The Findings: Modern & Contemporary | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Modern Conspiracism6
- The IlluminatiRobison misdated it: 'founded in 1775', 'abolished in 1786'. It was founded on 1 May 1776; the edict that broke it is dated 2 March 1785.
- The Nazi Occultism MythThe 'Vril Society' began as a Berlin 'Society for Truth' that Willy Ley recalled in 1947; Pauwels and Bergier renamed it and made it a Nazi power in 1960.
- Behold a Pale HorseCooper's 1991 edition reprints the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as chapter 15. An author's note calls it an exact reprint and tells readers to substitute 'Illuminati' for 'Jews'.
- MKUltraDulles approved MKUltra on 13 April 1953; its records were destroyed in January 1973. Seven misfiled boxes, about 8,000 pages, were found in 1977 by a CIA employee answering Freedom of Information requests.
- The Satanic PanicThe McMartin case, by 1990 the longest criminal trial in US history, ended without a conviction; in 1992 the FBI's Kenneth Lanning found no organised satanic cult.
- The Saturn Death Cult ClaimMcLachlan's site carries a 2011 copyright; the archived Red Ice interview is dated 6 February 2012, not an ancient source.
Entheogens4
- Aldous HuxleyThe pairing predates him: William James wrote in 1902 that nitrous oxide and ether 'stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree'. Huxley himself refused to equate mescalin with the Beatific Vision.
- Food of the GodsFor mushrooms sharpening early hunters' sight, McKenna cites Roland Fischer's late-1960s test: students on small doses of psilocybin got better at seeing parallel lines turn skewed.
- Soma: Divine Mushroom of ImmortalityDated 1968 but issued in 1969, the first edition was 680 numbered copies on handmade paper at $200, John Brough noted in his 1971 review.
- KavaKava was in a European journal by May 1616. At the Hoorn Islands, now Futuna and Alofi, Jacob Le Maire's voyage pictured men "chewing a certain green herb, called by them kava".
New Age4
- Seed of LifeThe seven-circle figure is far older than its New Age name. A lattice of such rosettes is carved across a gypsum door-sill from Ashurbanipal's North Palace at Nineveh, seventh century BC, now Louvre AO 19915.
- Indigo ChildrenNancy Ann Tappe said she first saw indigo auras in the early 1970s. Carroll and Tober's 1999 book popularised them; a contributor argued many were misdiagnosed with ADHD.
- The SecretByrne's foreword traces her secret to 'a hundred-year-old book' from her daughter: Wallace Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich (1910), 'the book that changed my life'.
- Crystal HealingMarbod of Rennes's eleventh-century verse lapidary already called amethyst "contrarius ebrietati", opposed to drunkenness. By the fourteenth century it had been translated into French, Provençal, Italian, Irish and Danish.
Fringe Archaeology2
- Erich von DänikenRobert Charroux made the same claims in 1963. Der Spiegel set their passages side by side in March 1969; Econ, Däniken's publisher, agreed to name Charroux as a source.
- The Ancient Astronaut HypothesisEven its publisher later conceded that von Däniken's 1968 book largely plagiarised earlier writers. Its sources included Pauwels and Bergier's Le Matin des magiciens (1960) and Robert Charroux's very similar Histoire inconnue des hommes (1963).
Fringe Science2
- Quantum MysticismThe physicist Victor Stenger replied in 1995 and 1997 that the standard interpretation 'says nothing about consciousness', only about what can be measured.
- The Tao of PhysicsCapra signed his preface in December 1974, before Berkeley students formed the Fundamental Fysiks Group in 1975, yet accounts of the group list his book among its bestsellers.
Modern Rune Divination2
- Ralph BlumBy his own account Blum had 'never seen a runic text' when he ordered and glossed the stones in one night. His sequence thus broke with the traditional futhark order. The ancient divinatory meanings, he conceded, 'are lost to us': the meanings printed in 1982 are his, partly drawn from I Ching hexagrams.
- The Book of Runes (1982)Blum did not devise the blank rune. His 1982 book says the home-made set that came to him in England in 1976 already had one, glossed 'that which is predestined and cannot be avoided'. His own reading turns the gloss round: 'Nothing is predestined; there is nothing that cannot be avoided', he writes.
Parapsychology2
- The Near-Death ExperienceThe life review was debated long before the name: in January 1896 Victor Egger weighed Professor Heim's reports of climbers who relived their whole past as they fell.
- Remote ViewingAt the 1995 review that ended the US programme, statistician Jessica Utts judged psychic functioning 'well established'; psychologist Ray Hyman called that premature.
Psychedelia2
- Timothy LearyLeary long said Harvard fired him in 1963; in 1996 Harvard said he got unpaid leave as his contract ran out. Richard Alpert was fired, for giving undergraduates drugs.
- The Psychedelic ExperienceLennon took the first line of 'Tomorrow Never Knows' (1966) from the manual's "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream", says Barry Miles.
Psychedelic Research2
- Rick Strassman and the DMT TrialsDMT was first reported in pineal-gland fluid only in 2013, from rats, in a paper he co-wrote, twelve years after his book proposed the pineal as its source.
- MAPS and the Psychedelic RenaissanceDoblin's 1986-89 follow-up of the 1962 Good Friday Experiment found what Walter Pahnke never reported: one psilocybin subject was given thorazine as a tranquilliser.
Human Potential1
- Esalen InstituteThe phrase 'human potential movement' was coined as Murphy and George Leonard talked until dawn on 2 February 1965. Leonard added 'movement', thinking of civil rights.
Lost Continents1
- Atlantis: The Antediluvian WorldBlavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888) leans on Donnelly throughout and praises his 'rare intuition'. Yet she corrects him: culture began not in Atlantis but with the teachings of 'Divine Rulers' far earlier.
Modern conspiracy esotericism1
- The Reptilian ClaimIcke did not invent them: Michael Barkun (2003) traced the shape-shifting serpent race to Robert E. Howard's pulp story 'The Shadow Kingdom' (1929).
Modern Numerology1
- Chaldean NumerologyCheiro's Book of Numbers (London, 1926) calls its letter table an 'ancient Chaldean and Hebrew alphabet'. He cites no source, and the table numbers the English alphabet.
New Age / Internet Esotericism1
- Angel NumbersAngel Numbers (2005) was not the start. Its publisher says the pocket guide grew from a brief chapter on repeated number sequences in Virtue's Healing with the Angels (1999), which readers carried to decode them.
Plains nations / modern1
- The Medicine WheelStorm's Seven Arrows popularised the four-colour wheel in 1972. The Bighorn wheel, the first medicine wheel in print, has no colours; Eddy found its cairns 'do not lie at or even very near the cardinal directions'.
Psychedelic Chemistry1
- Ann and Alexander ShulginAnn Shulgin's 1995 essay says 'Adam', the therapist Leo Zeff, met MDMA through Sasha in 1972. Sasha's notebook, read by Benzenhöfer and Passie in 2010, shows he first tried it in 1976 and gave it to Zeff in 1977.
Psychical Research1
- Hélène Smith and the Martian LanguageClaim and refutation share one binding: Flournoy's 1900 book prints the Martian texts beside proof that their word order is French, word for word.
Rationalist Pantheism1
- Baruch SpinozaHe finished the Ethics by 1675 but withheld it. Printed in the Opera Posthuma after his death in 1677, it was banned throughout Holland in 1678.
Sacred geometry (New Age)1
- Flower of LifeThe Abydos drawings that lend the pattern its antiquity are graffiti beside the Greek letters ICXC. David Furlong (2008) put them in the Christian era, perhaps the fifth or sixth century CE.
Soviet Parapsychology1
- Kirlian PhotographyIn 1976 Pehek, Kyler and Faust showed in Science that moisture passing from the subject to the film explains most variation in Kirlian images.
UFO Lore1
- Betty and Barney HillTheir hypnotist did not believe it. Benjamin Simon, who treated them in 1964, judged the most tenable explanation to be Betty's dreams of 1961, which had 'assumed the quality of a fantasied experience'.