Part of “Pseudoscience A to Z”, a series of brief articles in the OSSCI newsletter about topics that have not been subjected to much critical thinking by their promoters.

Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: Yes, you can live without food or water, as Breatharians claim. Yesterday I did it for at least nine hours, between my late-night beer and my morning granola bar. I sometimes go even longer. But I doubt it has anything to do with Prana Globules in the air. Confused? Attend….

Breatharianism was the philosophy espoused by Therese Neumann (1898-1962), who claimed that from 1926 until her death in 1962 she lived on nothing but transubstantiated bread. Transubstantiation, as you may already know, is the belief in some Christian sects that the bread served at communion actually becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ. Photographs reveal a rather chubby-cheeked, well nourished woman with all the signs of a healthy appetite, so I presume that the nutritional value of the bread would change, but that is not really our concern here. She was also a stigmatist, one who shows signs of crucifixion, and a mystic. And, for one who lived on very little, she appears surprisingly chubby in photographs. She is no longer with us (her lifestyle apparently does not extend the life expectancy), but she lives on as the patron saint of Breatharianism.

For living without food the proper term, if there can be such a thing, is Inedia. I have been unable to find a proper pronunciation, but let’s assume it’s ‘I need ya’, which is what I would be screaming at every doughnut after a few days. Ah yes, doughnuts. Could you make a good one with Prana globules instead of the usual ingredients? Juergen Buche, ND, thinks that is what enables one to live without food, which he claims is “not only unnecessary, but actually harmful to our health and well-being.” Prana is “divine energy”, and our Sun is a power station for its distribution. And food, well, that just poisons us. He claims that he was enlightened during a solo sailing trip up the East coast of the U.S. He began fasting, and claims that after three weeks he was “detoxified”. An interesting way of referring to food.

Another adherent is Ellen Greve, also known as Jasmuheen, who runs the CIA. No not that CIA. This is the Cosmic Internet Academy, and for the outlay of a few thousand bucks you can attend one of her seminars and learn to live on nothing but air. She lives in a house full of food, but she claims that this is only for her husband, a mere mortal. During a four day long test of her abilities administered by the Australian version of 60 Minutes she may have died if not for the intervention of a supervising medical professional. Her followers are not so fortunate, as at least three of them have died of starvation.

Dr. Johnny Lovewisdom (!) is another purveyor of Prana, and the author of such page turners as The Ascensional Science Of Spiritualizing Fruitarian Dietetics, Spiritualizing Dietetics: Vitarianism, and Maitreya: The Lovewisdom Autobiography, Volume 2, in which “He describes the events that led from his hermit life at lake Quilotoa to his founding of The Pristine Order Of Paradisian Perfection”.

The Common Sense of Physical Immortality, a book by Leonard Orr, gives us such advice as “Death is a grave mistake”, “If you can’t take it with you – don’t go!”, and “Dying is no way to live!” He missed his calling. He could have made legitimate money writing bumper stickers.

Can anyone take this stuff seriously? Unfortunately many do, and as noted it has killed some people. Adults may fall for whatever foolish notion they wish, but many times innocent children are involved, as with the infamous Jim Jones and the massacre of his followers. The promoters of Breatharianism do not seem to make any distinction as to who may follow the path, and no doubt some people are involving their offspring in something which can be easily and quickly lethal. Here is a clear case where society and its institutions should take a firm stand against such nonsense. Living without food or water is so fundamentally and obviously wrong that one must question why no action has been taken so far against those who would make anyone believe otherwise.

Really, I can’t do this subject justice. Check out their websites for more info. Their own words will hang them.

Malachy O’Morgair is known today as Saint Malachy, and like many saints, he had humble beginnings.

The son of a teacher, he lived in the northern Irish county of Armagh from 1094 to1148, worked his way up the priesthood, and eventually became bishop. If not for the intervention of a Benedictine monk named Arnold de Wyon he might be consigned to relative obscurity, but a quick perusal of the Internet indicates that even today controversy swirls around him, especially among breakaway groups who believe that Roman Catholicism has strayed from the true path. (One such group, which runs the website truecatholic.org, has even elected its own Pope.)

Saint Malachy’s holy status rests upon the prophecies attributed to him, which were allegedly discovered in the Vatican archives by the aforementioned de Wyon in 1590, a rather significant date as we shall see.

His 112 prophecies deal primarily with descriptions of future Popes, right up until the last one before the end of the world. According to most interpretations the current Pope Benedict is the penultimate pontiff, so I may be renting a backhoe this weekend and starting on the shelter.

Just as with the prophecies of Nostradamus, most of the prognostications of Saint Malachy are vague snippets which could be adapted to almost any circumstance. However, two are so specificc that one might question their provenance or consider them evidence of genuine revelation. One predicts that the English will persecute Ireland, which is correct, and the other says that England will eventually revert to Catholicism.

If we look back at the date of de Wynon’s discovery we see the problems. England did indeed persecute Ireland, and it began with an invasion by Henry II in 1171, 23 years after Malachy’s death. So is this a true prophecy? Perhaps, though it would be easier explained as hindsight by a later chronicler. Ironically, the invasion was apparently fully authorized by the only English Pope, Adrian IV, as a means of reforming the church in Ireland.

The gift of hindsight is glaringly obvious in the second prophecy, that of the return of Catholicism to England. In order for it to be restored it must first be tossed out. So how did Malachy know that England would reject Catholicism? Significantly, this turning-away does not seem to be mentioned in any of the prophecies I turned up. That did not occur until Henry VIII had his famous dust-up with Rome in the 1530s, which brought about the Church of England. As mentioned previously, de Wynon brought the document to light in 1590, which makes the whole thing look a little less like iron-clad proof of St. Malachy’s prognosticative abilities and more of de Wynon’s attempt to shore up church influence, with perhaps some level of personal gain in the bargain.

Such nefarious business is not without precedent. For another example of this kind of maneuvering, look up the Donation of Constantine on the Internet. A concise analysis is available at the following web address: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine.

Ley lines are either one of two mysteries: lines joining points of ancient sites and places of supernatural power, or they are mundane lines drawn on a map that make the skeptic wonder how anyone could fall for such a thing.

Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) was a photographer and antiquarian who, like many we run across, decided to step outside the boundaries of his training and take on a new task, that of amateur archaeologist. Looking at a map of ancient sites in the area of England near Leominster (pronounced “Limster” by locals) he fancied that he could discern straight lines along which the sites were situated. They appeared to be trackways, regular paths of travel. It seems that at first he thought of them simply as trade routes, which doesn’t appear too far-fetched, aside from the unlikelihood that ancient people would avoid going around an obstruction. His choice of the word Ley is obscure, but may come from an Anglo-Saxon word for “glade”, or a clear patch in a forest. (It certainly has nothing to do with Willy Ley, scientist and skeptic!) After a few lectures on the subject he published his seminal book in 1922, Early British Trackways, followed by his best-known work The Old Straight Track in 1925. Numerous other books expanded the study of Ley lines and led to the formation of The Straight Track Postal Portfolio club, wherein aficionados could exchange information. It lapsed into oblivion around the start of World War II, but a few individuals kept the interest going until resurgence occurred during the 1960s.

Finding a group of burial mounds, Neolithic forts, and stone circles roughly aligned would be interesting, possibly even worthy of investigation, but an alignment of only two objects would be, well, just a line, right? Not according to the more recent adherents to the field. These days you just mark places of interest on a map, start connecting the dots until you have a schematic of a drunken spider’s web, and call the results a network of Ley lines, along which mysterious energies flow. Others say that sites occur on concentric circles drawn around another site.

A sort of leap forward in the interpretation of the lines came about in 1939 with the publishing of the pamphlet Geometrical Arrangement of Ancient Sites, by Straight Track Club member Major F. C. Tyler. (One might surmise from his rank that a course in critical thinking was not offered at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.) In it he noted that the lines often shared a common point of origin, that is, they converged on a certain point, which might be a village or archaeological site. Furthermore he claimed that not only did ancient trackways form straight lines, but that the lines themselves existed before the tracks were established. Going out on the proverbial limb, and making the mystery even grander, he proclaimed that these alignments were “the remaining index of some great geometrical arrangement of these sacred sites.”

Lest one think that only eccentric Englishmen were involved in all this, let me introduce a German fellow named Dr. Josef Heinsch. A year before Tyler wrote his dissertation Heinsch had appeared before the International Conference of Geography, at which he presented his own work in the field. In Principles of Prehistoric Sacred Geography, he called upon a long-lost magic principle by which the ancients had built their sites. He said that the patterns remained when the Christian church took over many old sites for its own use.

Let’s jump ahead to the 1950s, and bring in one of the major crazes of the decade: UFOs. A Frenchman named Aime Michel, writing in his book Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, claimed that the reported sightings of UFOs fell into perfectly straight lines, which he was considerate enough to plot on a map. As it would be difficult to get permission to reprint it here I will ask you to trust me on this: the alignments are dubious at best. Most are simply a line drawn between just two sightings, though a few include a third point.

The relationship between Ley lines and UFOs was forged by one Tony Wedd, formerly a pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force. In his book Skyways and Landmarks he proposed that UFO pilots used ancient sites as navigation points. I guess that even with all their technology the idea of tuning in to navigational aids (like our own radio-based VHF Omnidirectional Rangefinders) had escaped them. After all, where does one purchase Earth navigational charts and flight supplements since the outlet on Rigel 7 went out of business?

As you might expect, the New Age movement has seized upon Ley lines. Not only does the belief seem to be growing, but it has even succeeded in dipping into the public purse. A dowsing organization called the Geo Group recently received $5,000 (US funds) from the Seattle Arts Commission to produce a map of Ley lines in the Seattle area. After taking money from the taxpayers of the city they are now flogging the maps back to them at $7 a pop.

I would definitely not purchase one. As I don’t pilot a flying saucer it would be useless for navigation, and besides, the only spot in Seattle which I would consider sacred is the Boeing aircraft facility. More science went on there in one minute than was ever used in researching Ley lines.

Ica Stones reveal an interesting facet of human history. The etchings on their faces show ancient humans as an advanced people, riding pterodactyls through the South American skies, performing complex transplant surgery with anti-rejection techniques, and possessing the ability to travel interstellar space without fuel. Wondrous stuff! They could outperform us technologically in almost every way, but left their only records… carved on stones?!

The “interesting facet” I am referring to is the ability of humans to deceive and be deceived, and Ica Stones exemplify this sad fact of our society. To the skeptic they are about as irritating as kidney stones. They are stones, that much is certain, and seem to exist as fossilized human gullibility. A volcanic material known as Andesite, they are naturally covered in an oxidized layer which, in contrast to the very hard rock, can easily be scratched away by an artist. And when that is done we learn, as with much art, more about the artist than the subject. We learn that they are frauds.

It was 1966 when a Peruvian physician, Dr. Javier Cabrera Darquea (usually known simply as Dr. Cabrera), first brought these curiosities to the attention of the world. (Actually there are conflicting claims about when he first saw the stones, but this is the one I’ve picked!) He called them Gliptoliths, and said they came into his possession when he was allegedly contacted by an illiterate farmer who claimed that he had found them in a cave. The story goes that Peru’s Ica River had overflowed its banks, destroyed a nearby mountain (no small feat in itself), and exposed a previously unknown cave. In a move which thickens the plot and muddies the waters the farmer refused to reveal the cave’s location, but kept on bringing more stones to Dr. Cabrera and selling them for a tidy sum. Hey, who ever said that illiteracy equals stupidity?

After a BBC report on the “artifacts”, the Peruvian government was under some understandable pressure to ascertain whether genuine antiquities were being hawked as souvenirs. An investigation was launched. The farmer, afraid of the severe penalties for such an offence, confessed to carving them himself, but as there were about 15,000 of them in existence by then it seems unlikely that he produced them all. There must have been a cottage industry at work in the area, with whole families feverishly scratching Andesite in between watering the yams and feeding the llamas.

Photographs show stones of various sizes, from mere pebbles up to the size of pumpkins, with the odd boulder thrown in for good measure. The carvings are often extremely intricate, if rather stylized, and believers claim that this is proof that the simple peasants of the area cannot be the artisans; therefore they must have been made by an advanced civilization. Probably the same ones who helped those dimwit Celts erect Stonehenge, those backward Egyptians build the Pyramids, and the inept Easter Islanders carve all those statues. Perhaps they had cultural strictures on how to record facts, but a few Kodachromes and leather bound journals would have been more convincing to me.

Where did this civilization go? According to Dr. Cabrera they foresaw some sort of planet-wide catastrophe and decided to find a new home in the Pleiades star cluster. This was actually a simple procedure, as they just climbed aboard their hi-tech magnetically-driven spaceships and waited for a passing comet to haul them off those well-known landing strips on the Nazca plains.
The response from the archaeological community was, to put it mildly, underwhelming. Yet forty years later the Ica Stones are still discussed breathlessly on internet chat rooms and web forums, especially amongst the Atlanteans and ufologists.

Those amateurs showcase another unfortunate facet of human behaviour: the ability of educated people to waste their talents. Many of their web sites are beautifully designed and well written, and could easily convince the casual observer that they are serious, scholarly treatments of the subject. Unfortunately, credulity reigns in this field, unhindered by trifles such as provenance, corroborating evidence, Occam’s Razor, and plain old common sense.

Hollow Earth adherents can point to a well-known man of science as their “patron saint”: Sir Edmund Halley. You may have heard of a comet named for him? That is one of the very few connections to genuine science that you could hope to find in this notion. Many modern believers will refer to it as a theory, but to call it that today is really an insult to the word, and to call it half-baked would insult pastry chefs.

It all began in 1692, when the illustrious Sir Edmund postulated the idea that the Earth, rather than being a simple globe, was actually composed of four concentric spheres nestled one in the other, with a luminous atmosphere. He also thought that the aurora borealis was caused when this atmosphere leaked through a hole at the North Pole.

How could one come up with such an idea? Halley was having difficulty explaining inconsistencies in the Earth’s magnetic field, particularly the way it seemed to move gradually over time. He explained this with his concentric spheres, each having their own magnetic field. Let’s not be harsh on him, for this was many years before the evidence for a molten core which acts like a giant magneto. Independent spheres with their own magnetic fields could also account for the observed phenomenon, as unlikely as the (literally) underlying geophysics might be.

Searching for more information on hollow Earth proponents will lead one through an odd assortment of characters, but one who looms large in legend is Captain John Cleves Symmes, the pride of Hamilton, Ohio. An impressive monument, topped by a sphere with a hole through it, was erected in the town by his son after Symmes’s death in 1859, and can be seen to this day. Despite his obviously unorthodox beliefs he did contribute to science in at least one positive way. He tried unsuccessfully during his life to finance a U.S. expedition to the North Pole, and after his death one of his ardent supporters, newspaper editor Jeremiah Reynolds, took up the torch and managed to convince the government to send a research team to Antarctica. They failed to find a hole, but did establish that the area was a continental land mass and not merely an icecap.

What of the inhabitants inside the hollow Earth? Scouring the literature on this subject over the years we find that adherents seem to fall largely into two camps. There are those who believe that the inhabitants are peaceful, enlightened beings, living in a paradise free from hate, greed or want. Fabled Atlantis often figures into these stories, and brings its advanced technology into play by being the source of UFOs, which they use to fly to the surface. It seems that such an advanced race is still lacking when it comes to designing an elevator. The other camp clings to the belief that the underworld is a secret Nazi base, and it is their flying saucers that appear in our skies. The alleged “holes at the poles” are dwarfed by the holes in this theory.

There is a significant Canadian contribution to this business. According to Leslee Dru Browning, a self proclaimed psychic, she was astral travelling one day with an inhabitant of the hollow Earth, a person she called Zyne. She says that he took her into the inner realm – but not through the North Pole. Rather, they entered somewhere in the hills near Zephyr, Ontario, about an hour north of Toronto. An unofficial Skeptics Canada expedition, carried out in a soft chair with some single malt to relax the brain cells, combed the area in vain, but astral travelling is not a skill I have mastered. Time to do it the mere mortal way, with a car, a map, and a pair of legs.

Zephyr is nestled in the rolling hills of northern Durham, with farms undulating away in every direction. The ads, flyers, and business cards in the general store are a typical mix of old and new, with posters for yoga classes pinned beside info on the local farrier. A tiny town, little more than a hamlet, its peaceful citizens appear to have no idea of what lurks beneath their feet. And whatever that may be, it certainly doesn’t seem to involve holes. The geology is not the type that would support a cave, nobody ever tried to build a subway, and I couldn’t even find a pothole in the road, which makes this town mysterious enough given the time of year.

A few kilometres southeast of town lies the inaptly named Mud Lake, filled with clear water. Could this be a portal to the nether regions? My visit revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and the only denizens appeared to be tree swallows.

An expedition with scuba gear might find out more, but not me. I would rather try fishing.

Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is one of those shadowy terms that we have all heard, but the act itself is something that we have probably not heard. It has come to be seen as nothing more than meaningless nonsense syllables strung together, but allegedly it once was much more divine.

Some claim that the original form was a language that could miraculously be understood by anyone hearing it, regardless of their native tongue. Quite a feat. I guess that whole Tower of Babel thing has been revoked?

So what is glossolalia? The easy reply, and probably the correct one, is that it is just a bunch of made-up words, spoken in such a way that they sound as if the speaker is using a real but unrecognizable language. It is not to be confused with Xenoglossia, which is the alleged ability to speak a real language to which one has had no exposure. While unrelated in definition, their believability quotient is about equal.

A web site called bible411.com quotes from an article in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation entitled “An Ethnological Study of Glossolalia” by George J. Jennings, March 1968. He mentions that glossolalia is practised among at least seventeen non-Christian religions of the world, a fact noted by bible411 with the wry comment “Certainly we wouldn’t attribute Glossolalia in these heathen religions to the work of the Holy Spirit.” Ah yes, when Christians babble a bunch of unintelligible phrases it’s because they are infused with the power of god, but anyone else is nuts, and a filthy heathen too. Actually, I would recommend this article for a number of reasons. There are passages that quote from scholarly research and provide a scientific approach to linguistics with a skeptical outlook, there are insights into the way believers approach the subject, and there is some uproarious unintentional humour, as the compilers do everything they can to spin things to make everyone else’s brand of belief to look silly while making their own views appear sensible.

Speaking in tongues is nowadays usually associated with the Pentecostal ministries, the typical “fire and brimstone” fundamentalist Christian sect whose adherents let little stand in their way. They take as their authority the Acts of the Apostles from the Bible, which says that on the day of Pentecost (a variable date connected to Easter) the Apostles “were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.” The web site of Pentecostal preacher R. W. Schambach, who says that he sometimes speaks in tongues, informs us that if we call their 24-hour-a-day prayer line “an anointed prayer warrior will pray with you.” Wearing godly fatigues I presume?

The Apostle Paul writes on tongues in Corinthians, saying, “He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself, ”Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not,” and “For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” This seems almost to go along with today’s gibberish interpretation.

Some of the most vehement objections to glossolalia come from Christians, who see the practice as not only nonsense but also insulting. The New Covenant Church of God reprints an article by D. James Janes, originally written for the Institute for First Amendment Studies. Titled “GLOSSOLALIA: THE GIFT OF GIBBERISH”, he rips into it with glee, noting that when he was flipping T.V channels and saw well-known televangelist Robert Tilton babbling away, it seemed to him that he had at one point used the phrase ‘Kowwabunga Dude’ made famous by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hardly poster children for fundamentalists.

Believe it or not, the subject is also scorned by David Icke, the guy who claims that Earth is gradually being infiltrated by reptilian aliens. Put these weirdos in a room and they turn on each other.

Erdestrahlen, Earth Rays, or E-rays are a type of energy that is apparently only visible to dowsers, those typically tweed-suited gentlemen who wander through fields with twigs attempting to discover all manner of resources. Scientists, and we poor souls who are not tuned to such energies, are not privy to the locations of the ‘hot spots’ produced by them. This is a pity, as it does not allow us to avoid the cancer-causing effects of these evil radiations. Since we therefore have to take their word for the very existence of E-rays, let alone their effects, it seems that dowsers have us at their mercy.

Searching for information is not easy, at least not on World’s Biggest Library (the internet). There are, you see, other types of e-rays, genuine articles discovered and verified by real scientists, which only serves to muddy the waters. They exist in such realms as optics and biology, but as far as is known they are not malevolent. How unexciting.

The word erdestrahlen is a German word that means, well, Earth Rays. In Germany there is a thriving business in black plastic sheets, placed under one’s bed, that are supposed to protect sleepers from the effects of these agents, and some will even go to the trouble of rearranging the placement of their beds to avoid e-rays. Some impertinent wags have wondered if such a practise may negatively affect the feng shui of the room, but the jury is still out on that. Apparently federal employees have had their desks rearranged on the advice of government hired dowsers, and hospital beds are regularly shuffled to protect patients from these silent killers. The profession of the ever-vigilant twig wavers seems to be fairly institutionalised in Germany, perhaps a holdover from pre-war days when such pseudosciences as “cosmic ice theory” and racial stereotyping held sway.

How much will it cost you to detect these strange emanations? A company called MartriX will sell you what is called on their web site a TranceDucer (L-Rod), described as “…hand made of wood, bamboo, silver and thin but sturdy messing wires, bent at a right angle to form a (sic) L-shape. The L-rods are perceiving tools believed to deflect when encountering an energy field, be it the human aura, the biomagnetic field of a plant, E-rays from cracks in the ground, or any other hypothetical field not measurable by common means.” (Emphasis added) I wrote to them and received an e-mail which changed the product name to “transducers” and gives a price of 45 Euros plus shipping. They’re currently backlogged, which may indicate a thriving business in such stuff. The reason? Here’s a quote from their letter: “We ordered a series of new L-Rods, using the same means of production and cleaning rituals. The products are partly made on Bali and since the Balinese have a ritual for each different part or material, it takes time.” I am certainly glad of that. My mother always told me to put on clean underwear and never go out with bamboo and wires that haven’t undergone the proper cleansing rituals.

You might expect that a company called Physics.co.uk would be dedicated to the latest findings about Quarks, Gravitons, and perhaps warp drive theory. Nope. They are more concerned with flogging products and services that will protect you from all manner of phantoms, and one that is highly recommended by feng shui practitioners is the Energia 2300. Looking like a standard electrical power bar without the sockets, it comes with glowing reviews from one David R. Cowan, who refers to E-rays as Tulleric Radiation and explains them in these riveting terms: “If you have a black spiral of tulleric energies like this in your bed, you will be susceptible to geopathic stress and ill health. An unhealthy ley line (a stream of individual waves) radiates into the spiral.”

Sounds familiar. I found a black spiral in my bed once, but it turns out the kids were snacking on Twizzlers.

Divination is the ancient practise of attempting to determine the future by means of,… well, just about any method the human mind can conceive of. Many of these are described by words that end with the suffix –mancy, which comes to us from the old French word mancie, which in turn comes from the Greek mantis, meaning ‘prophet’. Few things in the world have escaped this ancient version of the ‘tagline’, and volumes could be filled with descriptions of all the ‘-mancys’ that seers, oracles, and now new-agers, have used over the centuries.

Some are no doubt related. Aeluromancy, for instance, is the art of dropping wheatcakes in water and interpreting the results (if any), while alphitomancy uses barleycakes. I guess it depends upon what was on sale at the mill that week. Cephalomancy uses the study of a donkey’s head, and Kephalonomancy involves burning carbon on the head of an ass while reciting the names of suspected criminals. I’m not sure what happens if you use a laurel branch instead of carbon, because that’s more properly called Daphnomancy. Apparently the guilty party’s name will induce a crackling sound when spoken. Oinomancy is divination by wine, and probably works well with Tiromancy, which seeks to interpret the holes or mould in cheese. (Excuse me for a few minutes, I’m getting a bit peckish.)

Where was I? Ah yes. All that wine made me dizzy and led to Gyromancy, which seeks to determine what to do by walking around a circle of letters. It is unclear whether you are supposed to walk inside or outside the circle, but either way you go around until you get dizzy, fall down on the letters, and then somehow figure out what to do. Now, do I credit/blame the walking or the wine?

With Axinomancy you whack a hatchet into a table and interpret the way it quivers. As an alternate method I suppose you could interpret the quivers of the dinner guest it’s whacked close to. After dessert, stand them against the wall and try Belomancy, which uses arrows. You could try Coscinomancy, which uses a balanced sieve, but I doubt that would hold any water. Since you’re obviously close to a kitchen doing all this, try divination by onions, Cromniomancy. Do it under a sink full of water to avoid the tears, but don’t be too hasty pulling that plug because you can move on to Hydromancy, which examines the effects upon things such as tea leaves or coffee grounds when they are put into or taken out of water.

If you decide upon tea it’s called Tasseography, and if you use spring water the proper term is Pegomancy, while using rainwater is Hydatoscopy. Now scoop some of that water into a saucepan and make poached eggs. Watch what happens to the shape of the egg white, and you are practising either Ovomancy, Oomancy, or Ooscopy. If you’re still curious, open the refrigerator, grab that fresh liver, and try some Hepatomancy. Unless of course you’ve been saddled with goat liver, which makes it Splanchnomancy. If you drip anything on the floor during all of this you may get to determine your future with Myrmomancy, which is done by studying the way ants are eating.

On to more expensive foodstuffs, cut open an oyster to get a pearl. Drop it into a pot for a spot of Margaritomancy. Recite some names, and if the pearl jumps at the mention of one of them it means one of two things; either that person is a thief, or your oyster was feeding on Mexican jumping beans.

The only one of the mancys for which I have evidence is Ornithomancy, the study of bird flight. In my experience as a nature photographer I can assure you that once you have selected the film you want, set the camera on your tripod, framed, focused, and determined exposure, the bird will fly a split second before you press the shutter. Happens every time…

Cryptozoology runs the gamut from the ludicrous (sasquatches are shape-shifting extra-dimensional aliens), through the outlandish (remnant populations of dinosaurs), to the highly unlikely (mammoths still existing in Siberia), ending at the mildly curious (fifty foot snakes). In between all these are creatures that would make a science fiction writer proud.

The term Cryptozoology was coined by Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans (1916 – 2001), whose work and writings on the subject, particularly his 1955 book ‘On the Track of Unknown Animals’, earned him the unofficial title of ‘Father of Cryptozoology’. He was a formally trained zoologist but with an obvious taste for the unusual. Other luminaries in the field include Loren Coleman, Lucien Blancou, and Dr Karl P.N. Shuker.

Is Cryptozoology a science or a pseudoscience? A perusal of the internet shows that in the main it is definitely ‘pseudo’, but I don’t think that this covers all aspects of it. Example; A researcher working away in the bowels of a museum comes across an uncatalogued skin that she does not recognize. Documentation states that it was collected in the Amazon basin in 1893. A cross check of all available literature fails to turn up any further reference. However, the skin is real, and the animal definitely existed at some time. (Actually stuff like this happens often, and it will probably continue for quite a while.) If our hypothetical researcher decides to mount an expedition to find live examples, they are now stepping into the realm of Cryptozoology, as the search is now on for an unknown animal. Much of Cryptozoology is concerned with exactly this, a search for animals that have not been seen for a long time, and are considered extinct by most authorities. Recent examples would be the Thylacine or marsupial wolf of Tasmania, the Moas of New Zealand, and the Passenger Pigeon of North America. The approach that many researchers take is definitely unscientific, overly credulous, and naïve, but it is possible to take a scholarly, respectable attitude. After all, many animals declared extinct have been found alive and well, and sometimes in healthy populations. The Chacoan Peccary, previously known only from Ice Age bones, was found alive in South America, the Bermuda Petrel was declared extinct twice yet still cruises the Atlantic Ocean, and just within the past few days it has been announced that the Cuban Solenodon, a primitive shrew-like mammal, has been rediscovered.

There is one major snag with these findings as it relates to our subject; few if any such discoveries have been anticipated in the Cryptozoological literature. They are continually looking for long lost animals without success, but missing the real ones tripped over by undergrads tromping the bushes gathering mundane data on bird droppings. A glaring case would be that of the Coelacanth, that well known ancient fish rediscovered off the Comoros Islands in 1938 after about a 65 million year hiatus. For years some Cryptozoologists have whispered about a supposed population in the Caribbean, but a few years ago a doctor on honeymoon in Indonesia discovered one for sale at a local fish market. Subsequent searches have confirmed a new population there, perhaps a distinct species. If you wanted to find a sea further from the Caribbean, you would have to walk in the footsteps of Armstrong and Aldrin.

If you are looking for current information on Cryptozoology you could hardly do better than to head for the web page run by Ben S. Roesch at:

http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~bz050/HomePage.cryptoz.html

The writings of Mr. Roesch are almost an anomaly in the field. He is erudite, skeptical of many Cryptozoological claims, and unafraid to take people to task when they overstep the bounds of common sense. In a discipline that is in serious need of more discipline, he is a bright light indeed. Being a keen amateur naturalist I have a soft spot for Cryptozoology, and I hope that it survives in spite of itself. If more people of Mr. Roesch’s calibre enter the arena it is in good hands.

The Jonas Method of natural conception control is a strange mix of quack medicine, religious inspiration, and an astrologically based pseudoscience called cosmobiology. If you believe the claims it enables seemingly infertile women to conceive, while promising that you can choose the sex of the child you wish. It also avoids miscarriages, and “eliminates birth defects and mental retardation”. All of these purported benefits are based on conceiving at just the right time.

The story of Dr. Eugen Jonas begins in Hungary during the 1950s. A practising Catholic, he was aghast that the communist government had legalized abortion, and he decided that something must be done to ensure that every child was wanted, and was born healthy. This was a noble idea to be sure, but it does not appear to have been tackled with scientific rigour and healthy skepticism. His personal history, as told on his web site, says he remembered that there were laws governing the fertility cycle that were known to the ancients, and he set about to rediscover them. The web site considers it significant that he discovered the conception rules on August 15, 1956, the Feast of the Assumption of Virgin Mary.

What is this wondrous knowledge? As befits a web site which is trying to sell something, the exact method is only vaguely described, but it appears to involve a second fertility cycle – something that was hitherto unknown (except to the ancients!). This cycle is separate from the normal menstrual cycle, which is based on astrology. Oops, sorry, that’s “cosmobiology”. After all, we are talking about a wacky kind of medicine here, and one good pseudoscience deserves another. Speaking of pseudoscience, there are also references to Dr. Jonas presenting his findings to the First National Conference on Biorhythms in 1964. Which nation they are talking about is not specified.

Some hints about the nature of the method can be found at a web site called menstruation.com.au, which is another example of why some people should not be allowed near a computer. They dedicate (waste?) a lot of bandwidth on the so-called lunar fertility cycle, but they do help us by providing more information about cosmobiology and the beliefs of Dr. Jonas. Differing from astrology, cosmobiology, as they explain it, is not concerned with interpreting the meaning of the positions of celestial bodies, but is “the demonstrable and physiological effects of certain planetary bodies.” Sounds like material for another article … but I’ve already done the letter C.

The secret to Dr. Jonas’ second cycle is revealed as a three-point plan. First, it doesn’t matter at which point in the menstrual cycle a woman is, her most fertile moment is when the Moon is at exactly the same phase as the time of her birth. So if she was born when the Moon appeared, say, 58% illuminated, then she waits until that point in the cycle and hubby gets lucky. From this we might conclude that he doesn’t need to splurge on champagne and start a crackling fire to get her in the mood: she’ll lunge at him as soon as Selene is just a bit past half full.

Whoa, not so fast big boy! Now it starts to get complicated. The second step says that to properly determine the sex of the child the Moon must also be in the same position as at her birth. So we need 58% illumination, and it has to be, oh, howzabout 7.4 arc-seconds east of Regulus. Now we’re getting somewhere! Or maybe not. Since the Moon doesn’t follow the ecliptic exactly, but also travels above and below it, we need to get the altitude as well as the azimuth. Looks like our poor husband has to wait a bit longer.

Once we’ve got that figured out all we need to do is ensure that step three is adhered to. That concerns the viability of the pregnancy and the fetus, and depends upon the positions of other nearby celestial bodies. How near isn’t mentioned on the web site.

Sounds like our love-lorn Lothario is better off letting the experts at the Centre Jonas International figure out his charts for him, for a mere 250 Australian dollars. Significantly more than the champagne, but will a bottle of Mumm’s ensure a perfectly healthy child of the sex of your choice?

References:

Centre Jonas International: http://www.usmev.com.au/cji.htm

Menstruation.com: http://www.menstruation.com.au/periodpages/lunarhistory.html