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The Eagle and the Rose: A Remarkable True Story
by Rosemary Altea
(New York: Time Warner, 1995)
We learn from the dust cover that "Altea is an internationally renowned psychic medium. Traveling extensively around the world, she shares her amazing gift, demonstrating that we don't die. She has founded a healing organization based in England with patients worldwide,..." The book is endorsed by the author of The Celestine Prophecy and available from the Quality Paperback Book Club. It is bound to become a bestseller.
The author recounts her growing up as a desperately unhappy Cinderella to her three sisters, totally unloved by her mother and repeatedly beaten by her absentee father. Yet, she was always different. All her life she had visitors at night, in her dreams, and in broad daylight. She was married young to an unsatisfactory, philandering husband. She gave birth to one daughter after two miscarriages. After fourteen years the husband deserts her destitute in the north of England, and she has to go on welfare.
It is at this time she enters a spiritualist circle, in which friends immediately recognize her great psychic gifts. She describes a learning and training period, in which she acquires a Spirit Guide, the Grey Eagle of the title. He is a gorgeous Apache warrior and shaman, who seems to hail from the novels of Zane Grey rather than New Mexico. It is amazing how many spirit guides are North American Indians, not South American, or African, or Siberian.
Her description of psychic work is very straight forward, not to say mundane. She hears, sees, or feels spirits everywhere, sometimes invisible, or as ghostly apparitions, but most often solid like you and me. In fact, the reader gets the impression she is more at home with spirits than real human beings. The spirits of the dead are eager to communicate through her with their still living relatives. There is never any doubt, her reports always confirm to the client she is really in touch with the right person. Only one slightly questioning scientist figures in the narrative. He is quickly won over when his long dead grandfather is able to help him with a technical research problem. What this book lacks in intelligence, it makes up in dullness.
If this was a book about experiences with baking bread or making wine, I would not doubt a word the author says. Her matter of fact manner recounting psychic, spirit, and healing experiences if quite convincing. Her life story, however, is scattered throughout the volume, and the most coherent narrative only appears in the last chapter. When she meets the spiritualists the first time a friend drives her "down some long rutted country lanes, which were really no more than dirt tracks,"(p. 22) later the same trip is described as "only a fifteen-minute drive"(p. 40). In a deep trance the medium is unaware what she is saying or what is going on. "This is why we always made sure we had on a tape recorder at all times during the evening."(p. 61) Yet, when a dead woman is speaking through her body, "I stood on one side of my body, listening and in sympathy with everything I had heard,..,"(p. 69).
Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the
Cosmos
by Robert Osserman
(New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1995)
The innumerate or mathematically illiterate person misses many fascinating questions. A fundamental one asks whether mathematics is a science which discovers abstract relationships and propositions or a language invented by human genius. A second is the question why so many processes of the universe and on earth seem to obey mathematical rules. This is sufficiently true that Lord Kelvin thought no natural law could be considered discovered until it was quantified. A third issue concerns the coherence and interconnections among the rules of mathematics which tolerate not contradictions and lead to the same result along many pathways. "Even more difficult to explain is the almost magical way that certain mathematical notions that seem to spring out of sheer invention from creative minds turn out to be exactly the tools that are needed to describe the physical world."(p. 142) Some scientists have thought it not too much to assert mathematics is the language in which God created the Universe. Mathematics in this view is truly a garden of poetry, which has a clear and shining beauty of its very own.
Osserman takes us on a walk through the scientific understanding of the structure or geometry of the cosmos. He does this without a single mathematical formula, equation, or expression. These are banished to the end notes the innumerate reader can ignore. Rather he relies on a step by step historical exposition of the growth of understanding from the first measurement of the earth sphere in classical antiquity by Eratosthenes (about 200 BCE) to the curved space-time of the expanding universe of Albert Einstein and the astronomers. He also uses many simple geometric drawings to instruct us in the concepts of geometry and the ideas of curvature. (Figure from p. 59).
We know we live on a spherical earth in a large universe because we can see the sun and stars revolve around us daily. If we inhabited a planet like Venus with an impenetrable atmosphere could we still determine the shape of the world we live on? Osserman takes us through an interesting demonstration how we could yet determine the sphericity of the earth. This thought experiment then leads to demonstrating how we can determine we live in a curving universe even though we can't see it.
Osserman's little book has a good deal of material to learn and think about. Despite the absence of numbers and algebra there is nothing simple or easy about following his reasoning. There plainly is no effortless way to acquire an understanding of modern cosmology.
Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American
Witch Hunt
Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker
(New York: Basic Books, 1995) xvi + 317 pp.
Most of us remember news stories about ritual satanic child abuse, such as the McMartin pre-school case in California, or the Kelly Micheals case in New Jersey. Nathan and Snedeker examine the entire issue from the viewpoint of a modern witch hunt, with explicit references to the Salem past. Childrens' caretakers were accused of grotesque and impossible criminal activities, by words laid into the mouths of babes, by obscurantist professional too ignorant or too ambitious to see the consequences of their actions, and never inclined to retract. The book is dedicated to the victims still incarcerated in prisons.
Copyright 1992-2005, The Association for Rational Thought