by James Randi
Marrs, Texe
See Illuminati.
Materializations
In spiritualism, the production of any substance or item, particularly of a human figure or part of one, at a séance. The materialization can be an apport or can use ectoplasm in its formation. Materializations are often accompanied by strange (pleasant or unpleasant) odors and/or sounds. This is congruent, to the skeptical mind, with the possibility that the phenomena may be accomplished by trickery. And trickery has very often been the solution to the puzzle. It's true!
Mather, Cotton
(1663-1728) A minister of Boston who was notorious for his merciless persecution of accused witches in Salem, New England. He presided at the trials and executions.
Cotton Mather, the clergyman/zealot who sent witches to their deaths in Salem.
See also Increase Mather and Salem witch trials.
Mather, Increase
(1638-1723) Father of Cotton Mather, and no more pleasant nor intelligent than his son.
See also Salem witch trials.
Medicine Man
See shaman.
Medium
When used by the spiritualists in the sense of agent, instrument, or vehicle, this word refers to the person who is said to be able to bridge the gap between the living and the dead or to produce voices, artifacts (apports), writing, or other evidence of survival-after-death.
See also séance.
Mentalist
A person who performs a theatrical act which appears to use psychic forces but is actually done by ordinary conjuring means. The psychic often uses these methods, but is differentiated from the mentalist in that he or she claims that they are genuine powers.
See also Joseph Dunninger and Kreskin.
Meridians
In acupuncture and in qi gong, there are twelve major meridians in the body, mythical channels through which flows the qi, a gas/fluid/plasma/essence which is the basis for traditional Chinese medicine. Because of their spiritual nature, the meridians cannot be found by pathological examination of the body, nor are they visible or discoverable by any other means.
See also parsimony.
Merlin
A mythical magician who is said to have managed the birth of Britain's King Arthur and to have practically ruled early England through his powers and his influence on Arthur. Said by some to have been the son of Satan.
In the traditional story, Merlin does not die, but is spirited away to the Isle of Avillion, wherever that may be.
Mesmer, Dr. Franz Anton
(1734-1815) This Viennese medical doctor, who had written his dissertation on the effects of the planets on the health of the human body, after seeing a healing demonstration by a priest named Hell, formed the belief that a magnet could induce healing powers in those who held them. He displayed the procedure, which he called animal magnetism, during popular sessions that he held for French society, beginning in 1778. The phenomenon soon was dubbed Mesmerism.
Anton Mesmer, the man who started all the fuss about “hypnotism” and “trances.”
His soirées were theatrical rather than therapeutic, and the crème of French aristocracy elbowed one another aside for the privilege of seeing customers sitting around a huge vat of acid (called a baquet), holding on to iron devices immersed in the solution, while the master, dressed in a trailing lilac-colored robe of gold-flowered silk, gestured with his ivory wand at entranced socialites who gurgled, sighed, and moaned when they weren't screaming in ecstasy at their latest expensive diversion.
An investigation of Mesmer in 1784 by the French Academy of Sciences, in the company of U.S. ambassador Benjamin Franklin, brought the conclusion that Mesmer was merely using suggestion and that the clients were the usual silly segment of the populace who endorse and support such fads.
Meta-Analysis
A system of statistically analyzing very large numbers of already-published experiments each of which may not, in itself, be significant, and extracting from them information to be looked at with a view to obtaining validation of the sought-after effect. Only if an overall application of faulty procedures has been applied, or experimental results have been generally misreported, could properly applied meta-analytic procedures falsely indicate positive results. This procedure is gaining popularity among parapsychologists, who seem to always have miserable luck with simple, directly applied scientific methods and analysis of results.
Metoposcopy
See divination.
Micro-PK
(micro-psychokinesis) A term developed by the parapsychologists to describe very tiny effects not necessarily observable to the eye when, for example, spoons are bent by ostensibly psychic means and scanning-electron microscopes are needed to notice any change. Also the term describes seeming psychic influences on electronic random-number generators and other such sensitive equipment that may require very minute inputs of energy to affect them.
Parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt performed such experiments at the Mind Science Foundation years ago, and the results were reported as phenomenal. However, for some reason, they were never followed up on and the excitement died down.
Millerites
First on April 3 and July 7, 1843, and then again on March 21 and October 22, 1844, preacher William Miller (1782-1849) told his followers to expect the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The event did not occur. His group, the Millerites, broke up shortly after that and the basic philosophy was adopted by Ellen G. White (1827-1915), who founded the Seventh-Day Adventists. Another spin-off religion was the Jehovah's Witnesses.
White had been experiencing prophetic/divine dreams since age fifteen, so that she naturally felt she had to start a religion. Wisely, the Adventists did not set a date for the Second Coming, thus avoiding a certain inescapable and troublesome problem of reconciling fact with expectation. They only said “Soon.” They are still saying “Soon.”
In her book, pretentiously titled Health: Or, How to Live, White declared herself against: corsets, drinking, meat, smoking, spicy food, sex (in particular, masturbation), wigs, and just about everything else except air and small rocks. She was against any sort of medication and preached against seeing a physician for any medical problems.
However, the present Seventh-Day Adventist church operates seventy-three hospitals, plus hundreds of clinics and fifty-four hundred colleges and secondary and elementary schools in the United States. Its School of Medicine at Loma Linda, California, a prestigious facility famous for radical medical innovations, is a strange contradiction for a religious movement that began as vehemently anti-doctor and anti-medication.
Mirabilis, Dr.
See Bacon, Roger.
Mirandola, Count Giovanni Pico da
(1463-1494) An Italian philosopher, astrologer, and mystic who specialized in studies of the kabala. He was a brilliant scholar from an early age, and ran afoul of the church very soon, being accused of heresy. His powerful family connections saved him. Despite his being mired in the superstitions of his day, he nonetheless contributed some original and bold ideas in his writings.
Mitchell, Edgar D.
(1930- ) Dr. Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the Moon, as part of the Apollo XIV project, in 1971. After he retired from the space program in 1972, he founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences, devoted to the study of parapsychology, and particularly the relationship of humans to purported psi forces.
While engaged in his visit to the Moon, Mitchell performed an unauthorized experiment in ESP. He used a self-made deck of the 25 Zener cards and attempted to transmit these images to his recipients on Earth at predetermined times. The results of his experiment were reported in an enthusiastic New York Times article as “far exceeding anything expected.” The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research says, however, that
the results of the test were ambiguous, success or failure rating depending upon the evaluation techniques used.
Neither of these versions of the Mitchell experiment are correct, for t
he following reasons. There were actually four intended recipients on Earth; only the results of one were reported as exciting. The predetermined times for mental transmission were changed, but the recipients were not informed, so that they may have been “receiving” before or after the images were being “sent”; one recipient received more images than were sent. After careful mathematical analysis with the assistance of parapsychologist Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, the Mitchell results were declared to be three-thousand-to-one against pure chance. They were, but negatively; the results were so negative that the chances of missing to that degree were three-thousand-to-one.
Dr. Mitchell believes in plant perception — that plants can feel and understand the thoughts of humans — as described by Cleve Backster, though the two gentlemen are almost alone in that belief. Mitchell also was involved in testing the claims of Uri Geller and believes that Mr. Geller has genuine psychic powers.
Moons of Mars
British satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), in his four-volume work Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, better known now as Gulliver's Travels, described a mythical advanced kingdom where the astronomers had discovered that the planet Mars had two small moons in orbit very close to the surface. That fact was unknown — and unknowable — at that time (1726) and was not determined until 151 years later in 1877 when astronomer Asaph Hall, at the U.S. Naval Observatory, observed the planet and its moons during a favorable opposition. This provided a mystery, which was amplified by modern UFO fans into a theory that Swift had been visited by extraterrestrials who had informed him of this fact.
The eminent Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1540-1601) had supported a numerological argument that, since Mercury and Venus (the planets nearest to the Sun) had no moons, the Earth had one, and Jupiter (the second planet out from the Earth) had four (known) moons, that in order to preserve the harmony of the universe, Mars (between Earth and Jupiter) must have two satellites (see table following). Since these moons had not been detected, Tycho reasoned sensibly that they must be very small and close to the planet. This satellite-progression idea was accepted in Swift's time, and it appears that he reflected this fact and incorporated it into his writings.
Moses, Rev. William Stainton
(1839-1892) A spirit medium who first began operating as such at the age of thirty-three, after a distinguished career as a clergyman. Moses was inspired by the success of Daniel Dunglas Home, who he saw performing.
He became famous in England for his production of apports of every sort of object, including perfumes and scented oils which often ran down his face. He claimed that his control, or spirit guide, was named Imperator. He also did automatic writing and produced “spirit lights” as part of his performance.
He was one of the founders of the British National Association of Spiritualism, and later of the Society for Psychical Research.
Mu
In the 1920s, a mystic named James Churchward invented an attractive scenario involving a lost Pacific continent named Mu, which he said was first written about by the ancient Maya. Churchward based his stories of Mu on an imaginary translation of Mayan documents by Abbé Basseur, another mystic of the previous century. In actuality, these documents have never been translated.
A series of books on Mu appeared, but when the evidence Churchward had offered, artifacts and documents from Mu, proved spurious, interest waned. Mu, the Atlantis of the Pacific, sank out of sight and out of mind. However the books are still published. No facts are allowed to interfere with profit.
Murphy, Bridey
(1798-1864)? The fictitious character created by Mrs. (Hugh) Virginia Tighe of Denver, Colorado, at the suggestion of investment broker/amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein in 1952. In trance, Mrs. Tighe relived a colorful nineteenth-century life, speaking in a heavy brogue, using typically quaint Irish expressions (some, unfortunately for the theory, not in use in the nineteenth century), and giving details of her former life in Cork. It was all believed to be a sterling case of either reincarnation or possession. The possibility of imagination never came up.
Then, investigations by the Denver Post and the Chicago American, later followed up by writer Melvin Harris, showed that as a child Mrs. Tighe had lived across the street from an Irishwoman whose maiden name was Bridie [sic] Murphy. This woman had entertained Virginia with tales of her early life in Ireland. Also, as a teenager, Virginia had been featured in school theatricals playing Irish parts and using an Irish brogue. The kindest interpretation that one can put on this matter is that Mrs. Tighe had undergone classic cryptomnesia.
This highly publicized playlet resulted in a hit popular song by Nat King Cole, a motion picture, several best-selling books, and an LP recording of the trance session.
Muscle Reading
The art, highly developed by the conjurors, by which an operator can perform apparent ESP demonstrations by “reading” the involuntary movements and reactions of a spectator. Commonly, the demonstration involves locating a hidden object or performing a simple task, the nature of which is unknown to the operator. The spectator, who must know the withheld information, is asked to concentrate on making the demonstration a success.
In most cases, the operator is in contact with the spectator, either by grasping his wrist, holding a handkerchief also held by the spectator, or having the spectator hold him by the arm. This is known as “contact” muscle reading.
“Noncontact” muscle reading is more difficult. It consists of having the spectator follow the performer about and reading his hesitation patterns. Much experience is required for either system, and the results are very startling. The art is often referred to as “Hellströmism,” after one Alex Hellström (1893-1933), who made it popular early in the twentieth century. Another prominent performer was the Hungarian Franz Polgar, and today Russia's Lev Schneider is the leading artist in the field.
Yet another name for the art is “Cumberlandism,” after the English performer Stuart Cumberland.X
N
Native Healer
In every culture, a shaman or witch doctor figure emerges who is charged with the healing duties. He or she adopts or develops an acceptable plot to explain illnesses and malfunctions of the body and performs whatever cures or alleviations of symptoms are possible.
Patients usually expect to see something actually removed from their bodies as symbolic of the removal of the cause of their problem. With the extraction of teeth, that requirement is obviously easily met, and in cases where bullets or other missiles, slivers, or thorns are extracted, both the practical and the symbolic needs are also satisfied. In some situations, the healer may secretly introduce a small stone or twig onto the site of the operation, and since this would satisfy the need for an actual object, it can bring about more contentment from the patient, since something is produced that is identifiable as a cause of the discomfort. This is a bit of “show business” in a serious effort to bring relief to patients.
This process is known in certain African societies as “pulling the thorn.” Here, it involves a surreptitious introduction on the site of the operation of a bit of thorn or sharp object, usually via the healer's mouth, since African procedures involve sucking the wound to remove the infection. This act, though obviously potentially dangerous to both healer and patient from the infection point of view, might actually be very effective. The object is then spat out and identified as the source of the evil. The satisfaction thus evoked enhances the reputation of the healer, who is usually performing minor medicine of a very useful sort for people who have little if any other resource.
See also psychic surgery and shaman.
Necromancy
From the Greek for “corpse” and “divination,” the term refers to methods of obtaining information from the dead, without permission from the dead. It is a practice frowned upon by the most ethical sorcerers.
Necronomicon
Several editions of this grimoire have appeared. Said to have first been published in about A.D. 730 i
n Arabic as Al Azif by Abdul Alhazred, an English translation is attributed to John Dee, though it turns out to be the invention of fantasist H. P. Lovecraft, author of supernatural and horror tales. It relates powerful formulas for calling up dangerous demigods and demons who are dedicated to destroying mankind.
Nelson, Robert
