Seances and sex

“Participating in a seance is like having bad sex…your wandering mind devises shopping lists and ponders mundane chores you need to do around the house…”

Seances…psychic readings…ghost hunts…cult meetings…all in a day’s work!

Instrumental to the scientific method is empirical research. This involves observation, and, with an ethnographic slant, participation. As an investigator outside the lab, the next best thing is being there.

And so, I recently attended a seance…

But don’t get all excited and start thinking ectoplasm, spirit manifestations, apparitions, disembodied voices, blowing trumpets and levitation. That is the stuff of the early Spiritualism movement, and has all been discredited. Indeed, the movement was discredited by the originators themselves, the Fox sisters.

When the guru outrightly debunks his or her own movement, it’s time to give the game away. But still, some persist…

The new wave seances are more cognitive. That is, they’re all in the mind. Gone are the Hollywood effects, and instead the theatrics take over. Everyone sits in a circle, holding

hands in the dark, shrieking and moaning, overcome by ’spirits’ they’re channeling. It’d be a great environment to indulge in frottage, if you’re into that kind of thing.

How can we explain the behavior? We can put it down to the usual suspects: clinical condition, bad socialisation, fraud or delusion.

One of the worst things you can do is to fool yourself. But a simple, Ockham’s Razor-esque eplanation for seances apparently ‘working’ is that the participants are fooling themselves, and perceiving natural phenomena as paranormal phenomena.

As I sat there, observing the seance, I realized that the participants were doing exactly that. Like children in a dark room, they were scaring themselves. In fearful/excited anticipation and a dark room with vague patches of light and noise outside, they were ’seeing’ things, claiming that participants’ faces being replaced by ’spirit faces’. In a smoky, casino environment, they were ’smelling smoke’, and ‘menthol’. Chewing gum, anyone?

Sitting there, I truly tried to focus and participate in the seance. I noticed that the other participants would call out seemingly incongruous words and phrases, such as “snakes”, “cowboy boots”, “I see the initial ‘J’” and “I see a little boy!” My mind wandered too, in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. Nothing paranormal about that. In fact, participating in a seance is like having bad sex…your wandering mind devises shopping lists and ponders mundane chores you need to do around the house…(NB. This stereotypical reference point in no way represents the Skepbitch’s behavior, for she is energetic and creative. Ed)

Combine this with our propensity to ‘follow the leader’ in group activities, to emulate others in our hopes to ‘belong’, and to ingratiate ourselves in an adult peer pressure…no wonder ‘everyone’ was experiencing something ‘paranormal’.

Over the next day, the ‘findings’ were ‘validated’…i.e., participants interpreted the seance messages as ‘meaningful’. So I was told anyway. Not that anecdotes and heresay are testable. But who wouldn’t make connections to common words, phrases, initials, names, sights and sounds?

But just between you and me, there were real, live, liquid spirits in the room too…

…it’s easier to see spirits on spirits…

Bottoms Up!

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