The Essence of the Ace of Cups: Inception of Creativity and Spirituality

The oldest surviving tarot cards are from fifteen fragmented decks painted in the mid-15th century for the Visconti-Sforza family, the rulers of Milan. This deck is too early for the lower arcana to reflect occultism or esoteric thought.

Nowadays, we usually expect the Ace of Cups to follow the Ace of Wands, but why? Let’s rummage around in the portmanteau of history to find out, shall we?

Tarot cards were not always associated with occult symbology, the minor arcana in particular. When we put the suits of the lower arcana into some kind of order, we’re not talking, initially, about the importance of the four classical elements and their relationship to occult wisdom.

In addition to occult associations, we’ve inherited the order in which the suits are arranged from card games, some of which were concerned more with social hierarchy, mores and values, than with esoteric lore:

The origins of the tarot deck are thought to be Italian, with the oldest surviving examples dating from the mid 15th century in Milan, and using the traditional Latin suits of Swords, Cups, Coins and Staves (representing the four main classes of feudal society; military, clergy, mercantile trade, and agriculture).

Card games based around virtue and vice, or social concerns, have been produced from time to time through the centuries, and Tarot, with its emphasis on spiritual and moral ideology, has overtones of what’s left of Medieval Morality plays, as well as images that would have held the interest of those who played the games later Tarot cards were based on.

Although there is a natural fascination with discovering Tarot’s origins, usually what we’re interested in is whether Tarot originated in Egypt or some other occult, mystical place. The answers are, as usual with the sharing of ideas, complicated.

It seems fairly clear from tracing trade routes and knowing who imported what from whom, where and when, that Tarot as the game of Tarocchi was most likely developed from the complex trade alliances made between the Venetians and the Mamluks, powerful Islamic rulers who counted, amongst their possessions, cities like Cairo, Mecca, and Medina.

Prior to the occult and esoteric knowledge included in every current pack of Tarot cards, there was the rise of the playing card, which required something as prosaic as paper to flourish. One reason I think it’s entirely possible the theories that Tarot’s occult wisdom came from Egypt is that the use of paper spread from its apparent origins in China, through trade routes to Islam (which would have included the powerful sultanate of the Mamluks, centered in Cairo); and through Islam, on to Europe.

Mamluk cards, dating from the 11th-12th centuries, are a prototype of the European playing card and therefore one of the first steps leading to the development of the tarot pack, as we know it today

Tracing the roots of Tarot is interesting, for a few different reasons, but the primary reason is that, as with the oral tradition of language, much wisdom that swirls about in popular awareness could not be preserved and passed on to subsequent generations until there was an affordable medium with which to do so.

Paper has long made a better medium for the spread of ideas than its precursors of vellum, papyrus, or silk, all of which are relatively expensive and difficult to procure. With the advent of paper, however, it would become possible to cheaply replicate ideas and symbols, and the “creative fantasy,” of archetypal imagery, to paraphrase C. G. Jung, began to “freely manifest.”

Tarot as we know it today, with its suits and occult imagery, represents a blending of many different ideas that developed over time. There is no one likely source for all the imagery you see on the cards nowadays (which is why one cannot credit the idea that the Tarot was a gift from the god Thoth, as some would like to believe). Instead, as Tarot spread throughout Europe, it was inspired by ideas already in use, and modified by each culture.

When we speak of the Ace of Cups, we are referring not only to the beginning of a strong new emotional connection to something or someone. We are also speaking of the flow of feeling that underlies all creative endeavors. When you see the Ace of Cups in a reading, therefore, what is required of you is opening your creative spirit to all that which inspires the heart. The Ace of Cups is about learning to appreciate that which affects us intangibly through our emotions: poetry, music, art, literature, and emotional—in particular, romantic—expressions of love.

Associations between cups, water, emotion and love are not obvious, but one image that sums up the suit of cups’ material, spiritual, and practical meaning, is the chalice. The oldest Ace of Cups card still extant, from the Cary-Yale Visconti deck (ca. 1440 AD), depicts a chalice hand-painted in elegant silver and gold leaf.

An appropriately creative activity for the Ace of Cups, early cards were hand-painted

The chalice was associated with the clergy, spiritualism, and the Holy Grail, the story of which sums up much of humanity’s challenge when dealing with emotions:

The Grail plays a different role everywhere it appears, but in most versions of the legend the hero must prove himself worthy to be in its presence. In the early tales, Percival’s immaturity prevents him from fulfilling his destiny when he first encounters the Grail, and he must grow spiritually and mentally before he can locate it again. In later tellings the Grail is a symbol of God’s grace, available to all but only fully realised by those who prepare themselves spiritually, like the saintly Galahad.

In subsequent years, when Tarot cards were revisioned as instruments of occult wisdom by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the order of the suits reflected the philosophy of the Greeks, by way of the Stoics, Platonists, and other Socratic and Pre-Socratic sources. The Hermeticists explained the natural hierarchical order of the elements this way:

The locust and all flies flee fire; the eagle and the hawk and all high-flying birds flee water; fish, air and earth; the snake avoids the open air. Whereas snakes and all creeping things love earth; all swimming things–love–water; winged things, air, of which they are the citizens; while those that fly still higher–love–the fire and have the habitat near it. Not that some of the animals as well do not love fire; for instance salamanders, for they even have their homes in it. It is because one or another of the elements doth form their bodies’ outer envelope.

Through the Greek philosophers, the physical body becomes the container for the four humours, the Ancient Greek attempt at classifying and understanding emotions. The element of water becomes esoterically associated with emotions, and hey presto! the mystical alchemy of linked meanings brings us to today’s version of the Ace of Cups, which, if I were creating a new Tarot, would be renamed the Ace of Valentines, since most Cups readings seem to deal with love, romance, passion, and relationships.

Voyager Tarot's metaphor of the open flower as container for pure rainwater. The message is, "open your heart, feel everything, love and let yourself be loved."

Yet the Ace of Cups is not solely about love; it is about all the emotions, and the ability to express emotion; to open the heart to feelings of all kinds. When this Ace appears in a reading, it implies an upsurge of emotion, a tidal wave, if you will, intended to carry you to the next thing you fall in love with. Sometimes that’s a person, but other times this Ace, upright, will represent a new way of living life, of approaching life with greater passion and fullness of being.

Perhaps most importantly, you are being offered an opportunity to care about something as you have never cared before, but that can be love for an idea or belief; not all love is about love for another, but if someone is offering you their heart, you’ll see it with this card. 

The Ace is usually represented by a cup; a cup’s purpose is to contain, and the esoteric implication is that this particular cup contains spirit. Throughout history, actual literal cups were associated with drinking; drinking to one’s health, at a party, as a celebration. This Ace represents that experience of emotional celebration.

I do think there is almost nothing sadder than seeing a reversed Ace of Cups, for it indicates the cup of plenty run dry—the person in question cannot give, has nothing to spare, has lost his or her way, is barren of hope, feeling, empathy.

To the extent that this Ace represents an opportunity for greater emotional maturity on the spiritual path, receiving the upright cup being offered is a gesture of good faith from someone, somewhere, so do not allow this gift of emotion to pass you by. 

Related articles

• The Fire of A New Beginning: Invention, Inspiration, and the Ace of Wands (beyondthestarsastrology.wordpress.com)
• Type and Tarot (identityandtype.wordpress.com)
• Archetypal Tarot No.6 The Heirophant (archetypist.com)
• Charming Tarot Card Bag (cutoutandkeep.net)
• When the Tarot Trumps All (thestarryeye.typepad.com)
• Five of Cups (theawl.com)

The Fire of A New Beginning: Invention, Inspiration, and the Ace of Wands

Ace of Wands as a butterfly mandala from which emerges a rainbow of fire and all the colors of a Spring dawn

Where does a thought begin? We enter this new year by asking: how do we make something manifest; how do we make our thoughts take shape and become real? An appropriate question for the new year—a year we shall be keeping a close eye on, since it threatens to end long before we’re done with it, or so some New Age calendar-reading sages would have us think.

Peter Gabriel, inspired by Anne Sexton‘s self-revelatory poetry so honest it cuts to the bone, wrote the song “Mercy Street” in response to the images and feelings her words evoked in him. 

The following lyric helps remind me how ephemeral human-made objects are; they were once just a dream in somebody’s head, no more than a thought, easy to forget or ignore unless we find a way to transform thought into reality, unless we have the will to make real that which we visualise. 

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see

are the dreams all made solid
are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of those cars
were once just a dream
in somebody’s head …

—Mercy Street, inspired by Anne Sexton’s  poem, 45 Mercy Street 

The disembodied hand of God in the Marseilles Tarot, offering you that new thought or opportunity

Wishes are the fuel of imagination. Locating the source for this ‘fuel’ has plagued philosophers and poets for millennia, however. Even today, we invoke the Muses if we hope to create, invent, or discover something new. Of course, some of us turn to other instruments of intuitive wisdom, like tarot cards, for inspiration, and where better to begin than with the Ace of Wands?

In the Ace of Wands, we see themes of inception and boldness, genesis and the initial moment of creation symbolized. Traditional imagery of a wand, baton, or stave surrounded by flames, melds alchemical motifs with astrological symbolism and the four classical elements.

In Western astrology the sequence is always Fire, Earth, Air, and Water, according to the elemental rules of the four classical triplicities. 

Once the Zodiac was sorted into 12 astrological signs, it was further divided up according to the Ancient Greek classical elements, and it doesn’t require much imagination to understand why the fire signs were designated as such, particularly since the predominant fire sign begins with Leo, it being the constellation traditionally aligned with the hottest, driest time of year.

Therefore, the element of fire becomes associated with hot and dry humours; the summer months; a choleric temperament; the masculine; and the eastern point of the compass.

Tarot relies heavily on the classical elements to define each suit of the minor Arcana. I understand the desire to revise history, and to come up with postmodern interpretations of that which has been taken for granted as “so” for a very long time, but there are deep-structure reasons for aligning wands with the element of fire. 

Each sign is connected via its element to other signs within the triplicity. Tarot makes use of astrological lore for much of its symbology

You mess with this ordering system, as I’ve seen some Tarot practitioners try to do, by associating Wands with the element of Air, and you’re messing with the order of the universe, which can only lead to confusion, so cut it out. Wands are associated with the element of Fire for a reason and not simply because some old fogey said so!   

Beginning with the Ancient Greeks (such as Heraclitus) fire was thought to be the preeminent element from which all others depended. Alchemists—scientists of yore—observed fire’s expansion upon exposure to air, but watched while it was extinguished in a bell jar, or when doused with water or earth. 

Fiery symbolism underlies most of the metaphors to do with invention, inspiration, and creation, for these acts are seen as dynamic and active, but somewhat difficult to control. An upright Ace of Wands in a tarot spread tells you the moment you’ve been waiting for is now. Do not hesitate! Begin whatever it is you’re thinking about. Be prepared for an unexpected opportunity to arrive, an offer of some kind, the beginning of a new enterprise. We must take the offer of inspiration being handed us, and do something concrete with it if we do not wish to lose this opportunity. 

A reversed Ace of Wands delays a positive outcome, but it usually doesn’t deny it entirely, for this Ace brings with it the power of inevitability. All Aces in the minor Arcana are cards of promise, representing a new beginning of some kind. The Ace of fire, however, is thought to be the single most powerful ‘pip’ of all, so to see it upright in a spread is not insignificant. 

In many decks, this Ace is depicted as a colorful maypole, the ancient phallic symbol representing potency and rebirth (which often brings with it a new sexual relationship, since elemental fire represents passion, physical and emotional). Other decks draw on the connection between wands, batons, or torches, since wood is associated, obviously, with fire. 

Deviant Tarot plays with the metaphors of newness, Spring, and birth implicit in the Ace of Wands

Fire is also associated with raw energy, health, newness, vigor, and lust. The fire metaphor is called upon to goad us into action, to help turn the dreams in our heads into reality. Someone or something might inspire us, as happened for Peter Gabriel through the poignancy of Anne Sexton’s poetry.

When you see this Ace, pay attention to who or what is trying to wake you up, get your attention, make you see things anew with a fresh perspective. We have repeatedly called this type of paying attention ‘listening to our Muse,’ but whatever you call it, the vibrating, pulsing energy of invention lies in the simple ‘magic’ of being aware of what’s going on in the endless flow of information around you. 

When Shakespeare’s chorus in Henry V cried out  

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention

he was shaking a metaphorical fist at the heavens, long thought to be the source of the divine spark of inspiration poets agonize over. To be inspired originally meant being infused with the breath of God. Mere mortals could not become inspired without the direct intervention of God, or, for the Ancient Greeks, one of the gods or nine Muses.

That we reference these ancient mythopoeic concepts even today illustrates their enormous emotive power over our collective imagination. Try as we might, we’ve never excised the belief that if we perform all the magic rituals, the divine spark will then light up the heavens, as it must have for Shakespeare.

Or so we’d love to believe, since relying on someone or something relieves us of some of the work and responsibility creation requires. 

This time it's a magic wand emanating from one's typewriter, granting your wishes that your writing sound clever and avoid all clichés

To begin a new project, that first crucial thought has to have been dreamed, visualised, created. Inspiration seems to come from nowhere, but we think that only because we don’t recognize the internal process by which we are piecing information together subconsciously all the time, both awake and asleep.

Our minds churn, turning fragments and mosaic glimmers into a cohesion, bursting into consciousness. You cry out, “Eureka! I have a new thought!” If you’re a writer, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Perspicaciously, Katelan V. Foisy, the artist who painted the typewriter Ace of Wands seen above interprets this card’s meaning like this, because she understands that we don’t work alone when we’re inspired, even though it might seem that way. We’re always responding to something someone said or did: 

… [L]obelia spicata seen in the Ace of Wands consists of a central taproot, from which occasional basal offshoots are produced. The offshoots then germinate, although self-compatible, a flower is unable to offer pollen to itself and it must be pollinated by insects. This shows the querant that no matter how great an idea or partnership is, it must have help from the outside to truly blossom. 

Not a tarot card, but an Ace of Wands-type image that perfectly illustrates the fire of creation

Related articles

• Why is water known as one of the five basic elements (wiki.answers.com)
• Words, a poem by Anne Sexton (thefindingplace.wordpress.com)

The greatest mystery of all for astrologers: how to argue with a skeptic

How does it all connect?

Astrologers have long been faced with trying to explain to skeptics how and why astrology works. I don’t mind the questions; I mind the closed-mindedness of Empiricists who cannot perceive as true anything that is not verifiable via the five senses—but that’s a rant for another day.

Fortunately, someone who understands the principles of argumentation can speak for me, so that this won’t become an unnecessary diatribe in which I splutter and lose whatever credibility I still have, tattered though it might be.

In a rebuttal to the skeptic’s usual method of argumentation, on his website Theory of Astrology, author and theoretician Ken McRitchie addresses not only the assertions that are most often leveled against astrology; but also, the structure and foundational premises of the arguments themselves.

He has found that most of the arguments used against astrology rely on logical fallacies that go ignored because the nature of the rhetoric employed is so inflammatory or misguided that, instead of creating discourse, all that is accomplished is further dissension and misunderstanding.

The following represents one of the many fallacies that undergird negative assumptions about astrology, at the same time that it foregrounds the reason Plato didn’t like rhetoricians very much. He deplored the rhetor‘s ability to twist words around so as to make the weaker argument the stronger. This twisted rhetoric, amounting to legerdemain, was a pet peeve of his, as it is to anyone who believes in keeping an open mind and not manipulating people.

Burden of proof fallacy — The assertions that astrology should be explained by a conventional causal mechanism (such as gravity or magnetic forces), or that astrology should use the time of conception instead of the time of birth, are attempts to argue that view A (conventional mechanism and time of conception) is to be preferred to view B (testable, falsifiable operations drawn from astrology texts).

The logical fallacy in this case is that the burden of proof laid on view A is raised to an impossibly heavy level, and furthermore would not prove view B either. Preference for view A further leads to the false attribution that astrology makes extraordinary claims, and that no evidence of view B is sufficient because extraordinary evidence is required to prove view A. This argument makes a faulty inference of proof and is another error of logical structure.

Why are these rational errors made? No doubt the theories and applications that scientists are familiar with do not explain how astrology works. Yet no theory can be used to either support or deny what astrology actually claims in its texts. This requires evidence. To rely upon theory before evidence is, epistemologically speaking, to put the cart before the horse.

Before astrology can be explained, or explained away, it is necessary to understand and evaluate its claims. All researchers, whether they agree or disagree with the claims of astrology, need to immerse themselves deeply into the empirical observations made by astrology.

Without evidence, all arguments go down a slippery slope of rational errors. [In the year 2000], [a]strologer Rob Hand assert[ed], “We should not be trying to explain astrology by means of science as it is, but there is no problem with trying to explain astrology by a science that has not yet come to be.”

I think this is the fundamental problem for astrologers: astrology cannot be defined by the current narrow parameters of science as it exists today, and I see nothing wrong with that, because science allows for hypothetical realities and possibilities to be true even if they are not currently verifiable.

The fact that ‘how astrology works’ cannot be proven or disproven according to current scientific rules does not change my premise, which is that one should keep an open mind until perhaps one day, science catches up with the perception that astrology has some validity, of a sort that cannot currently be verified. That there are instruments incapable of measuring an energy or force does not mean the energy or force does not exist. It means we need to create more sensitive instruments, and that might never happen.

But what if it did? I know that I am not the first to have thought the currently impossible was remotely possible—some day. 

How it all connects for astrologers: through symbols, images, the zodiacal belt, and imagination

Related articles

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• I am a circle, I am a square: Astrology as ontological metaphor (beyondthestarsastrology.wordpress.com)

When death stretches out his bony hand…

These women don't look as scared as they should be

One of the things I appreciate most about my computer is the ability to listen to old-time radio shows that would otherwise be very difficult to find nowadays.

“In my day”, she creaked, all her joints being crickety and old, “we still listened to radio shows for entertainment.”

I listened to The Green Hornet, and The Shadow; Gunsmoke and Bat Masterson (his theme song still runs through my mind from time to time). In fact, I listened to anything I could, because I loved stories, and I was an avid reader, but radio stories were unique, in that they allowed me to close my eyes and imagine the scene as though it were happening in front of me.

However, my favorites were mysteries. Stories about the weird, the witchy, the unknown, and the uncanny, were my preferred fare of an evening. I am pleased to tell you that many (but not all) of these stories still exist; my favorite, The Witching Hour, has mostly been lost to the ravages of time. Below, I’ve included the links to some of the best sources available online for murder mysteries and scary stories, performed in the inimitable style only the drama of the 1930s and ’40s American radio serial could create.

I'm frightened! What's that in your hand?!

I mean, seriously, listen to the following tracks from Murder at Midnight, Tales of Terror and Retribution, and you’ll be surprised at how creepy they are! When the announcer intones, in a voice of doom “Midnight, the witching hour, when our fears are strongest,” you’re reminded of how frightening being alone in the dark, listening to the immediacy of the voices weaving their dark tales, can be. Overly dramatic though these stories might sound to our more sophisticated ears, they’re still a lot of (creepy) fun.

There was Suspense, billed as “radio’s outstanding theatre of thrills,” its radio dramas compounded of

mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution… until the last possible moment.

Much of the tradition of scaring the wits out of you and creeping you out belongs to the time when we used to tell ghost stories around the fireplace, flames flickering against the darkness. But there is another tradition the horror radio show is reminiscent of, and that is the type of story told at the Grand Guignol in Paris; macabre and bloody stories which seem to have been resurrected most recently in gory slasher movies.

Radio Drama’s Adolescence

In 1934, the anthology series Lights Out debuted and exploited many of radio’s unique qualities to massive success. The program was penned by Wyllis Cooper and aired at midnight. Cooper employed stream of conscious monologues, multiple first-person narrators and internal monologues which were at odds with the characters’ spoken dialog.

Lights Out veered into Grand Guignol horror:

It’s most often remembered, however, for its gruesome and explicit sound effects which attempted to suggest joints being ripped from sockets, skin being eviscerated, heads being decapitated and other depictions of violence that would still be pushing the envelope, even on modern cable television programs.

Lights Out … was characterized by grisly stories spiked with dark, tongue-in-cheek humor, a sort of radio Grand Guignol. A character might be buried or eaten or skinned alive, vaporized in a ladle of white-hot steel, absorbed by a giant slurping amoeba, have his arm torn off by a robot, or forced to endure torture, beating or decapitation—always with the appropriate blood-curdling acting and sound effects.

Radio had the advantage for the listener, it seems to me, to be able to imagine the gory details without having to actually witness them. But it’s entirely possible that it’s much scarier to have an image lingering in your mind, long after the lights have been put out, and you’re alone with your thoughts…

Here is a selection of some of the best shows still available from the days of gore:

I Love a Mystery  Lights Out Murder at Midnight  Suspense Inner Sanctum

The staple of the Grand Guignol repertoire was the horror play, which inevitably featured eye-gouging, throat-slashing, acid-throwing, or some other equally grisly climax. Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre (for instance Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Webster's The White Devil) to today's splatter films.

Related articles

• Old-Time Radio Fans Sign Off (npr.org)
• Old Time Radio (wallablog.wordpress.com)
• Close Your Ears! (slate.com)
• Lean & Hungry Theater to Perform and Record Radio Drama Version of The Winter’s Tale, December 4 and 5 (prweb.com)

Into the liminal darkness…

Doorway into November's darkened room...

To begin a month which, in the northern hemisphere, grows dark early, forcing us to hold meagre candles against the creeping half-light, I think a poem appreciating mystery (my theme for November) is appropriate.

I would like to thank The Violet Hour (an evocatively liminal-sounding title for a blog) for bringing this poem to my attention… 

STORIES

The stories we live in, my stories and yours,
knit from the wool of our ancestors,
spun on family helixes,
hold our worlds together – for a span.
Garments of swaddle and comfort,
patterns set in warp and weft,
bequeathed by “her” story and “his”
name, tribe, role and fate.

Graciously they wear thin, these stories;
shiny with overuse, one strand tears, and another,
until the fabric falters
under the weight and stock of incarnation.
Stories that once held worlds together
rip and split so that we can fall –
shredded and unraveled –
into mystery.

Here there is nothing;
nothing, but to wait
in the expanse of silence.
Wait until new fibers accrue
and the cosmic force returns
to thrust a greening axis
into the center
and possibility is reborn.

I slip between worlds...

I used to prefer the old stories
with familiar beginnings and ends,
comforted by convention;
the liminal darkness, the unknowing averted.
But now, at last, I am curious
or exhausted,
or perhaps have simply lost my place.

I slip between worlds,
into the darkness,
into the spacious silence,
to wait for the opening line
of a story that has never been told,
a story that begins with a smooth round
circle of breath –
the story that truly begins with
“Once….”

… Joyce Pace Byrd,
Poems From The Labyrinth

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Of Cats and Covens and Carved Pumpkin Faces Lighting the Night: Happy Hallowe’en!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Happy Hallowe‘en, and enjoy the images I’ve

collected through the year to celebrate this

day! 

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Hallowe’en movie poll—what’s your scariest movie ever?

A still from "Nosferatu," 1922. Not necessarily your scariest movie ever, though.

Disturbances observed on the Planet Mars

Original movie poster, 1953

On this day in 1938, residents of New Jersey were terrified to hear, as they tuned in to local radio stations transmitting a broadcast from Trenton, that in nearby Grover’s Mill, a ‘huge cylinder’ had plummeted to earth, and crashed on Mr. Wilmot’s farm. Listeners were shocked to learn that a “greenish streak” had shot through the sky, making an enormous sound as it hit Wilmot’s farm.

Martian Landing Site

In towns all over the state of New Jersey, and indeed, in towns across the United States, families prepared for the coming invasion from Mars.

My own grandmother and grandfather packed up my mother, a four month-old baby, born that July, in preparation to evacuate Newark, New Jersey, a city threatened in the broadcast, with imminent invasion. They weren’t alone; their credulousness was shared by thousands influenced by the menacing tone and immediacy of the radioplay, which made use of news updates to simulate the ‘reality’ of its scary news story, that ‘creatures’ had landed on Earth, with the intention of destroying humanity.

The broadcast sounded entirely believable. It relied on ‘grave announcements’ from New Jersey State Militia, professors, even the Secretary of the Interior in Washington D.C., all of whom convinced the listener that indeed, invaders from Mars had ‘cut the state through its center,’ threatening the entire eastern seaboard, and eventually, the rest of the United States.

Of course, what really happened is that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre broadcast a scary radio drama for Hallowe’en:

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre On The Air broadcast a radio dramatization of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) coast-to-coast network. The story of invading Martians is presented realistically, but disclaimers stating that the presentation is entirely fictional are aired four times during the hour-long show. Nevertheless, a nationwide panic ensues that reaches as far as Seattle.

Orson Welles, 23 at the time he wrote and produced “The War of the Worlds.” Brilliant, annoying, wunderkind, shocked the nation and changed the future.

The wonderful story this radio broadcast was based on is H. G. Well’s book The War of the Worlds, one of the earlier modern pieces of science fiction, in which an apocalyptic vision of the future was drawn for the reader. It was a terrifying vision in 1898, its year of publication, and has spawned any number of movies and inspired many subsequent science fiction stories.

The next day, an apparently contrite Welles appeared in front of the press to apologize to the pubic, but also to express surprise that his retelling of the original H. G. Wells’s story would have “such an immediate and profound affect” upon radio listeners:

To listen to the original radio broadcast, click here. Click on the title of the book to read the full text of  The War of the Worlds. Here is a Youtube version of the radio broadcast, including illustrations.

The myth of mass panic is considered ‘highly anecdotal,’ and has its share of disbelievers, although my grandparents would not have been among them. This fact is embarrassing, but understandable, given their lack of a formal education. I imagine that for those who had never read the book, Orson Welles’ assumption that a story commonly read “by children,” that should be known by everyone, would not have been terribly reassuring to hear the day after the end of the world.  

Related articles

• October 30, 1938: Space invaders By Jon Blackwell / The Trentonian (capitalisthistory.wordpress.com)
• The myth of the War of the Worlds panic (bbc.co.uk)
• The Lesson In Grover’s Mill Psychology: Before Deciding On An End, Never Miss An Introduction (9-poeticfingers.org)
• On This Date: October 30th (bloggoschloggo.wordpress.com)
• Close Your Ears! (slate.com)
• Disturbances observed on the Planet Mars (beyondthestarsastrology.wordpress.com)
• H.G. Wells “War of The Worlds” (Orson Welles 1938 Live Broadcast) Happy Halloween from Occupy Cyberspace! (occupycyberspace.wordpress.com)
• Skeptic History: Halloween Hoaxes (randi.org)
• Academic Article. French Intellectuals and Globalisation: A War of Worlds. (capitalisthistory.wordpress.com)

Messages from beyond the veil

At age 11, Houdini attended a séance for his dead half-brother; at age 18, he paid for a "professional psychic reunion" with his recently-deceased father.

One of spiritualism’s true believers was Arthur Conan Doyle, and one of its major detractors was Harry Houdini. 

The two had a friendship that went on for years, yet they ultimately had a falling out over their differences, fueled by misunderstanding and feelings of betrayal.

Conan Doyle and Houdini both endured almost unbearable losses due to deaths of close family members. Following the death of Doyle’s wife Louisa in 1906, the death of his son Kingsley just before the end of World War I, and the deaths of his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews shortly after the war, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace in spiritualism and its attempts to find proof of existence beyond the grave. 

Houdini’s famous skepticism, on the other hand, was fueled by not a little bitterness. After his mother’s death, he had tried, in vain, to contact her through séances, which proved fruitless. Though he claimed in his book A Magician Among the Spirits that his mind was “open and receptive and ready to believe,” he never did receive the messages from the beyond that he waited every day for years and years to hear; neither from his dead parents, nor later in life, from his close friend and personal secretary, John W. Sargent.

What seems clear from Houdini’s writings is not that he didn’t believe in the possibility of messages from the beyond; but that instead, he took the possibility so seriously that he deplored fakes and liars pretending to communicate with the dead, who at the same time, took advantage of the vulnerability and credulousness of surviving family members. Houdini, expert at the art of creating stage illusions, was critical of mediums who claimed an ability they clearly lacked, and he made it his business to debunk sham-mystics who merely pretended to speak to “the other side.”

Houdini attends a séance

In contrast, Conan Doyle had begun his relationship with Spiritualism as somewhat of a skeptic (with an open mind), who became a true believer while staying as a guest at the home of a fellow-member of the British Society for Psychical Research. His friend had been complaining for quite some time of the disquieting loud noises he and his family suffered through but could find no explanation for.

During his visit, Doyle heard the same noises, but once again, no explanation could be found. A few years later, the house burned down, and a child’s skeleton was discovered, buried in the garden. Conan Doyle became convinced that he really had witnessed psychic phenomena caused by the spirit of the dead child.

Houdini met Conan Doyle when the escape artist performed in London in 1920. Some years later, Conan Doyle’s wife invited Houdini to attend a séance, in the hopes of contacting Houdini’s mother. Lady Doyle was considered an accomplished automatic writer, and during the séance produced copious amounts of writing in English, simultaneously claiming that she was communing with Houdini’s mother, a woman who had trouble speaking English, hence Houdini’s disbelief. Once again, he thought he was being deliberately duped, mislead, and, worst of all, since the Conan Doyles were friends, betrayed.

For weeks after his mother's death, Houdini made almost daily visits to the cemetery, sometimes lying on her grave to speak to her.

How to explain unseen phenomena… this is what lies behind so much of the experimentalism of the period. Houdini and Conan Doyle’s falling out stems largely from their differing values, but it all began with the experiment in ideomotor response that a séance represents (especially one involving automatic writing, or a ‘spirit’ or talking board). Attempting to speak with the dead, of course, is part of the Hallowe’en tradition, since it is on this night that the veil between the worlds of the dead and living is thinnest, and most easily breached. 

An entertaining parlour game

With the rise of Spiritualism in America and England, the most popular method of communication with the spirit world became the Ouija board, but packaging it and selling it to the masses diminished any authenticity and mystique the idea might once have claimed.

Ouija boards stemmed from use of the ‘talking board,’ or ‘spirit board,’ versions of which have existed throughout history, in many cultures. Some methods of communicating with the dead via written language were as simple as spreading cards inscribed with the alphabet in a circular pattern on a tabletop, and using an empty wine goblet as a pointing device.   

Another use for the talking board, interestingly, developed in the therapeutic 1970s, when the idea of talking to one’s self through the medium of the board (rather than using a medium to communicate via the board to another realm) augmented psychological study of the subconscious. An example of this kind of board, used to facilitate therapeutic automatism, can be found on The Museum of Talking Board’s Ziriya message board page.

Inadvertently furthering the popular desire to communicate with the dead, Houdini himself died unexpectedly of peritonitis on Hallowe’en, 1926. For ten years afterwards, his widow, Bess, conducted an anniversary séance on the night traditionally renowned as the time when spirits are most likely to speak to the earthly realm. However, the convoluted system she and Houdini had worked out prior to his death, that she was told to employ when attempting to communicate with him, would defy the ability of most spirits, it seems to me:

“The message was based on both sentimentality and an old vaudeville mind-reading routine,” (Magictricks.com). “The message was, ‘Rosabelle- answer- tell- pray, answer- look- tell- answer, answer- tell.’ Bess’s wedding band bore the inscription “Rosabelle,” the name of the song she sang in her act when they first met. The other words correspond to a secret spelling code used to pass information between a magician and his assistant during a mentalism act. Each word or word pair equals a letter. The word ‘answer’ stood for the letter ‘B,’ for example. ‘Answer, answer’ stood for the letter ‘V.’ Thus, the Houdinis’ secret phrase spelled out the word ‘believe’.”

In 1929, a young medium named Arthur Ford claimed he had successfully received the secret message from Harry Houdini. Upon investigation, however, it was discovered that Ford’s claim was a hoax. Bess, it seems, had inadvertently revealed the message to reporters more than a year earlier.

One wonders what Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini would have made of this pseudoscientific device, created specifically to communicate with “other levels” of human consciousness. In the ongoing attempt to penetrate the veil between this realm and the next, the spirit board or séance will always be easier to facilitate than a complex device of ‘metascience,’ but as you’ll see from this example, human beings will continue to try. My suggestion if you want to achieve success, however, is not to make the message you’re hoping to receive from the dead understandable on your terms, since you’re alive, and they most definitely are not.

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Of haunted houses and harmless phantoms

All houses wherein men have lived and died are haunted...

I’ve always wanted to see a ghost, but they have resolutely avoided presenting themselves to me—until this past year, when I believe it’s entirely possible I might have actually seen one in my house.

If it was a ghost, it looked like a dusty cloud of ash in the shape of a man. If you imagine what a man’s reflection in a black and white photograph looks like, that’s what this grey shape resembled. I was outside, and looked up when I noticed a silhouette against an upstairs window. It appeared in the same room I’m writing in now…

I often wonder if it will ever appear again, or if I saw what I think I saw … whether something in the combination of shadow and light emanating from the upstairs window somehow formed into the shape of a man that night. Did I just imagine it?

I have sometimes felt, or sensed, a presence in this room, and thought, “there’s something or someone here…” but then would forget about any impression of another body in the room with me. If I’ve thought “perhaps…. just perhaps something is there”, I’ve also talked myself out of it each time.

Last year, while taking a tour of the underground city of Edinburgh, I was certain someone was tapping on my shoulder; I turned around to say “stop it,” in annoyance, thinking one of the people on the tour was deliberately trying to scare me, but no one was there. I was rather scared in that moment; nothing like that has ever happened to me, and I’m not terribly suggestible. In fact, I even stood close to the door, away from the group, resisting the tour leader’s attempts to corral us into an enclosed space and then frighten us (predictably and deliberately, so the women would scream and everyone would laugh). I thought that by standing off by myself, and keeping my eyes closed (which I did) I wouldn’t get scared against my will. I’m a curmudgeon that way.

Made on Christmas Day in 1875 by Jay J. Hartman of Cincinnati, the back of the spirit picture bears the signatures of fifteen witnesses who observed the entire photographic procedure, certifying that Hartman never touched the plate or saw the dark room during the development of the picture.

It’s possible the ghost haunts my house because I live on top of ancient native tribal burial ground. I would happily return the tribe’s land to them if I could. I have no desire whatsoever to reenact scenes from Poltergeist simply because white people got greedy and bought land dirt cheap, so as to transform it into suburbia.

However, if I have a ghost (or two) it would be because the house was built on sacred ground, and I am an interloper. My hope is that global guilt and talking nicely to the ash-shapes will be enough to appease them. We shall see. But as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in the poem Haunted Houses,

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;

Owners and occupants of earlier dates

From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands

And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

I’m not the first person to wonder about the existence of ghosts. For millennia, necromancers summoned spirits and spoke with the dead, but this practice was squelched during the spread of Christianity.

Church-sanctioned investigations into the spirit world began in Sweden, with controversial Christian theologist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who, in 1741, entered a “spiritual phase” at the age of 53, in which he gradually began to experience dreams and visions. He believed the Lord had opened his eyes to the spiritual realm, so that he could commune directly with angels, spirits, and demons, and “freely visit” both Heaven and Hell. 

Of potential interest to astrologers is Swedenborg’s Life on Other Planets, in which he wrote that he conversed with spirits from Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and the moon (he left out Uranus and Neptune, which had not yet been discovered). Towards the end of his life, Swedenborg warned others against seeking out spirit contact, although later spiritualists ignored his concerns.

Sadly, not a real ghost

In the protoscientific atmosphere of the Enlightenment, when ancient superstition was measured against hypotheses and theories modern science was in the process of formulating, Swedenborg’s spiritual writings were influential to those seeking ‘direct personal knowledge of the afterlife.’ 

One of the astrologer/astronomers he influenced was Franz Mesmer, a German physician known for his theories about animal magnetism (a natural transference of energies between animate and inanimate objects) and hypnosis.

Hypnosis made it possible for spiritualists to contact, or at the very least, appear to contact, the dead through an induced trance-state. Speaking to the dead became big business from the 1850s on, but its very success (due in large part to the overwhelming mortality rates of the Civil War and World War I) contributed to its notoriety, drawing both the skeptical and the believer.

Toward the end of the 19th century, then, speaking to the dead via a trance-induced medium, preferably during a séance, became de rigueur. Spiritualism, a recognized religion, which began with Swedenborg’s belief that he could communicate with spirit-guided entities from other realms, had been combined with modern science and technologies available at the time to create a compelling mystical practice, with roots in both the occult and science. Spiritualism proved far more sophisticated than a mere parlour game, and yet so very dangerous to the emotionally vulnerable or gullible.

Two organizations begun during this time have carried on into the present: The Ghost Club, founded in London in 1862, is about to celebrate its 150th year; and the Society for Psychical Research. Both organizations were created with the purpose of investigating, with the intention of either proving or disproving, the existence of the spiritual realm, and both societies, therefore, consider themselves founded in the principles of science. In fact, many one-time skeptics and scientists have become converts to the belief in spiritualism, as I will discuss in the next blog entry, when we look at the odd friendship and inevitable estrangement of Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

The popularity of séances grew dramatically with the founding of the religion of Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Related articles

• Reporter Scared Out of Her Mind By Haunted House (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• Civil War Haunted House (thelintinmypocket.wordpress.com)
• Halloween Evening Reads… Stories and Tales (skydancingblog.com)
• Is Your House Haunted? (123beta.com)
• Of haunted houses and harmless phantoms (beyondthestarsastrology.wordpress.com)
• Why haunted houses work: It’s all about the right kind of fear (theglobeandmail.com)