Quest Magazine

Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

Dean Radin
New York: Deepak Chopra Books, 2013. 369 + xxiii pages, paper, $14.

Scientific explorations of human potential often focus on technological and chemical enhancements to the human body, leaving the cultivation of our natural capabilities as mere hints of what can be altered through artificial means. In Dean Radin's latest offering, Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, the veteran psychical researcher brings us back to the self as the starting point for investigation. He comes up with surprising evidence that a journey inward may reap more rewards than anything that conventional science can offer us.

Radin has three previous works under his belt, but this is his most provocative book yet, delving into the deeper implications of psychical research for self and society. Supernormal explores some of the exciting conclusions that can be drawn from the extensive peer-reviewed research and tears apart the misconceptions and misrepresentations that are common in the skeptical subculture. Radin doesn't tease us with a weak-kneed appraisal of what can be understood from over a century's worth of accumulated data. Instead he makes a full-scale assault on commonly held assumptions that limit us from embracing the radical possibilities of human existence.

While Radin's previous books have covered similar ground, this work, framed around an exploration of the Hindu and Buddhist siddhis (extreme abilities and states of consciousness reported by advanced yogic practitioners), provides a unique connecting point to the cross-cultural dialogues that are being fostered by the Dalai Lama with Western scientists. As Radin points out, these powers are commonly reported in all major religions: "Tales of supernormal mental powers are not unique to the yogic tradition. Most of the same abilities are described in Catholicism as chrisms and in Islam as karamats. In Judaism, nahash or divination may be practiced by a zaddik [holy man] . . . All shamanistic traditions are saturated with such tales." Experiences assigned by academics to the realm of legend, myth, and hagiography may in fact bring us closer to what we are at the very core of our reality.

Supernormal provides a solid starting point for bridging between ancient and contemporary understandings of the world and to evaluate the reality of esoteric and so-called "occult" doctrines. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis are all examined in light of their exposition in Eastern sutras as well as in scientific data. We are also treated to examinations of abilities such as bilocation, teleportation, manifestation of physical objects, and other feats that seem to stretch credibility to the utmost limit. While careful in his analysis of each claim, Radin emphasizes that in the traditional sutras, these abilities are not presented as wholly metaphorical but are given as literal powers that can be attained through advanced practice.

Balancing between his scientific examination and the incredible potentials described in works such as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and Avatamsaka Sutra, or Flower Ornament Scriptures, Radin is able to evoke a wonderful sense of possibility without ever falling into fantasy or gross speculation. He maintains this delicate balance even when he takes us into evidence that the universe's very structure may support something akin to the reality expressed in popular works such as Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. Hence our participation in reality may go much deeper than crude manipulations of the material realm.

Readers familiar with esoteric doctrine will be delighted to find within Supernormal a well-organized apology (in the classic sense) that utilizes Western science to open up the reality of the hidden realms of human potential. Those whose interest lies in more scientific areas will find in the book a powerful means of taking their inquiries into the far-reaching realities that outshine popular materialism and skeptical mythmaking. At the time of writing for this review, Supernormal is currently ranked as the number one best-seller in its category for two weeks in a row by Nielsen BookScan, and is holding a high ranking on Amazon as well, showing that Radin has touched on a deep need within our culture. In doing so, he will hopefully provide one more key to understanding ourselves and our society in a way that can lead to greater growth and fulfillment of who and what we truly are.

David Metcalfe

David Metcalfe writes the "Psi in the News" column for the Reality Sandwich Web site. Dean Radin will be a featured speaker at the Theosophical Society's Summer National Convention in July 2014.  

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean

Amruta Patil
New York: Harper Collins, 2012. 276 pp., hardcover, $64.75.

Epics form such a precious place in our lives. We grow up with them. In the beginning, they are stories that we go to sleep with. Then we grow older, and they become pathways for our lives, a beacon in our dilemmas and a guiding star in our dark nights.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major epics of ancient India, the Ramayana being the other. The story of a conflict between good and evil and of blessings and curses, the Mahabharata comprises eighteen parvas (chapters), of which Adi Parva is the first. The first thing I noticed about this book is that it says, "via Amruta Patil" and not "by Amruta Patil." A unique depiction of the stories from the Adi Parva in the graphic medium, it is the first of a trilogy of graphic novels we will receive from her. "The conclave of creators is a crowded space," she writes, and she too has entered the conclave of retellers of this epic story. 

Many versions exist of the Mahabharata (including a famous Indian TV series that brought all activities to a stop when it was shown). For those that grew up as children in India, the one that is most memorable is the one told at bedtime by our grandmothers. The amazing thing about the origin of Patil's book is that she was not born in a traditional family. There was no storytelling granny whispering in her ear at bedtime, she says in one interview. So her journey into the Mahabharata was a solitary one, which she started at age twenty-one. Her discoveries were original ones and not tainted or colored by other views and impressions. "It was like taking off layers of wallpaper and seeing how the walls were like," she says. She felt a connection with the tales of Mahabharata, and therein perhaps lies the seed for this work.

Is the Mahabharata a story to be read? Not really. It is a story to be heard, and now Patil has introduced us to a story that is to be experienced visually, to be seen through the eyes of a new observer. The graphic novel genre in India is in the hands of a niche readership (ages eighteen to thirty-five, English-speaking). It is new and not something readers have been brought up on. It is still experimental, with rules being formed as the writers go  along. Hence we have to drop our preconceived notions of the epic and see it fresh in this book.

Patil learned how to paint for this book. She worked on it as a part of residency at La Maison des Auteurs in Angoulame, France, through a grant from the French embassy in New Delhi. It was like a "room of her own" for her. "I wasn't looking for a feat of friends. I needed safety, solitude, stability, and sanctuary . . . and had that for one charmed year," she says. She did not throw away a single page, painting over as much as she could. The text and the paintings intermingle, the images effortlessly changing from watercolor to charcoal to pencil. It is a gorgeous work.

I am not sure how traditionalists will look at Patil's work, but she is faithful to the essence of the story while being unencumbered by traditional expressions. Reading, or rather experiencing, this book, I felt that she has lived up to her responsibility. As a narrator in the book says, "In any case you are not held captive by old narratives. Tales must be tilled like the land so they keep breathing. The only thing you owe allegiance to is the essence." We find here in Adi Parva via Amruta Patil a tale that is alive and vibrant. It is a visual joy. Read it slowly. Don't be in a hurry to turn the page.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for the past forty-five years. He is a regular contributor to the Indian periodical Lokmat.

One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life

Mitch Horowitz
New York: Random House, 2014. 338 pp., hardcover, $24.

Mitch Horowitz is the author of the excellent and informative historical work Occult America, and in his latest book he expands upon some of its themes, specifically the origins and ongoing influence of the positive thinking movement, also known as New Thought. What I find most compelling about One Simple Idea is how it unveils the hidden influences behind past and current New Thought. For example, Horowitz carefully explains the profound effect of Mary Baker Eddy's upscale, female-led Christian Science movement upon medical licensing, pastoral counseling, and the role of women in the clergy, as well as the influence of the New England healer Phineas P. Quimby upon her philosophy. Quimby, in turn, was influenced by the teachings of Franz Anton Mesmer, who  himself operated in the milieus of Freemasonry and the French Revolution.

Through this book march a panoply of unlikely characters and eminences, whose often surprising influences from New Thought are herein revealed. Many Elvis fans already know that Presley was a devotee of New Thought. But who would have suspected as much from Sherman Helmsley (TV's George Jefferson), who doted upon The Kybalion? Or of Michael Jackson, who was very fond of James Allen's book As a Man Thinketh? It is in these pages that we learn that black activist Marcus Garvey was an aficionado both of James Allen and of Robert Collier's The Secret of the Ages, as well as of Emile Coue, one of the pioneers of positive thinking. Here we learn that the self-proclaimed deity Father Divine was influenced by both Elbert Hubbard and the poet Edna Wheeler Wilcox. And who knew that a Wall Street Journal self-help favorite such as The Science of Getting Rich had its roots in the Christian Socialist movement, or that Norman Vincent Peale was profoundly informed by Ernest Holmes, author of Science of Mind, who was himself influenced by the Transcendentalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Horowitz explores such esoteric ideas as quantum mechanics and the placebo effect, but he also traces how, for instance, Protestant ministries progressed from distrusting New Thought medical cures to actively embracing them in the form of Pentecostalism— giving us the now-familiar figure of the "faith healer," who, Horowitz affirms, began fading from the scene in the late 1960s, concurrent with the triumph of "the prosperity gospel." Indeed, how New Thought eventually shifted from an emphasis upon the blessings of God for health to the blessings of God for wealth is the central story of this enlightening and, in many measures, entertaining work.

Horowitz goes on to describe how, slipped from its occult moorings, the  mind-power teachings through Scrip- tenets of the New Thought movement became part of mainstream thought— and even politics—in the years following World War II. Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie are shown to be the two men who, as much as anyone, effected this change, beginning in the 1930s with their books Think and Grow Rich and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Napoleon Hill was influenced by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, whose own thought was shaped by the "mysterious doctrines" of Emanuel Swedenborg. As for Dale Carnegie, his mantra that "agreeable people win" had a profound influence upon the career of Ronald Reagan, who was also influenced by occult thinker Manly P. Hall.

Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 best-seller The Power of Positive Thinking was itself based upon Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman's 1946 bestseller Peace of Mind, now largely forgotten. By removing the punitive aspects of Protestantism and thereby further mainstreaming the positive thinking movement, Peale was as responsible as anyone for the present spate of motivational best sellers. It was with Peale that psychospirituality—the melding of psychoanalysis and religion—first gained great prominence with "a system that reprocessed  tural language and lessons." Not widely known until recently was Peale's anti– New Deal and anti–Roman Catholic leanings, as well as the influence of Ernest Holmes upon his thought.

The author has a knack for poking into hornet's nests: he is not shy, for instance, in exposing the ties of Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, not only to William James and C.G. Jung but also to the Swedenborgians and Frank Buchman's controversial Oxford Group—a group from which Wilson later disassociated himself, though not before adapting many of its key tenets to serve the cause of AA.

Moreover, Horowitz is far from gullible in his history of the New Thought movement; in fact, he is unable to overlook its internal contradictions and logical inconsistencies. He points out that popular and influential (and sometimes scandal-ridden) ministries such as those of Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, and Robert H. Schuller all borrowed from New Thought for their prosperity gospels, and that not all believers are completely on board with such belief, some going so far as to label it a "quasi-Christian heresy."

Horowitz lands perhaps a more telling critique: "To call suffering an illusion, yet also demand that it bend to desired change, signals a core inconsistency in the mind-power perspective . . . New Thought and the mind-power philosophies seek to rise above the world and consume its bounty at the same time." As for New Thought's attempts to explain present-day sorrows by referring to past-life sins, Horowitz dismisses this explanation: "The person who justifies someone else's suffering, in this case through collective fault, only casts a stone" (emphasis in the original). In that way, "a narrowly conceived New Thought can slam closed the doors of perception that it was once envisioned to open." Horowitz thinks that the "Meaning Based School," which teaches that "a higher\ perspective can rescue a person from an existence of aimlessness and undefined anxiety," is the "most morally and spiritually convincing" approach to the use of the power of the imagination to alter reality.

One salutary effect of One Simple Idea is that, in tracing the history of the positive thinking movement in America, a great many of its tenets are also explicated. Horowitz's understandably guarded enthusiasm for some of these techniques is nonetheless infectious. You'll probably feel better just by reading this book—that is, if you wish it.

Francis DiMenno

Francis DiMenno is a humorist, historian, and long-time music journalist.

Ronald Decker
Wheaton: Quest, 2013. 330 pp., paper, $23.95

There are many baseless occult theories about the origins of the Tarot: it came from ancient Egypt; it was created by Kabbalists who modeled it on the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet; it is a hieroglyphic text created under the direction of the semilegendary magus Hermes Trismegistus; it is the oldest book in the world, created by the god Thoth, who invented writing.

Most of these can be traced to the eighth volume of Le monde primitif ("The Primitive World"), published in 1781. This encyclopedic ork, by the occultist and Freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin, captured the imagination of his fellow occultists and focused their attention on the Tarot. This trend inspired numerous books that attempted to correlate the Tarot with all aspects of occult and Kabbalistic teachings, with little regard for facts or actual history. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Tarot's reputation as a tool for divination and as an ancient esoteric document was taken as gospel among occultists, at least in the English- and French-speaking worlds.

Later in the twentieth century, historians of playing cards and popular history began to bring out factual accounts that firmly rooted the Tarot's creation in fifteenth-century northern Italy, where it was designed to play a trick-taking game that is the ancestor of bridge. The most influential of these works was The Game of Tarot by Michael Dummett, published in 1980. Dummett was an excellent historian who examined all available early examples, documentation, and related imagery and history. He firmly established the Tarot as a creation of the Renaissance. In 1996, he teamed up with French historian Thierry Depaulis and Ronald Decker, an art historian who was the curator of the collection of the United States Playing Card Company, to write A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. This book covered the contributions of the early occultists to Tarot literature and design and often uncovered the foolishness of their theories. In 2002, Dummett and Decker teamed up again to write A History of the Occult Tarot, in which they continued to follow the Tarot's development up to 1970.

Although Dummett, best known as an Oxford philosopher, was excellent on Tarot history, he avoided all but the most obvious explanations of the Tarot's iconography and denied any use of the Tarot in divination before the eighteenth century. This, combined with his periodic ridicule of nineteenth-century occultists, tended to infuriate modern occultists and Tarot practitioners. A gulf opened up, with historians on one side and practitioners, who found spiritual value in the Tarot's symbolism, on the other.

Unfortunately, at first New Age Tarotists thought of Decker as being on the wrong side of the gulf because of his association with Dummett. But as  an art historian and an artist himself, Decker recognized that a mystical allegory is illustrated in the Tarot, and he has spent the last forty years trying to uncover it. In fact, he was attempting to validate the underlying assumptions of the occultists and find Hermetic and Kabbalistic connections for the Tarot while maintaining a scrupulous respect for facts and history. Decker was one of the few who recognized that there should be no gulf between history and meaning and that the two can be mated. The Esoteric Tarot is the outcome of his quest.

The Esoteric Tarot is a work that Decker has been developing and publishing in tidbits in numerous articles over the years. I first became aware of Decker's work when I read his article on the origins of the Tarot in Gnosis magazine in 1998. In that article, he related the Tarot trumps to the figures in an allegorical woodcut on the journey of life by Hans Holbein from 1525. Decker also related the Tarot's Magician card to the figure of the Good Demon, a man with a wand and a broad-brimmed hat who is depicted handing out lots to babies entering life's arena. Decker revisits that correlation in his introduction to The Esoteric Tarot.

Although the book is divided into six parts with chapters in each, it can really be thought of as having three parts, with the last four combined as one. In the first, Decker, like most historians, traces the origin of cards to China, where paper was invented in the first centuries of the Common Era. But while the standard theory holds that the Chinese money cards with four suits representing coins, strings of coins, myriads of strings of coins, and many myriads, were the first decks, Decker sees them as a later development that was influenced by a deck that originated in the West. Making use of new findings, he posits domino cards, based on the throws of dice, as the first deck. This deck traveled west  and gave rise to a four-suit deck that would eventually become the inspiration for the Tarot's minor suits as well as traveling east to China to inspire the money cards.

Decker theorized that this deck originated in the city of Harran, in present day Turkey. This was a culture that was firmly entrenched in Hermetic mysticism and a pagan religious synthesis. Decker sees the suit symbols as having astrological and Hermetic significance, with the suit of swords being related to the god Mars, the suit of golden coins to the sun god Sol, the suit of cups to Venus, and the suit of staffs to the moon god Thoth. From here the deck traveled to Egypt, where it was adopted by the Muslim Mamelukes, who introduced it to Western Europe in fourteenth-century Spain. This part coincides with the standard theories about the intro-
duction of the cards to Europe.

In the second part, Decker tackles the origin and symbolism of the trumps. He theorizes that it was in Milan, circa 1440, that the trumps were first added to the four-suit deck, which retained the suit symbols invented in Harran. This first deck had fourteen trumps, but was later expanded with an additional seven to have twenty-one. Decker believes that this deck was influenced by the Renaissance interest in Hermetic symbolism and can be seen as a Hermetic allegory of the soul's progress, with the trumps divided into three groups of seven. The first seven cards illustrate the soul's descent into matter, the second seven, called the probation, illustrate the soul's attempt to evolve through the trials of existence in the world. The last seven illustrate the ascent back to the celestial realm of the World Soul, depicted on the World card as Isis. This explanation of the trumps is satisfyingly harmonious with the imagery on the cards and does not feel forced in any way.

Commentators often criticize attempts to connect the trumps with Hermeticism by pointing out that the written by Joseph Gikatilla in the the principal source of Renaissance Hermeticism, the Corpus Hermeticum, only arrived in Italy in the 1460s, after the creation of the Tarot. But Decker, with his scrupulous attention to detail, lists numerous sources for Hermetic philosophy that were available in the early Renaissance, including the Latin translation of the Asclepius, one of the texts from the Corpus that was available throughout the Middle Ages. He also finds correlations for the trumps with astrological and numerical symbolism and the Egyptian hieroglyphs that were presented in the Hieroglyphica, a Hellenistic text that arrived in Italy in the early 1400s.

In last four parts, Decker takes on modern cartomancy. Although he has established that certain divination practices with cards can be traced back to the Renaissance, he champions the role of the eighteenth-century occultist Etteilla as the inspiration for modern cartomancy. This section starts with a biography of Etteilla that is the most complete and accurate one that I have read. It is probably the best one available in English, and is by itself worth the price of the book. Although almost all later occultists tended to diminish Etteilla's role, he was the first professional card reader and the first occultist to have a deck designed solely for divination. Although his theories on the trumps have little modern influence, all modern divinatory interpretations for the pip and court cards are derived from Etteilla's work. 

From the origin of the cards to their use by Etteilla, the Hermetic symbolism behind the Tarot has been established. But what about the Kabbalah? This is where Decker performs some brilliant detective work. He follows the thread back to Etteilla's source for the meaning of the pips to his study of traditional French card readers, then back to earlier Italian readers, who derived numerical symbolism for the pips from a Kabbalistic text, The Gates of Light, teenth century and available in a Latin translation to Christian Kabbalists since 1516. 

This final revelation tends to turn the standard occult theories, which find Kabbalistic references in the trumps rather than in the pips, totally on their heads. Decker's views may be surprising to many, but everything he has written is carefully researched and supported wherever possible with facts. I trust no other author more for insights into the Tarot history and symbolism.

Robert M. Place

The reviewer is author of The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, Alchemy and the Tarot, Astrology and Divination, and designer of The Alchemical Tarot, the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, and five other Tarot decks.