Crazy Alchemist

Nearly every prophecy people quote turns out to be vague, backdated, or invented after the fact. But a handful were written down or told to a named witness before the event happened, and those are hard to explain away. This article measures them against the five criteria a Society for Psychical Research investigator laid down in 1965, following the collapse of the Society’s own flagship archive of 701 cases to two under a skeptic’s demand for dated documents, and walks the strongest modern cases, Aberfan and Fatima, against the best rational account of each. It ends where the evidence does, at two places the explanation does not quite reach.

The Hortus Palatinus was the Eighth Wonder of its day: a machine-garden of singing statues and water organs, built by the Winter King at the height of the Rosicrucian moment. Within five years the dream and the man were gone. Did the magic help cause the catastrophe, or only die with it?

Most people picture animism as bowing to rocks and trees. The real thing is a world full of persons, only some of whom are human. Here is what it really means, and why an old argument about it has come back.

In the 1970s, an archaeologist named Ze’ev Meshel dug up a small abandoned waystation in the northeastern Sinai, a place called Kuntillet Ajrud, and found large storage jars covered in drawings and writing. One line, scratched into the clay in the old Hebrew script around 800 BCE, was a blessing. It reads: “I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah.”

That last word is the problem, and the whole story. Asherah was the name of a goddess, an old and important one. The blessing pairs her with the god of Israel as naturally as you would pair a husband and a wife, and a second inscription from a tomb in Judah does the same thing. For more than forty years scholars have argued about what those four words mean, because the cautious reading and the explosive one are both still standing. The explosive one is that the God of the Bible had a wife, that ordinary Israelites worshipped her, and that the editors of scripture spent centuries writing her out.

The film opens on a black screen. One line appears in white type, with the name under it in plain capitals: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche. John Milius wanted the audience to know the ground under their feet before the first image appeared.

The line is the eighth maxim from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, written in 1888 and published in January 1889. Nietzsche’s German is singular (“Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker”), so the closer sense is “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” The film card turns that into the broader first-person plural that the line has worn in English ever since. Nietzsche put the maxim under the heading Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens, “from the war-school of life.” Months later, on January 3, 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, embracing a horse, and never recovered his sanity.

On 31 March 1848 in Hydesville, New York, two girls worked out a code with a rapping presence in their cottage. Four years earlier Samuel Morse had sent the first electric message from Washington to Baltimore. The Spiritualist movement that followed organised itself in the vocabulary of the telegraph, and a generation later the engineers who had laid the Atlantic cable were running séances with the same instruments. From Hydesville to the Houdini-Doyle feud, as one technological story.

On 21 April 1587, in a Bohemian household at Třeboň, John Dee and Edward Kelley signed an angelic covenant to share their wives. The angel was a young girl named Madimi, scryed in a polished black mirror. Dee was sixty, formerly the leading mathematician of the Elizabethan court. The signed page is in the British Library. This is what the diary actually says.

Almost every culture tells the story of the First Couple. Even materialist geneticists in 1987 reached for ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ as the popular name for the most recent common matrilineal and patrilineal ancestors of all living humans. The Genesis pair is not unusual; the Western Christian demotion of them is. This article walks through why no major culture has historically practiced active cult-veneration of the literal First Couple (the hierarchy logic of all creator-religion), what the Western Catholic tradition added on top of that universal pattern (Augustine’s reading of a Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12), what the mystics from Philo to Adam Kadmon to Boehme to Ibn Arabi knew that the literalists missed, and what 1987 changed: for the first time in human history, the First Couple is a measurement rather than a story. The genetic Adam and Eve are inside every cell of every living human, with a kind of measurable presence in the species that no god of any religion has ever been instrumentally demonstrated to have. The cultural practice has not yet caught up with the science.

Imagine a modern ancestry-testing lab could analyse Jesus’s DNA. Hold your answer in mind for what the father’s side would show. Then walk through the five possible results case by case, and ask what each one would mean for an atheist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew. The piece commits to no answer of its own. The depth material (Aquinas Summa III Q31 A4 verbatim, Quran 3:59 in three translations, the Jeconiah curse and its Talmudic and medieval afterlife, the Shroud and Lanciano relic studies, the small body of work by believing biologists from Kessel 1983 to the 2024 Cambridge book Jesus and the Genome) sits inside each case where it becomes relevant.

On a Derbyshire hillside named in 1285 as ’elves’ valley’, a slot in the limestone drops 55 metres straight down. Thomas Hobbes called it one of the Seven Wonders of the Peak. Charles Cotton said his hand trembled to describe it. A 17th-century earl reportedly lowered a peasant on a rope; the man came up unable to speak and died eight days later. Locals threw geese in to see if they would emerge from a cave two miles away. The Royal Society finally measured it in 1770. A Bronze Age burial mound stands 350 metres from the rim.