Psychic Hoax

Sunday February 5, 2011

Psychic Hoax

“The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

      Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks.  (New York) W. W. Norton. 97

    Throughout his life William Butler Yeats believed in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology.  His interest in these fueled his imagination with ideas and images that he employed in his poetry.  Even though W. H. Auden admired Yeats’s poetry, he found his idiosyncratic beliefs in Yeats’s poetry troubling.  He said that Yeats’s willingness to accept the occult as a means to know the future or a way to divine life’s mysteries was the “deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic.”  Of course, Auden is correct in this assessment.  Any grown man who believes the occult has fallen under some illusion of magic and mysticism. Nevertheless, Auden was spellbound by the beauty of Yeats’s poems.

   When writing poetry a poet steeps external reality in the world of the imagination and for Yeats that reality included the occult which he used to beguile the boundaries of the quotidian with mystical beliefs. The genius of his poetry and the need to satisfy his ravenous imagination make it forgivable that Yeats believed in the occult or worse, that he consulted astrologists to learn whether Maud Gonne would ever return his love.  In the twenty-first century, I would expect that all but the most credulous would dismiss such ignis fatuus for what it is.  Yet, even today many people read daily horoscopes and consult psychics with the hope that they might find answers to their problems and might communicate with dead relatives, friends.  In fact, many credit psychic readings with literally transporting from the grave the spirit of a parent, brother, sister, or friend into their presence during the course of a “reading.”

   Recently, a friend consulted a psychic and told me about the reading the psychic offered her.  At first, I thought her visit was for her amusement and the money she spent no more a loss than what one might slip into an Atlantic City slot machine.  To my shock, she credited the psychic with touching upon some personal matters in her life with an uncanny accuracy.  But more distressing was her willingness to believe this charlatan’s success at summoning deceased members of her family to join them at that reading.  Clearly, he manipulated her through her grief over the recent death of her brother.  Though I tried to wrest her from the grip of this sham artist’s illusions, she remained convinced that he had tapped into some special psychic energy that graced him with the power of clairvoyance.

   Anyone who believes a psychic’s ability to summon their dead relatives and foretell future events has failed to consult the most rudimentary research that exposes how these swindlers scam unfortunately willing victims.  Psychics gull victims by using a series of techniques which include cold reading, warm reading, hot reading, “shot-gunning,” the Forer effect, and the rainbow ruse to name a few.   One source that can quickly disabuse one of the psychic’s “power” is The Skeptic’s Dictionary (Skeptic.com) which provides reasonable and logical explanations of how these methods work.  If you are tempted to visit a psychic, read this website first.

   It can be safely stated that many, like my friend, who consult psychics feel confident that they possess a strong faculty of reason.  Yet they accept answers to questions that categorically exceed human knowledge from someone who claims to have supernatural powers. Surely the imagination, as was true in Yeats’s case, conjures possibilities that don’t exist.  And surely the grief over someone’s death or the anxiety over what awaits us in the future can spawn in the imagination the idea that spirits exist in an afterlife from which they can visit us and to which we will travel once we die.  Perhaps these basic human feelings explain why so many fall for the obvious psychic hoax.  Or perhaps it is too painful and frightening to confront the simple fact that we know exactly where the dead are and the only other knowledge we have for certain is one day we will join them.