Lab Notes
Sleight of Spirit

Note to readers: Although unlucky numbers are not a scientific concept, the final draft of this column was completed on Friday, Oct. 13—a date that comes up even less frequently than Leap Day. Read at your own risk. Still, October's favorite holiday, falling 18 days later, has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain ("Summer's End," celebrated on Nov. 1), when hilltop bonfires were set so that people could carry torches back to their homes and relight their hearth fires for the winter. Cattle were brought back from their summer pastures, land leases were renewed or renegotiated, slowpoke farmers gathered up the last of their fall harvests, and poor people begged for food to stock their winter larders. This practical holiday also had a strong religious component, though, because on this day worshippers believed the world of the gods overlapped and intermingled with the material world. This made it a favorable time for divination—the magical art of reading the future—and to petition the gods for health, wealth, long life and other material concerns.

Not all gods in the Celtic pantheon were friendly, though, so this was also a day of thrilling and terrifying supernatural episodes, fraught with danger. During Samhain, almost anything could happen! In response, the Celts offered sacrifices of food to placate the gods, and also the spirits of the dead, who were believed to return home to visit for the night. As darkness fell, the bonfires served to light the way for good spirits and to frighten away the evil ones, and just to be safe many people wore masks so the dead wouldn't recognize them. This of course reinforced the mythology; when you actually do see ghosts and hobgoblins roaming the gloomy hills, the safe bet is to dress up like one yourself and blend in. And when the people around you fear the divine pranks of the gods, it makes sense to pull some secular pranks of your own and blame them on the spirit world.

As the Roman empire expanded to include Britain, Samhain took on influences from the Latin funerary holiday of Feralia (even though that was traditionally celebrated on Feb. 21) and the harvest holiday of Pomona (celebrated by, among other things, bobbing for apples). This thrice-pagan festival continued well into Christian times, until finally the Catholic holiday of All Saints' Day was moved on top of it in order to confuse and Christianize the day. The night before Samhain then became All Hallows Eve, or Halloween. Spanish conquistadores carried this hybrid holiday with them to Mexico, where it welded itself to Aztec funerary traditions of the same season to become Dia De Los Muertos, a festive time when people bring gifts of toys, candy and alcohol to local graveyards to share with their dead relatives. This, in turn, has had a global influence on the concept and celebration of Halloween, which continues to this day.

Nothing up their sleeves

It's all in good fun; I think you'd be hard pressed to find an organized mainstream religion today teaching that the dead actually return to Earth on Halloween night. However, it's worth remembering that as recently as the 1920s large numbers of ordinary people—including respectable scientists and scholars—were still practicing séances in a completely credulous way. This ancient ceremony's format dates back at least to biblical times, and probably much earlier: The living sit down with a witch or medium, who enters a (sometimes drug-induced) trance to commune with the spirits of the dead. Sometimes the connection is by voice alone, with the medium serving as a kind of psychic telephone, and sometimes there are visual, auditory or even physical manifestations as the spirit moves objects, or takes on solid form to interact directly with the world of the living. The medium is generally viewed as having special powers or spirit relationships, although some belief systems allow almost anyone to fill this role.

In the late 1700s, communication with the dead became associated with the new science of Mesmerism (hypnosis), and the Americans and English (and to a lesser extent, the continental Europeans) saw this "spiritualism" more as a rational, materialist, reductionist pursuit than a religious or supernatural one. Beginning in 1848, though, the movement took on an increasingly unfortunate association with showmanship, stage magic and money. Probing criminal and scientific investigations revealed widespread fraud in the industry, but public and scientific interest continued unabated for decades. People understandably yearned for it all to be true, for science to prove once and for all the existence of an afterlife—and the possibility of connecting to it while still alive. Even the Catholic Church issued a statement condemning "necromancy" but encouraging the legitimate scientific investigation of spiritualist claims.

It's against this backdrop that two new movies—Neil Burger's The Illusionist (based on a short story by Steven Millhauser) and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (based on a novel by Christopher Priest)—seek to beguile us away from our faith in modern science. With life and death literally hanging in the balance, we're treated (like the audiences of Victorian spiritualists) to the suggestion that the carefully staged magic is somehow real—that by studying card tricks and sleight of hand long enough and hard enough, a stage conjurer can actually tap into the primal forces of nature.

Do you believe in magic?

Which is true in a Clarke's Law kind of way: Any sufficiently advanced technology (or sufficiently clever Victorian mechanism) is, to the properly positioned audience, indistinguishable from magic. It may not be possible to grow an orange tree in 30 seconds—especially in Vienna!—but there really are potions (e.g., tetrodotoxin) that mimic the effects of death. There really are people (e.g., Teller, Harry Houdini) who can hold their breath for minutes at a time while wriggling out of chains and straitjackets. There really are gizmos (e.g., the Van de Graaff generator) that can generate lightning and Saint Elmo's fire and other pyrotechnics while people stand safely nearby. There's even a credible theory kicking around that the Ark of the Covenant was a gigantic capacitor, designed by Egyptian alchemists and capable—actually capable!—of electrocuting a human being. If that's not "real" magic I don't know what is.

Still, Harry Houdini (1874-1926, born Erik Weisz) could not have performed his famous escape tricks without great physical strength and a custom set of locksmithing tools. No one knows better than a magician how easy it is to fool a crowd. As a result, he dedicated his life to debunking spiritualism and other pseudoscience—a tradition that lives on today with magicians Penn & Teller and James "The Amazing" Randi. A skeptic even in death, Houdini promised to send a coded message to his wife from the other side if at all possible. Unfortunately, before her death in 1943, Beatrice Houdini declared the experiment a failure. No message was ever received. The actual biographies of men like Houdini—and of real wizards like Nikola Tesla—are beyond the scope of this column, but are fascinating and well worth investigating in your spare October evenings. As for The Illusionist and The Prestige, well, in a science-in-SF sense it's difficult to say much about them without giving away their secrets and, you know, spoiling the trick. But they're worth your time as well.

Seriously, though: Here in the real world, can we contact the dead by joining hands around a coffee table? Can we summon the words, the thoughts, the images of deceased loved ones by sheer force of will? None of the supposed evidence for this has ever survived the modern peer-review process, and while spiritualism lives on in the loosely organized New Age religion, in occult practices, and in occasional TV and stage shows (harkening back to the days of big-money fraudsters?), it's no longer a part of our cultural mainstream.

Both movies also deal with love triangles, and thus primal forces of a different sort. The point is well made, that for better or worse, love and death are not ours to command. Similarly, if death is the state in which we exist only in the memories of our loved ones, then the proper way to raise spirits is by treasuring the dead in our hearts and, yes, by raising a glass (or downing a chocolate bar) to their memory in a graveyard sometime. If we honor them properly with our actions in the here and now, do we really need to see their approval spelled out on an Ouija board? Better for everyone, I think, to let the dead rest in peace while we, the living, dance around the Samhain fires of modern cinema as the Halloween darkness falls.

Sources:
The James Randi Educational Foundation: www.randi.org

Campbell, Cathie: "History and Hauntings," The Sierra Star, 28 October 2005

The Science Channel: "The Ark of the Covenant Revealed," 2004

Blackburn, Michael and Bennett, Mark: "Re-Engineering the Ark," Fortean Times, March 2006

Old Testament of the Bible: Samuel 28:7-19

www.rottentomatoes.com: "The Illusionist," "The Prestige"

The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): "The Prestige"

Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 Ultimate Reference Suite: "Samhain," "Feralia," "Halloween," "Spiritualism," "Houdini, Harry"

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Dia De Los Muertos," "Penn & Teller"