Modern & Contemporary
Symbol · 18th century
The Medicine Wheel
One Name, Two Objects
Taught as timeless, the four-colour wheel spread from a 1972 book, and borrows a Wyoming sacred site's name.
What it meansAs taught, it maps four directions to four colours, four ages, four elements and four races of humanity — a totality in which every part is equally necessary and none is the centre. The teaching's appeal is that it makes wholeness a matter of position rather than of rank.
The FindingThe four-colour quadrant 'medicine wheel' of workshops and posters was popularised by Hyemeyohsts Storm's Seven Arrows in 1972; the Wyoming stone wheel it took its name from has no colours, and Eddy, who surveyed it with a transit that same year, wrote that its cairns 'do not lie at or even very near the cardinal directions'.
Thread · Modern Currents · 1896
Hélène Smith and the Martian Language
French in Martian Dress
A famous 1890s spiritualist case where linguists proved a medium's channeled 'Martian' language was cryptomnesia of French.
SignificanceFlournoy's reading is the one that lasted: the unconscious is a maker, inventive and tireless, and it built a whole language while believing it had received one. The case is treated as evidence about creativity rather than about Mars — subliminal romance, in his phrase.
The FindingThe best-documented mediumistic language of its age was refuted inside its own source: Flournoy's 1900 book prints Hélène Smith's Martian glossary beside his demonstration that its word order is French and one Martian word answers each French one.
Thread · Modern Currents○
The Near-Death Experience
A cluster of reported experiences during clinical death or its approach — a tunnel, a light, a life review — named and popularised from 1975.
SignificanceFor many who report one, the experience reorders life: fear of dying falls away, and love and learning come to matter more than status or possessions. For believers it is testimony that consciousness may outlast the body, and a glimpse of what awaits.
The FindingThe term itself is recent: Raymond Moody coined it in 1975. A 2014 clinical study of cardiac arrest survivors, the largest of its kind, set out carefully what had and had not actually been verified about awareness during resuscitation — a rare case of the phenomenon meeting a controlled test.