Crazy Alchemist

Most famous prophecies fall apart the moment you check when they were written down. A small number do not. This is about the cases where a specific prediction was recorded before the event by a datable witness, the rule the Victorians built to test them, and the two seams that still do not fully close.

Frederick V built a hydraulic garden at Heidelberg to model the cosmos, then gambled a crown and lost everything. Did the Hermetic dream behind it help cause the war that buried it?

Animism is usually dismissed as the primitive idea that everything has a soul. The truth is stranger: a way of living in a world full of persons, only some of them human, and for most of human history it was simply how people saw the world.

Two desert inscriptions bless 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' She was a real goddess, El's consort at Ugarit, and her image once stood in the Jerusalem Temple. Yahweh's wife, or only a sacred pole?

On 31 March 1848, two girls in a Hydesville cottage worked out a code with a rapping presence. Four years earlier, Samuel Morse had sent the first electric message from Washington to Baltimore. The Victorian and post-Victorian Spiritualist movement 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. This article reads the period from the Hydesville rappings to the Houdini-Doyle feud as a single technological story, with the documented case file of mediums and exposures, the Society for Psychical Research, and the migration of the metaphor from wire to wireless.