All Hallows
Halloween used to be my favorite holiday. Not any more. After years and years of doing seances and other haunted events, each time I see the season approach and the bowls of candy corn come out, I’m reminded that the doors of the spooky barn are again going to swing wide open and every lunatic fringe paranormal belief will be trotted out once again, without much true history, rational interest or skeptical thought to show what’s really going on. That amazes me.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m the first to love a good ghost story and I will do my best to put on my most classy and well scripted seance to thrill every person I can and I still look forward to this time of year for the chance to stretch the imaginations and maybe even scare the hell out of a few folks, but these days I’m conflicted.
With the media covering every street corner haunting on morning tv and the latest shock jock drive time radio shows (many of which I have been frequently asked to participate in) I’m asked to assume my role. It is a role after all. Yes, skeptics out there; I do readings with tarot, palmistry and the occasional rune stone, and for the corporate groups who look down their noses at such superstitious claptrap, I offer handwriting analysis. Never mind that even though this last “divination” process which is accepted as more credible is still just another branch of cold reading and that the techniques employed are nearly identical, it has become harder and harder for me to hold back the urge to jump up and say, “Enough!”
Problem is, I catch hell from magicians and mentalists for revealing psychic secrets and face worse when I admit to doing a palm reading to a skeptic. I was brought up as a magician with greasepaint in my blood and no matter what my skeptical mind tells me is the “right” thing to do, I’m an entertainer …and entertain I must! People pay me to lie to them. Can you imagine that? I’m trained to supply the fantastic and bizarre and the more bizarre and outrageous, the better. I love that! I’m a charlatan, ladies and gentlemen. With all the corruption, cheating and con-artistry going on out there in the big money world, my “problem” seems a tame one. Is it really or am I deluding myself? Are my issues just the ripple effect from what’s going on globally?
Here we are, approaching a new administration and hopefully a new era. I can’t change my past, but I sure as hell don’t look forward to a future with any more bullshit. Walking this double-edged sword has been an adventure verging on schizophrenia. I look forward to a new direction with The Skeptologists. With this group all my training and experience has finally been given a new meaning. There’s light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Meanwhile, BOOO. Any suggestions?
I’d say that your “problem” is a big one for you, but not necessarily for the world as a whole. Desire to view the world differently or to try to understand one’s place it in is normal for humans, and so there will always be demand for people who present a different world view. Some of those are palm readers, tarotists, etc. Some are actors and authors. I think that as long as you are aware of the reality behind what you’re doing and are willing to explain the process behind your act to the people you perform for that you shouldn’t have any qualms about what you do. There will always be people who believe there is more to what you do than what you show and tell them and there is nothing you can do about it. But for every one of them, there is another person who you’ve shown the truth to and who accepts it. Every little bit of education that the world receives is important. Keep it up!
I guess this is a situation where you really can’t please everyone. Some people are going to believe that psychics and magic are real no matter what, and some won’t. Plenty will appreciate you explaining it to them and plenty won’t. So if you enjoy doing it, and people enjoy watching it, why stop?
Well, in your past you may have been a liar, but now you are an honest liar. There is nothing wrong with that. There’s duality but it’s sort of like the “scariness” of halloween but no real fear. Enjoy the “show” of it and now you get the added bonus of actually teaching people some critical thinking.
I was Wiccan for twelve years; Halloween was a religious holiday for me. Now, I’m dressing up as a zombie with a zombie dog.
How does your art differ from that of a stage magician, like James Randi?
“People pay me to lie to them. Can you imagine that? I’m trained to supply the fantastic and bizarre and the more bizarre and outrageous, the better. I love that! I’m a charlatan, ladies and gentlemen. With all the corruption, cheating and con-artistry going on out there in the big money world, my “problem” seems a tame one.”
Are you sure you aren’t a member of Congress as well? :P
I have a similar problem, in that I have ceased being entertained by spooky stuff on TV. I used to eat that stuff up, but now I sit there and think, “Well, it actually sounds like that kid has schizophrenia, not possession…”. If I want to enjoy the holiday, I have to pretend everything is fictional (sort of the opposite of suspending disbelief).
Maybe you should try to shift your framework totally to entertainment. I used to work at a major theme park, and we had to constantly lie to guests to keep up the ‘story’. Lie about real things, like that the guests were indeed digging fossil dinosaur and mammoth bones out of the ground, even though Orlando is pretty much all very recent carbonate rocks and the bones were fake. I had to reframe it as though I were in a play or movie, and the guests were playing along (of course, most of them weren’t in on the game). You are an entertainer, providing a days’ amusement to people, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Forgive the analogy, but a lap dance is just a lap dance.
I’ve often wondered or feared if my work as a scientist and my general materialist outlook are imagination killers. In other words, is it possible for a godless materialist to write a great ghost story?
With that said, I see Halloween as a once-yearly license to engage with superstitious/irrational fears in their own terms.
It’s interesting that you mentioned catching “hell from magicians and mentalists for revealing psychic secrets,” because this has been an issue I’ve been lately thinking a lot about. I’m a skeptic but I am not a magician. Given this, I’ve made no oath to protect the secrets of magic. And while there’s no question that the world of magic and mentalism has been great to this movement (that goes without saying), I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this particular value being encouraged within the skeptical world of upholding the magician’s code. I love magic as much as the next person. And it’s true that if more of the techniques of magic were exposed, something that has been part of magic tradition for a long time could be lost (though likely not for everyone), but I completely disagree with the assertion frequently made that magic loses its luster when the trick is revealed and that knowing how its done somehow ruins the fun. I find that at least for myself, I actually gain greater appreciation and enjoyment when I learn how a particular trick is done.
In fact, just a few Monday’s again a friend and I went to one of the NYC Monday Night Magic shows that skeptic Jaime Ian Swiss is apart of. One of the other performers did a trick that I was able to figure out based on my recent readings about how magic uses misdirection. So I kept my eyes on exactly where the magician was directing everyone else away from and saw the trick happen before my very eyes. Sure I didn’t get the same experience as most of the other spectators but I’ve had that experience before. Now my appreciation came more from respecting the artistry of a good trick done well. I think it could be argued that this is a deeper appreciation than simply being mystified and never getting the solution.
And of course even some of the biggest names in magic who are also skeptics have from time to time revealed how particular tricks are done. And now that we live in the information age, it’s not nearly as hard to find the solutions to many magic tricks anyway. You can even buy books by the magicians themselves that teach the craft on Amazon. It just seems silly to me that so much of the skeptical movement chooses to handicap itself by just accepting this tradition that probably goes back to the days where magicians had no hesitation about passing themselves off as genuine spiritualists, possibly designed as a means of keeping the scam going.
And when I mean by handicapping ourselves I’m thinking of videos I’ve seen of Randi where he was suggesting that guys who claim to talk to the dead are using simple magic tricks but stopped short of giving a lesson on how the trick is actually done, something that I feel would at least do as much short-term damage to these frauds as Randi’s initial exposing of Peter Popoff. If more people knew how to do this stuff, they would not be so easily impressed or fooled. Plus they might gain a new enjoyment by then performing the tricks on their friends.
And finally, I have a sneaking suspicion that the magic world would manage to still thrive in a world where more people knew the tricks. People like a good show. Hell, it might even push the magicians to work that much harder to revolutionize the industry with newer and increasingly more innovative ways to fool people.
[...] As much as I love Hallow-e’en, it is the time when all the crazies and spooks come out – “After years and years of doing seances and other haunted events, each time I see the season approach and the bowls of candy corn come out, I’m reminded that the doors of the spooky barn are again going to swing wide open and every lunatic fringe paranormal belief will be trotted out once again, without much true history, rational interest or skeptical thought to show what’s really going on.” [...]
[...] Magicians’ Code A comment in this blog got me thinking. Skeptic Mark Edward said this: Problem is, I catch hell from magicians and [...]
Does the skeptical approach make our world a less exciting one?
I had a rich imagination as a child. I’d dream up fantasy creatures at the bottom of the garden. I’d then construct elaborate traps to capture one and perhaps make it my pet. After numerous failures my nascent scientific mind began to wonder if they really existed.
Another early scientific experiment involved telepathy. I tied my little sister to a tree and promised immediate release if she could reveal which cards I was holding. The experiment failed and an intefering variable arrived in the form of angry parents.
As an adult I still love Star Wars and Jurassic Park. I’d love to one day write science fiction or fantasy. I find the natural world astonishing. Yes, the supernatural world fascinated and thrilled me for many years. I jumped from religion to ghosts to magic to psychic phenomena with glee – but invariably the realization struck home that there simply wasn’t anything there. I think it’s called growing up.
Can a skeptic write a good ghost story? Perhaps one of the most renowned horror story writers of the 20th-century was H.P. Lovecraft, avowed atheist and self-described mechanistic materialist. See the introduction to his famous essay on the supernatural in literature:
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/superhor.htm