An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
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The psychometrists claim that by “reading” these vibrations, they can obtain information, and they also use it for diagnosing illness, with the same degree of success.
Psychotronics
A “science” that includes dowsing, radionics, and the construction and, as of 1974, the use of various “machines” that are said to focus and concentrate psychic powers. This is currently a very popular fad in Russia, though scientists there insist that the devices cannot be tested because of their esoteric nature. For the same reason, they also cannot be demonstrated. All rests on faith.
See also Ruth Drown.
Puharich, Dr. Andrija
(Henry K. Puharich, 1918- ) A medical doctor who has never practiced except as an intern, Puharich served the U.S. Army in several functions.
In 1959, he wrote The Sacred Mushroom, Key to the Door of Eternity, about his adventures with peyote and other hallucinogenic substances. In Hawaii, he was appointed to be a “grand kahuna,” or mystical chief. Then, in the early 1970s, he met Uri Geller, and the result was another book, Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller. A very strange book relating highly unlikely events (dematerializations, disembodied voices, and teleportations), it was endorsed enthusiastically by its subject, who declared that “every word [of the book] is true!”
In Brazil, Puharich investigated the work of the psychic surgeon named Arigó and wrote a naive book on the subject, Arigó, Surgeon of the Rusty Knife.
Pyramid Inch
A unit of measurement proposed by Charles Piazzi Smyth, a Scottish astronomer who was obsessed with the Great Pyramid of Giza, which see. The original outside “casing” layer of stones that had covered the Great Pyramid had been carted away over the ages, so that the true dimensions were unknown until investigators began finding a few of the stones buried at the foot of the structure. Smyth measured the first casing stone that was uncovered, divided the width by twenty-five (the reason for choosing 25 was never given), and obtained what he called the basic unit used in the pyramid's construction, the pyramid inch. This was just slightly greater than the English inch.
Though it was soon found that other casing stones measured different widths, Smyth's definition was retained by believers in the myth, and it is still used today by those who accept that the Great Pyramid is a tool of prophecy.
Pyramid Power
A book by author Pat Flanagan, Pyramid Power, citing unknown and untraceable sources, claimed that wonderful forces were at work in the Great Pyramid of Giza, forces that could be tapped by those who would purchase from him miniature replicas of the monument.
In 1973, U.K. author Lyall Watson told of placing a dead cat inside a model of the Great Pyramid and thus preserving it. He later endorsed a process discovered by a Czech engineer named Drbal whereby it was claimed that razor blades placed in a small pyramid remained sharp despite use.
The craze for pyramid devices lasted through the seventies, though simple tests of the claims easily showed them to be spurious.
Pythagoras
(circa 580-500 B.C.) A prominent Greek philosopher/mathematician who developed intricate mystical theories involving the basic qualities of numbers. He taught that “number is all.”
Pythagoras contributed greatly to an understanding of musical harmonies and their mathematical sources, and this gave rise to his ideas of corresponding cosmic harmonies. “Harmony of the Spheres” is the term used to designate that notion. Those views, though they were expressed mystically by the philosopher, are basically sound. Unfortunately but understandably, the valuable elementary truths were smothered in abstract attributions such as good and evil, male and female, positive and negative.
The school he left behind him continued to generate ideas and formulations that have often been attributed directly to him. The famous Pythagorean theorem — that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal in area to the sum of the squares on the other two sides — is probably a discovery made well after his death, but using the methods he had advocated.
Q
Qabala
See kabala.
Qi
(pronounced chee; the Japanese equivalent is “ki”) The poorly defined substance, the “life force” believed by the ancient Chinese — and many new agers — to circulate in the body through the meridians. Balancing the yin and yang, the two different forms of qi — feminine and masculine — is a process said to bring about harmony of body and spirit. There are thirty-two different kinds of qi, all essential to all forms of life.
Since belief in this substance is very widespread in Asia, it has become a firm article of cultural acceptance, and there is great reluctance there to examine the matter. Fortunately, the Chinese have accepted other, more Occidental forms of medical treatment and have incorporated those into their system.
See also acupuncture.
Qi Gong
(pronounced chee-gung) One claim made by practitioners of this art is “remote diagnosis,” in which the diagnoser needs only the name of the patient in order to correctly state what ailments are afflicting that person. Since patients seldom, if ever, report results, the practitioner has no means for assessing his or her success. This claim, and the many other aspects of qi gong, have been tested many, many times and have failed eloquently. For a fuller discussion of qi gong, see acupuncture.
Quack
An ignorant person who pretends to have knowledge of medicine and wondrous remedies. The word is short for quacksalver, meaning, one who “quacks” (makes a loud noise) about a remedy (a salve).
Though a multitude of quacks have been exposed and convicted for their activities, the support of their dupes is eternal. An early American scientist/philosopher offered a more specific comment on the breed.
Ben Franklin, who was aware of that strange quirk of human nature that elects the victim as chief supporter of the trickster.
Ben Franklin said:
There are no greater liars in the world than quacks — except for their patients.
One prominent British quack of the 1830s who went by the title of St. John Long, developed a salve that he claimed indicated disease by raising a rash on any afflicted body part to which he applied it. The means of using this salve need hardly be puzzled over for long. This fraud was convicted of manslaughter and was fined for causing the death of one patient, then the following year he was brought up on another such charge and acquitted. This time he was driven in triumph from the courthouse in a nobleman's carriage and cheered by the crowds.
At this writing, quackery is becoming more and more popular worldwide, particularly in the United States, and threatens to supersede much of modern medicine. Political and legal considerations have prevented open discussion or even the questioning of procedures that are clearly without merit. The highly litigious nature of American society has effectively provided the quacks with protection, and the public suffers because it cannot afford to defend itself, and politicians fear censure.
R
Radionics
See Drown, Ruth.
Rampa, Tuesday Lobsang
(Cyril Henry Hoskin, 1911-1981, also Dr. Carl Kuon Suo) A Surrey plumber's assistant who in 1956 published a romantic tale, The Third Eye, dealing with a Tibetan youth from Lhasa who had a hole poked in his forehead — an operation to open the “third eye” — and thereby became gifted with all manner of mystic powers, encounters with the Abominable Snowman, and levitation. Hoskin said that he was the chosen youth.
The book was a best-seller in twelve countries and was followed by The Cave of the Ancients. When it developed that the author spoke not a word of Tibetan, had not ever owned a passport, and certainly had not been a hero of the Chinese air force battling the Japanese — as he'd claimed — the inventive Hoskin came out with two more books, Doctor from Lhasa and The Rampa Story, which explained all by saying that the real Rampa had occupied the body of the otherwise ordinary plumber's assistant. Believers gladly accepted this illumination of what had appeared to be
a refutation of the Rampa history.
Hoskin produced several more books, including My Visit to Venus, in which he described a trip in a flying saucer in the company of two Venusians named Tall One and Broad One.
Having no adequate knowledge of science, Hoskin produced some classic blunders. In his 1955 book Flying Saucer from Mars, he explained that UFOs do not land on Earth because they are made of antimatter, which upon contact with regular, terrestrial matter would produce a spectacular explosion resulting in the mutual annihilation of both the substances involved. He failed to recognize that air itself would bring that about.
Hoskins's books are of course still very popular and widely sold.
Ramtha
See Knight, J. Z..
Rapping
A phenomenon first widely exhibited in 1848 by the Fox sisters in which raps are made to come from the floor, a table, or a wall. There are those who believe these are signals originating with spirits. Such tintinnabulation is very popular at séances, and incidentally also very easy to accomplish by trickery, if the real thing is not available at the moment.
There are various mechanisms available for this purpose, but the basic trick can be accomplished by a person who has the ability to crack the toe joints. While the person is standing, this gives rise to a distinct thump on the floor. In the time of the Fox sisters, one Reverend Eli Noyes discovered and demonstrated seventeen different methods of producing raps without mechanisms. His raps were indistinguishable from “real” spirit communications.
The stunt is not original with the Fox sisters. A 1528 book published in Paris described the spirit of Sister Alis de Tellieux, who had lived in a monastery where she swiped some relics and was thus doomed to walk around the place as a ghost. The book describes what followed:
A number of years afterwards, when the monastery was occupied by other and better nuns, one of their number, a girl of about eighteen years, was aroused from her sleep by the apparition of Sister Alis. For some time afterwards the spirit haunted her wherever she went, continually rapping on the ground where she stood.
It appears that this neat trick has a long history.
Rasputin
(né Grigory Yefimovich Novykh, 1872?-1916) A mystic popularly referred to as the “mad monk” who was very popular at the court of Nicholas II of Russia because of his attempts to heal the Czar's son, a hemophiliac.
Rasputin was also known as a notorious lecher; he espoused a religious philosophy that dictated sexual exhaustion as a means of liberation and revelation. His adopted name, Rasputin, means “debauched one.”
He became very influential at the Russian court, particularly with the Empress Alexandra. He appointed ministers and used large quantities of treasury money for his projects. There were many attempts to assassinate him, only one achieving any success. In December 1916 at St. Petersburg, a determined group of nobles led by Vladimir Pureskivich poisoned him, clubbed and shot him, and finally drowned him. His death preceded by a few weeks the takeover of the empire by the revolutionaries and the murder of the Czar and his family. Doubtless the failure of the Czar to anticipate the revolution was due to his loss of the services of his mystic.
Reflexology
The art of diagnosing ailments by examination of the sole of the foot, and of treating the patient by manipulation of parts of the foot that are said to relate to corresponding body parts and areas. Similarly to such notions as palmistry, ear acupuncture, and iridology, the foot in reflexology is believed to represent a homunculus: The great toe is the head, the next toe is the right arm, and so on.
A diagram of the soles of the feet, indicating specific areas (“reflex points” ) related to organs and parts of the body, according to the theory. Relief is achieved, say the practitioners, by pressing these points to “stimulate blocked nerve endings.” This is nonsensical jargon.
Reflexology could be regarded as simple sympathetic magic except for one saving factor: treatment is effected by massaging the foot, and that usually feels rather good. As a medical tool for treating specific ailments not connected with the pedal extremities, however, it is useless.
Reich, Wilhelm
See orgone.
Reincarnation
The idea that the spirit of a person leaves the body at death and is reborn into another. It is claimed, in some versions, that the spirit must wait a certain period before entering the next body.
In some Indian religions, the spirit passes either to a higher or lower form of life, depending on the righteousness of the life just left. This obviously encourages righteousness.
The idea is a very important part of the Theosophical religion, which teaches that there are a series of reincarnations necessary for the spirit to attain The Path of Perfection.
See also karma.
Relics
(religious) Though all the Protestant denominations have historically condemned the veneration of holy objects/relics and their use in healing, the Catholic church — at one time — preferred to depend entirely upon the magical qualities attributed to the possessions or actual physical parts of various saints and biblical characters for healing. The Vatican not only permitted but encouraged this practice, which entered history in the third century.
Catholic churches and private collections still overflow with hundreds of thousands of relics. Included are pieces of the True Cross (enough to build a few log cabins), hundreds of thorns from the mock crown placed upon Christ, bones of the children slain by King Herod, the toenails and bones of Saint Peter, the bones of the Three Wise Kings and of Saint Stephen (as well as his complete corpse, including another complete skeleton!), jars of the Virgin Mary's milk, the bones and several entire heads and pieces thereof that were allegedly once atop John the Baptist, sixteen foreskins of Christ, Mary Magdalene's entire skeleton (with two right feet), scraps of bread and fish left over from feeding the five thousand, a crust of bread from the Last Supper, and a hair from Christ's beard — not to mention a few shrouds, including the one at Turin, Italy.
A church just outside Moscow holds the fourteenth-century bones, it is said, of three Russian saints: Bishop John, Saint Euphemia and Saint Euphrosinia. Alas, examination shows that Saint Euphemia has been assembled from three different skeletons (one of them a child's) and has far too many ribs and several other extra bones. And all of these three assemblages are the remains of Mongols; the three saints were not Mongols. This may be a miracle.
One avid German collector claimed to have more than 17,000 of these objects, which inspired Pope Leo X to calculate that the man had saved himself exactly 694,779,550½ days in purgatory by such pious devotion to his hobby. But this man's efforts were dwarfed by the collection at the Schlosskirche at Halle, Germany, which boasted 21,483 relics in its vaults.
See also Januarius, Saint.
Remote Viewing
This phenomenon first became a celebrated subject after parapsychologists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ published a scientific paper which reported on experiments in which a remote location had been chosen, an experimenter visited there, and a subject recorded his or her psychic impressions of the spot. Their results seemed to prove that a “remote sensing” faculty did exist.
Subsequently, properly controlled tests were done by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence that had been present in the tests. These new tests produced negative results. The data of Puthoff and Targ were reexamined by the other researchers, and it was found that their students were able to solve the locations without use of any psychic powers, using only the clues that had inadvertently been included in the Puthoff and Targ transcripts.
Rhabdomancy
Also known as “water-witching,” “divining,” and dowsing, which see. More strictly speaking, rhabdomancy is an art of throwing sticks, rods, or arrows on the ground to interpret the plans of nature. It has a parallel in “throwing the wands” in the process of I Ching fortune-telling.
Rhine, Dr. Joseph Banks