PROPHECY OR EVIL EYE?

On 14 April 1912, the luxury liner, Titanic, went down on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg. In 1898 Morgan Robertson had written a novel, futility, in which a similar ship had met a similar fate.
Just a few years before the disaster, journalist W T Stead warned of a coming tragedy here because of a lack of lifeboats. Consequently, when Titanic sailed, many of the passengers and crew were too frightened to turn up.

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Perhaps the owners of the Titanic made a big mistake describing their ship as unsinkable. Why? Was it tempting fate? Or could it be that the public’s lack of faith caused unconscious decisions in the crew that led to the disaster? For instance, what caused the crew to go too fast in iceberg territory? Did they feel they had something to prove?
Psychiatrist Dr John Barker theorised the existence of the self-fulfilling prophecy, where your mind actually causes something to come true. Many cases of supposed precognition could fall in line with this idea – itself just a simple variation of a possible mechanism behind astrology. However, this is far from a complete understanding of our ability to affect the future.

I CHING

There are problems with prophecy. And the problems intensify when we look to a similar discipline, divination. Typical is the ancient Chinese system of I Ching, thought to have been devised by the emperor Fu Shi, but unknown in the west until relatively modern times.
An off-shoot of Taoism, there is no past, present or future within the system. There is just the lifeforce, ch’i, and its complimentary forces of preservation and destruction, yin and yang. By consulting the ‘book of changes’, the diviner can toss 50 yarrow sticks or three coins three times.
The way they land produces a ‘hexagram’, consisting of patterns of solid and broken lines. The result is seen as a guide to how you should continue your life.

TAROT

Another system is the Tarot, from the Italian ‘tarochi’, meaning trumps. A pack of cards in two parts, the Tarot is split into the Major Arcana with 22 cards representing death, wisdom, etc, and the Minor Arcana with 56 cards representing the suits wands, swords, cups and pentacles (there is an additional picture card in each suit, the page).
Thought to have been brought to Europe by gypsies, the earliest known pack of 17 cards is kept in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The modern pack was created in 1910 by occultist Arthur Edward Waite.
The pictures are said by some to be ancient images from the Egyptian Book of Thoth, whilst others think they can be traced to the Hebrew alphabet.
Carl Jung saw them as archetypal images from the human psyche. But to many dabblers, shuffling them and laying them out in chance order can hold predictive qualities.

COINCIDENCE

How viable is it that random fluctuations of sticks/coins or cards can lead to real knowledge of the future? Could any ‘success’ be simply down to coincidence, for instance?
The Oxford Dictionary defines coincidence as a ‘ … notable concurrence of events of circumstances without apparent causal connections.’ This reminds me of Chaos Theory. For instance, could it be simply that our interpretation is too reductionist to understand the causes?

CHANCE

Could coincidence be an off-shoot of chance, with predictability leading to order? For instance, when a study was carried out into the number of dog bites in New York, each bite appeared random, but the annual percentage of bites hardly varied from year to year.
If we take a radioactive isotope, the decay of a particle is totally unpredictable, but an isotope has an exact half-life. Even physicists such as Paul Dirac could think of only one word to explain the unique balance that led to the formation of the universe and life. Coincidence.
However, Carl Jung was also fascinated with coincidences, evolving his theory of ‘synchronicity’, where he argued that coincidences were so extraordinary that perhaps the mind had a role to play in the world to bring them about.
Indeed, such a mind/disaster scenario has been with us for centuries, ignored by science because it comes under the heading of Curse.

CURSE

There are many famous curses, ranging from the events following the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, to those associated with Voodoo. And we can see a specific socio-psychological ‘mechanism’ at work in them.
Consider how people involved in the excavations in Egypt would have felt as more and more people seemed to be affected by the curse. Rationally, they would no doubt seem to ignore it, but could their unconscious mind have played an effect in their actions?
If so, then we can see the odds increase above chance, causing a synchronistic action that could lead to injury, or affect the person’s health. And I would argue, good reader, that as in the Titanic, and the practices of divination, above, a culture can be created in which the mind could well direct you towards your own destiny.
For centuries such a power has been placed in the ‘evil’ adept, and was called the ‘evil eye’. I suspect a ‘belief’ in his powers could cause you to place the ‘evil eye’ upon yourself.

(c) Anthony North, March 2008

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