A dizzying labyrinth of credulity

Chris Hill delves into a sympathetic but comprehensive study of the human desire to believe in the paranormal and metaphysical in our quest for existential reassurance

Mysteries and Secrets Revealed

From Oracles at Delphi to Spiritualism in America

Loren Pankratz

Prometheus Books 2021

Hb, £25, 472pp, ISBN 9781633886681

If you have ever asked yourself “How can anybody believe that?” then Loren Pankratz’s history of deception is highly recommended. As a former professor of psychiatry now involved in forensic consultancy, there is little about human gullibility that he has not considered. From the ancient world to the rise of Spiritualism, he guides the reader through a dizzying labyrinth of human fallibility in its search for existential reassurance.

Beginning in Delphi, Pankratz explores how the trust of the Athenian elite in the oracles remained steadfast even in the face of defeat at the hands of the Persians and the apocalyptic plague of 429 BC. Their political agency thrived until the more astute Theodosius sanctioned their questionable prognostications in AD 392; a move indicative of growing public suspicion and the rise of Christianity. The 17th-century polymath Bernard de Fontenelle later explored this rich seam of deception in his History of Oracles (1687), which to the annoyance of the Church drew a comparison between the naïvety of the oracular devotees and the control mechanisms of Christian demonology. Appeals to paranormal forces were a feature of civil society through the centuries, we read, and Pankratz explores the close parallels between scientific and mathematical discoveries and the acceptance of alchemy, magic and astrology as legitimate investigative protocols, particularly among Renaissance thinkers such as Geralmo Cardano.

The persecution of Galileo Galilei and his insistence upon empirical observation becomes a suitable case history for the author to further explore the complex relationship between scientific and religious authority. As the Copernican revolution spread throughout Europe and the flawed Aristotelian cosmology favoured by the Church and State underwent more exacting scrutiny, we discover that “truth” becomes political capital. Finding his state patronage removed and the subject of Inquisitorial interest, Galileo’s science very nearly cost him his life. The papacy insisted on Aristotelian orthodoxy in an edict of 1614 and Galileo, humiliated and without support, reluctantly recanted his Copernican leanings. Jesuitical confirmation of his findings proved irrelevant in the case and thankfully his work

He focuses on the clairvoyants and carnivalesque characters of the Spiritualist circus

found publication beyond the authoritarian Venetian state.

Fellow traveller Federico Cesi also capitalised on the new science of optics and took the fight inwards to the cellular level. His investigation into fossil remains and plant life brought about a systemisation of enquiry and raised questions about our very origins. Pankratz offers the reader quite wonderful biographical sketches of such intellectual pioneering and cogently contextualises the importance of the institutionalisation of scientific enquiry into bodies like the Royal Society of London (founded 1660), which ensured anonymity for its members as they pursued fundamental research into the material world. Was superstition finally on the run?

Apparently not, as focus shifts to a discussion of the clairvoyants and carnivalesque characters that emerged in the hugely popular Spiritualist circus of the 19th century. The scene is historically contextualised with an account of how fantasy narratives and mystical discourses become almost interchangeable. Cyrano de Bergerac’s lunar contact narratives and Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary Christianity, replete with extraterrestrial beings, have much in common, but whereas de Bergerac’s tales were recognisably fiction, Swedenborg’s became foundational myths for a religious movement.

As intellectual boundaries became blurred, new avenues of trickery opened up, aided and abetted by such fads as the “mental magnetism” of Franz Mesmer, notions of a “collective consciousness” and theorists of a plethora of other dimensions. By the 19th century any seeker after the “real truth” could happily delve into a mishmash of paranormal alternatives.

With its American origins, Spiritualism’s first celebrities were undoubtedly the Fox sisters of New York who established contact with the spirit world in 1848. Such was the attendant media attention and devotion that surrounded them that even an admission of trickery in 1889 did not dissuade their followers. Pankratz portrays the key players of this lucrative trade in elegant vignettes and illustrates the singular point that attempts to debunk the abilities of clairvoyants, even by luminaries like Michael Faraday and Harry Houdini, were frequently dismissed. A reality not helped by the conversion of paranormal investigator Hereward Carrington to the Spiritualist cause through the antics of the clairvoyant doyennne Eusapia Palladino. America’s greatest export remained popular throughout the 19th century, whether in fashionable salons or local halls and its vocabulary of table-turning and ectoplasmic invocation became staple routines of deception.

Throughout his critique, Pankratz’s tone is never less than sympathetic to our very human existential predicament and its myriad scientific, metaphysical and paranormal expressions, rational and otherwise. Our quest for reassurance, he surmises, defines us and our continuing search for purpose takes many forms, weird and wonderful for sure and always with willing recipients along their intellectual trajectories.

An encyclopædia of human frailty and intellectual insecurity written with a wry sense of fun, Mysteries & Secrets Revealed boasts an excellent bibliography, notes and index.

★★★★★