Are there any real mysteries left? Clearly, we’re not the doe-eyed, innocent public we once were, back when Howdy Doody and Alka Seltzer ruled the popular zeitgeist. It’s not enough for things to be true anymore. Now they must pass a more rigorous test: the test of believability in the laboratory of public opinion. And yet somehow there still remain unsolved phenomena to boggle the jaded mind, shake us out of our trances, and remind us never to trust our senses, our reason, our memory, or the evidence. We live in a truly miraculous time, when anything can be true.
But only the best things can be SuperTrue®.
It was a Saturday séance like any other. The medium, a person sensitive to the presence of spirits of the dead who hovered close to the veil between worlds, intoned instructions to the others gathered, and recited incantations.
The one thing that stood out as different from any séance you might be picturing is that it took place thirty-four thousand years ago, and all the participants were Stone Age cave people.
Did they have candles? No. The cave they had gathered in was lit with twisted plant fiber wicks soaking in animal fat pooled in divots carved at intervals into the stone tabletop. The tabletop was also decorated with red and yellow ochre designs constituting a complex diagram of the spirit world. This schematic bled out from the limits of the tabletop and spread throughout the cave, across the floor, up the walls, and all over the ceiling.
All the better for the Stone Age medium and the avids and adepts assembled to fully inhabit the spiritual realm in both an analogous and an aesthetic sense.
They joined hands, connecting in a sacred circle, as their descendants would do in 19th Century parlors tens of thousands of years later. The medium, or shaman, for that was her function in her tribe, now brought an eerie, deep tone to her incantations. Her voice was no longer her own, indicating that she’d entered the trance that would allow her to pass through the barrier between the world of living bodies and that of the shades.
The flames guttered in the breeze that passed over them as if a hot, animal breath from deep within the cave’s tunnels. The various hanging shell and bone chimes rattled. Crude furniture fashioned from logs clattered as they hopped and shivered around the chamber. The company were all used to this... read more