The third cardinal rule of debunking, and maybe the most important, is “Ask yourself, what do they get out of it?” or, as the Bible (source of many scams) puts it, “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
And if the prices on this stuff were any indication, Ariaura was getting a hell of a lot out of it. The 8×10 glossies were $28.99, or $35 with Ariaura’s signature. “And if you want it signed by Isus,” the blond guy behind the table said, “it’s a hundred. He’s not always willing to sign.”
I could see why. His signature (done in Magic Marker) was a string of complicated symbols that looked like a cross between Elvish runes and Egyptian hieroglyphics, whereas Ariaura’s was a script A followed by a formless scrawl.
Videotapes of her previous seminars—Volumes 1–20—cost a cool sixty apiece, and Ariaura’s “sacred amulet” (which looked like something you’d buy on the Home Shopping Network) cost nine hundred and fifty (box extra). People were snapping them up like hotcakes, along with Celtic pentacles, meditation necklaces, dreamcatcher earrings, worry beads, and toe rings with your zodiac sign on them.
Kildy bought one of the outrageously priced stills (no signature) and three of the videos, cooing, “I just loved her last seminar,” gave the guy selling them her autograph, and we went into the auditorium.
It was hung with rose, lilac, and silver chiffon floor-length banners and a state-of-the-art lighting system. Stars and planets rotated overhead, and comets occasionally whizzed by. The stage end of the auditorium was hung with gold Mylar, and in the center of the stage was a black pyramid-backed throne. Apparently Ariaura did not intend to sit on the floor like the rest of us.
At the door, ushers clad in mostly unbuttoned lilac silk shirts and tight pants took our tickets. They all looked like Tom Cruise, which would be par for the course even if this weren’t Hollywood.
Sex has been a mainstay of the psychic business since Victorian days. Half the appeal of early table-rapping had been the filmy-draperies-and-nothing-else-clad female “spirits” who drifted tantalizingly among the male séance goers, fogging up their spectacles and preventing them from thinking clearly. Sir William Crookes, the famous British chemist, had been so besotted by an obviously fake medium’s sexy daughter that he’d staked his scientific reputation on the medium’s dubious authenticity, and nowadays it’s no accident that most channelers are male and given to chest-baring Rudolph Valentino–like robes. Or, if they’re female, have buff, handsome ushers to distract the women in the audience. If you’re drooling over them, you’re not likely to spot the wires and chicken guts or realize what they’re saying is nonsense. It’s the oldest trick in the book.
One of the ushers gave Kildy a Tom Cruise smile and led her to the end of a cross-legged row on the very hard-looking floor. I was glad Kildy had brought the pillows.
I plopped mine down next to hers and sat down on it. “This had better be good,” I said.
“Oh, it will be,” said a fiftyish redhead wearing the sacred amulet and a diamond as big as my fist. “I’ve seen Ariaura, and she’s wonderful.” She reached into one of the three lilac shopping bags she’d stuck between us and pulled out a lavender needlepoint pillow that said, “Believe and It Will Happen.”
I wondered if that applied to her believing her pillow was large enough to sit on, because it was about the same size as the rock on her finger, but as soon as they’d finished organizing the rows, the ushers came around bearing stacks of plastic-covered cushions (the kind rented at football games, only lilac) for ten bucks apiece.
The woman next to me took three, and I counted ten other people in our row, and eleven in the row ahead of us, shelling out for them. Eighty rows times ten, to be conservative. A cool eight thousand bucks, just to sit down, and who knows how much profit in all those lilac shopping bags. “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
I looked around. I couldn’t see any signs of shills or a wireless setup, but unlike psychics and mediums, channelers don’t need them. They give out general advice, couched in New Age terms.
“Isus is absolutely astonishing,” my neighbor confided. “He’s so wise! Much better than Romtha. He’s responsible for my deciding to leave Randall. ‘To thine inner self be true,’ Isus said, and I realized Randall had been blocking my spiritual ascent—”
“Were you at last Saturday’s seminar?” Kildy leaned across me to ask.
“No. I was in Cancun, and I was just decimated when I realized I’d missed it. I made Tio bring me back early so I could come today. I desperately need Isus’s wisdom about the divorce. Randall’s claiming Isus had nothing to do with my decision, that I left him because the prenup had expired, and he’s threatening to call Tio as—”
But Kildy had lost interest and was leaning across her to ask a pencil-thin woman in the full lotus position if she’d seen Ariaura before. She hadn’t, but the one on her right had.
“Last Saturday?” Kildy asked.
She hadn’t. She’d seen her six weeks ago in Eugene.
I leaned toward Kildy and whispered, “What happened last Saturday?”
“I think they’re starting, Rob,” she said, pointing at the stage, where absolutely nothing was happening, and got off her pillow and onto her knees.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
She didn’t answer that, either. She reached inside her pillow, pulled out an orange pillow the same size as the “Believe and It Will Happen” cushion, handed it to me, and arranged herself gracefully on the large tasseled one. As soon as she was cross-legged, she took the orange pillow back from me and laid it across her knees.
“Comfy?” I asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, turning her movie-star smile on me.
I leaned toward her. “You sure you don’t want to tell me what we’re doing here?”
“Oh, look, they’re starting,” she said, and this time they were.
A Brad Pitt look-alike stepped out onstage holding a hand mike and gave us the ground rules. No flash photos (even though they’d confiscated all the cameras). No applause (it breaks Ariaura’s concentration). No bathroom breaks. “The cosmic link with Isus is extremely fragile,” Brad explained, “and movement or the shutting of a door can break that connection.”
Right. Or else Ariaura had learned a few lessons from EST, including the fact that people who are distracted by their bladders are less likely to spot gobbledygook, like the stuff Brad was spouting right now:
“Eighty thousand years ago Isus was a high priest of Atlantis. He lived for three hundred years before he departed this earthly plane and acquired the wisdom of the ages—”
What ages? The Paleolithic and Neolithic? Eighty thousand years ago we were still living in trees.
“—he spoke with the oracle at Delphi, he delved into the Sacred Writings of Rosicrucian—”
Rosicrucian?
“Now watch as Ariaura calls him from the Cosmic All to share his wisdom with you.”
The lights deepened to rose, and the chiffon banners began to blow in, as if there were a breeze behind them. Correction, state-of-the-art lighting and fans.
The gale intensified, and for a moment I wondered if Ariaura was going to swoop in on a wire, but then the gold Mylar parted, revealing a curving black stairway, and Ariaura, in a purple velvet caftan and her sacred amulet, descended it to the strains of Holst’s Planets and went to stand dramatically in front of her throne.
The audience paid no attention to the “no applause” edict, and Ariaura seemed to expect it. She stood there for at least two minutes, regally surveying the crowd. Then she raised her arms as if delivering a benediction and lowered them again, quieting the crowd. “Welcome, Seekers after Divine Truth,” she said in a peppy, Oprah-type voice, and there was more applause. “We’re going to have a wonderful spiritual experience together here today and achieve a new plane of enlightenment.”
More applause.
“But you mustn’t applaud me. I am only the conduit through which Isus passes, the vessel
he fills. Isus first came to me, or, rather, I should say, through me, five years ago, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to believe it. It took me nearly a whole year to accept that I had become the focus for cosmic energies beyond the reality we know. It’s the wisdom of his highly evolved spirit you’ll hear today, not mine. If …” a nice theatrical pause here, “… he deigns to come to us. For Isus is a sage, not a servant to be bidden. He comes when he wills. Mayhap he will be among us this afternoon, mayhap not.”
In a pig’s eye. These women weren’t going to shell out seven hundred and fifty bucks for a no-show, even if this was Beverly Hills. I’d bet the house Isus showed up right on cue.
“Isus will come only if our earthly plane is in alignment with the cosmic,” Ariaura said, “if the auratic vibrations are right.” She looked sternly out at the audience. “If any of you are harboring negative vibrations, contact cannot be made.”
Uh-oh, here it comes, I thought, and waited for her to look straight at the two of us and tell us to leave, but she didn’t. She merely said, “Are all of you thinking positive thoughts, feeling positive emotions? Are you all believing?”
You bet.
“I sense that every one of you is thinking positive thoughts,” Ariaura said. “Good. Now, to bring Isus among us, you must help me. You must each calm your center.” She closed her eyes. “You must concentrate on your inner soul-self.”
I glanced around the audience. Over half of the women had their eyes shut, and many had folded their hands in an attitude of prayer. Some swayed back and forth, and the woman next to me was droning, “Om.” Kildy had her eyes closed, her orange pillow clasped to her chest.
“Align … align …” Ariaura chanted, and then with finality, “Align.” There was another theatrical pause.
“I will now attempt to contact Isus,” she said. “The focusing of the astral energy is a dangerous and difficult operation. I must ask that you remain perfectly quiet and still while I am preparing myself.”
The woman next to me obediently stopped chanting “Om,” and everyone opened their eyes. Ariaura closed hers and leaned back in her throne, her ring-covered hands draped over the ends of the arms. The lights went down and the music came up, the theme from Holst’s “Mars.” Everyone, including Kildy, watched breathlessly.
Ariaura jerked suddenly as if she were being electrocuted and clutched the arms of the throne. Her face contorted, her mouth twisting and her head shaking.
The audience gasped.
Her body jerked again, slamming back against the throne, and she went into a series of spasms and writhings, with more shaking. This went on for a full minute, while “Mars” built slowly behind her and the spotlight morphed to pink. The music cut off, and she slumped lifelessly back against the throne.
She remained there for a nicely timed interval, and then sat up stiffly, staring straight ahead, her hands lying loosely on the throne’s arms. “I am Isus!” she said in a booming voice that was a dead ringer for “Who dares to approach the great and powerful Oz?”
“I am the Enlightened One, a servant unto that which is called the Text and the First Source. I have come from the ninth level of the astral plane,” she boomed, “to aid you in your spiritual journeys.”
So far it was an exact duplicate of Romtha, right down to the pink light and the number of the astral plane level, but next to me Kildy was leaning forward expectantly.
“I have come to speak the truth,” Isus boomed, “to reveal to thou thine higher self.”
I leaned over to Kildy and whispered, “Why is it they never learn how to use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ correctly on the astral plane?”
“Shh,” Kildy hissed, intent on what Isus was saying.
“I bring you the long-lost wisdom of the kingdom of Lemuria and the prophecies of Antinous to aid thee in these troubled days, for thou livest in a time of tribulation. The last days these are of the Present Age, days filled with anxiety and terrorist attacks and dysfunctional relationships. But I say unto ye, thou must not look without but within, for thee alone are responsible for your happiness, and if that means getting out of a bad relationship, make it so. Seek you must your own inner isness and create thou must thine own inner reality. Thee art the universe.”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Something, at least, but this was just the usual New Age nonsense, a mush of psychobabble, self-help tips, pseudo-scripture, and Chicken Soup for the Soul.
I sneaked a glance at Kildy. She was sitting forward, still clutching her pillow tightly to her chest, her beautiful face intent, her mouth slightly open. I wondered if she could actually have been taken in by Ariaura. It’s always a possibility, even with skeptics. Kildy wouldn’t be the first one to be fooled by a cleverly done illusion.
But this wasn’t cleverly done. It wasn’t even original. The Lemuria stuff was Richard Zephyr, the “Thou art the universe” stuff was Shirley MacLaine, and the syntax was pure Yoda.
And this was Kildy we were talking about. Kildy, who never fell for anything, not even that vedic levitator. She had to have had a good reason for shelling out over two thousand bucks for this, but so far I was stumped. “What exactly is it you wanted me to see?” I murmured.
“Shhh.”
“But fear not,” Ariaura said, “for a New Age is coming, an age of peace, of spiritual enlightenment, when you—doing here listening to this confounded claptrap?”
I looked up sharply. Ariaura’s voice had changed in mid-sentence from Isus’s booming bass to a gravelly baritone, and her manner had, too. She leaned forward, hands on her knees, scowling at the audience. “It’s a lot of infernal gabble,” she said belligerently.
I glanced at Kildy. She had her eyes fixed on the stage.
“This hokum is even worse than the pretentious bombast you hear in the Chautauqua,” the voice croaked.
Chautauqua? I thought. What the—?
“But there you sit, with your mouths hanging open, like the rubes at an Arkansas camp meeting, listening to a snake-charming preacher, waiting for her to fix up your romances and cure your gallstones—”
The woman next to Kildy glanced questioningly at us and then back at the stage. Two of the ushers standing along the wall exchanged frowning glances, and I could hear whispering from somewhere in the audience.
“Have you yaps actually fallen for this mystical mumbo-jumbo? Of course you have. This is America, home of the imbecile and the ass!” the voice said, and the whispering became a definite murmur.
“What in the—?” a woman behind us said, and the woman next to me gathered up her bags, stuffed her “Believe” pillow into one of them, stood up, and began to step over people to get to the door.
One of the ushers signaled someone in the control booth, and the lights and Holst’s “Venus” began to come up. The emcee took a hesitant step out onto the stage.
“You sit there like a bunch of gaping primates, ready to buy anyth—” Ariaura said, and her voice changed abruptly back to the basso of Isus, “—but the Age of Spiritual Enlightenment cannot begin until each of thou beginnest thy own journey.”
The emcee stopped in mid-step, and so did the murmuring. And the woman who’d been next to me and who was almost to the door. She stood there next to it, holding her bags and listening.
“And believe. All of you, casteth out the toxins of doubt and skepticism now. Believe and it will happen.”
She must be back on script. The emcee gave a sigh of relief, and retreated back into the wings, and the woman who’d been next to me sat down where she’d been standing, bags and pillows and all. The music faded, and the lights went back to rose.
“Believe in thine inner soul-self,” Ariaura/Isus said. “Believe, and let your spiritual unfoldment begin.” She paused, and the ushers looked up nervously. The emcee poked his head out from the gold Mylar drapes.
“I grow weary,” she said. “I must return now to that higher reality from whence I cameth. Fear not, for though I no longer share this earthly plane with
thee, still I am with thou.” She raised her arm stiffly in a benediction / Nazi salute, gave a sharp shudder, and then slumped forward in a swoon that would have done credit to Gloria Swanson. Holst’s “Venus” began again, and she sat up, blinking, and turned to the emcee, who had come out onstage again.
“Did Isus speak?” she asked him in her original voice.
“Yes, he did,” the emcee said, and the audience burst into thunderous applause, during which he helped her to her feet and handed her over to two of the ushers, who walked her, leaning heavily on them, up the black stairway and out of sight.
As soon as she was safely gone, the emcee quieted the applause and said, “Copies of Ariaura’s books and videotapes are available outside in the waiting area. If you wish to arrange for a private audience, see me or one of the ushers,” and everyone began gathering up their pillows and heading for the door.
“Wasn’t he wonderful?” a woman ahead of us in the exodus said to her friend. “So authentic!”
Is Los Angeles the worst town in America, or only next to the worst? The skeptic, asked the original question, will say yes, the believer will say no. There you have it.
—H. L. MENCKEN
Kildy and I didn’t talk till we were out of the parking lot and on Wilshire, at which point Kildy said, “Now do you understand why I wanted you to see it for yourself, Rob?”
“It was interesting, all right. I take it she did the same thing at the seminar you went to last week?”
She nodded. “Only last week two people walked out.”
“Was it the exact same spiel?”
“No. It didn’t last quite as long—I don’t know how long exactly, it caught me by surprise—and she used slightly different words, but the message was the same. And it happened the same way—no warning, no contortions, her voice just changed abruptly in mid-sentence. So what do you think’s going on, Rob?”
I turned onto La Brea. “I don’t know, but lots of channelers do more than one ‘entity.’ Joye Wildde does two, and before Hans Lightfoot went to jail, he did half a dozen.”
The Best of Connie Willis Page 16
