique to radio and TV audiences. Of course that approach is unconvincing unless one actually poses as a medium and then-after seemingly making contact with subjects’ dead loved ones-reveals the deception. Although audiences typically fall for the trick (witness Inside Edition’s use of it), I deliberately avoid this approach for a variety of reasons, largely because of ethical concerns. I rather agree with Houdini (1924, xi) who had done spiritualistic stunts during his early career:

At the time I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed. To me it was a lark. I was a mystifier and as such my ambition was being gratified and my love for a mild sensation satisfied. After delving deep I realized the seriousness of it all. As I advanced to riper years of experience I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed, and when I personally became afflicted with similar grief I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time realized that it bordered on crime.

Of course tricking people in order to educate them is not the same as deceiving them for crass personal gain, but to toy with their deepest emotions-however briefly and well intentioned-is to cross a line I prefer not to do. Besides, I believe it can be very counterproductive. It may not be the alleged medium but rather the debunker himself who is perceived as dishonest, and he may come across as arrogant, cynical, and manipulative-not heroic as he imagines.

As well, an apparent reproduction of an effect does not necessarily mean the cause was the same. (For example, I have seen several skeptical demonstrations of “weeping” icons that employed trickery more sophisticated than that used for “real” crying effigies.) Far better, I am convinced, is showing evidence of the actual methods employed, as I did in collaboration with Dateline NBC.

Although John Edward was among five “highly skilled mediums” who allegedly fared well on tests of their ability (Schwartz et al. 2001)-experiments critiqued elsewhere in this issue (Wiseman and O'Keeffe, see page 26)-he did not claim validation on Larry King Live. When King (2001) asked Edward if he thought there would ever be proof of spirit contact, Edward responded by suggesting proof was unattainable, that only belief matters: “. . . I think that to prove it is a personal thing. It is like saying, prove God. If you have a belief system and you have faith, then there is nothing really more than that.” But this is an attempt to insulate a position and to evade or shift the burden of proof, which is always on the claimant. As Houdini (1924, 270) emphatically stated, “It is not for us to prove the mediums are dishonest, it is for them to prove that they are honest.” In my opinion John Edward has already failed that test.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the assistance of Tom Flynn who helped me analyze the video clips mentioned in the text and refine the hypothesis that Edward may have glimpsed a reflection. I am also grateful to Tim Binga, Barry Karr, Kevin Christopher, Ben Radford, and Ranjit Sandhu for other assistance.

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