THE BATTALION Page 3B
nSupernatural alive, well in B-CS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1979
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By CLAY B. COCKRILL
Special to The Battalion
Belief in the supernatural is alive
over the world, including Bryan
id College Station. Clairvoyants,
trologists, folk doctors and water
55 appea v j ne rs can all be found locally,
ick one ros The following narrative captures
closely as possible the dialogue
tween a man and a clairvoyant
at transpired in Bryan. Sources
main unidentified for reason of
ivacy.
The young man climbed the
rch of the large, old house and
ocked a few times at the door. A
mrt, dark-complected woman of
out 50 years appeared.
“I, uh, guess I came to seek your
rvices,” he said.
The woman unlatched the door
id let him in. He found himself
anding in a high foyer with two
lairs against the back wall and
to be|'
„ it goes 011
3 eople drf teU !/ ou y° ur P ast ’ present
ice they: jM future by looking into your
tn’t beattkit/es, your face, and your body.
beatable’ a
player’s
| will answer three questions,
onsultation is $40.” — A
ryan woman who says she is a
ges himmli a i rC0 y an t
And 1
rs.
ster they
’s fascinate
e detail mi
- beeps aii
uicken »
■rs approad]
o a
night
ask whelk™ ,
, , he man spoke
ace Invade! ,. v „ >.
■ McDilU YeS ’ $4 °- Don 1
aor leading into a living area. In-
Ide, the house seemed stately. The
oman turned to him and spoke
:ry routinely:
I tell you your past, present and
ture by looking into your eyes,
ur face, and your body. I will an-
er three questions. Consultation
I $40.”
I There was a long pause and then
ix months.
i inflation
Dr the last
in lawyer
gotten tei
you have a
•'nrfteaper rate, maybe, like for less
P ent at le fJions?”
The woman smiled warmly. “You
em to be a little short today. I tell
rou what, I let you have the three
lestions for $25, how’s that?”
/ITIC There was another long pause.
much do you have,” the
i woman asked.
Ct/i I "Well I wasn’t thinking of spend-
|jng more than $10.”
“Okay. What do you want to
lOW?”
“Well I, uh, have this problem
[ith women. None of the relation-
ips ever seem to last. I’d like to
know if one ever will.”
I “Your problem is you are too
percentnk emo tj ona l. That has been the prob-
s. Therein j n a jj y 0ur p as j relationships:
last year L ur enl otions and your temper got
' rate j’“ r .put of hand. You have to learn to
plus the k Ijufj-o] y 0ur emotions. You are not
road decidt j v j n g j n (} ie cav eman days; you can’t
r of reti j u ]] y 0ur wa y through everything
to pacd 115a Lj, gel whal you -waul. You
have to learn to control your
hat mafesi | em p er .”
0 the Unil t was awe( j Never before
h taxation anyone spoken so truthfully to
and jitteiifljiu) anc ] w ith such knowledge and
lunity, uliji
a IFrankliii»W^ e man was awe< ^- ^ ever be-
ador. fore had anyone spoken so
ris builtti truthfully to him and with such
1, a school 1 knowledge and authority. He
civic orgaii teas confused. How could she
an Amp k mw these things about him?
Anonym® fj e b een skeptical of fortune
' e °’ tellers before, but now he was
" S i / beginning to wonder.
porate 01* 0 0 ____
pend ski ufftority. He was confused. How
gh to surai s 4 know these things about
shim? He had been skeptical of for
tune tellers before, but now he was
ginning to wonder.
The woman sensed his awe. “I
ow you are confused. It is a gift
1 me by God. Everyone has a
You have yours.”
“How long have you had it?”
“I have known about it since I was
about 15 years old. What else do
you want to know?”
“I will soon graduate from col
lege. My father runs a business and
he wants me to come work with
him.”
“No, it will never work. Your
father is too much like you are. You
don’t like to be told what to do. You
both would rather give orders than
to receive them.”
“But what if he retires?”
“Oh, well that would be all right.
As long as you are your own boss.”
Still the man was awed. The
words she used seemed to charac
terize him perfectly. How could she
do it? How could she know?
“There is a woman I met who
lives in another state. When I
graduate, she wants me to come see
her. Should I?”
“Go. Give it a chance. Give some
one a chance to be close to you. And
don’t wait too long. You are young,
but you will get older, and you
could live a short, unhappy life if
you aren’t careful. Speed, alcohol
and drugs will not make you happy.
Why do you need these things? And
remember that sex is not all there is
to a relationship. If sex is all you
want, go out on the street and get it,
and that way you won’t hurt any
one.”
“Can you predict the future?”
The woman spoke impatiently
now: “You are going to be all right
but you must do these things I’ve
told you.”
“But if you can see the future, the
future is the future; what difference
does it make?”
“You are going to be all right, if
you do these things.”
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Dr. Tom Green, a folklorist at
Texas A<LrM, called what people
want clairvoyants to do “taking
the randomness out of a situa
tion. ”
The woman had never seen the
man before that day, and yet in that
brief period she had painted a de
scriptive image of him that seemed
to be correct. She was apparently
able to do this through her powers
of extrasensory perception (ESP), an
ability to perceive and understand
things that cannot be perceived by
the normal senses. The man left the
house with a greater sense of direc
tion in his life and a less skeptical
attitude toward the supernatural.
In helping people work out their
problems, psychologists and minis
ters take a much less direct ap
proach to giving advice, said Dr. Jef
frey Kern, a psychologist at Texas
A&M University.
They don’t depend on any kind of
special, extra sense through which
they can define people and give
them advice, and they avoid de
scriptive images. In fact most of
them, said Kern, avoid giving ad
vice altogether. Instead, they try to
help people understand themselves
so that they can answer their own
questions.
Kern is skeptical of clairvoyants.
“I don’t think that anyone can
make those kinds of statements
about another person with such cer
tainty as she did,” he said.
Kern said clairvoyants try to al
leviate peoples’ problems by making
something predictable that wasn’t
before.
Dr. Tom Green, a folklorist at
Texas A&M, called this “taking the
randomness out of a situation. ”
A person confronted with a prob
lem is confused by the multitude of
possible outcomes to an impending
situation. Green said. What the
clairvoyant does is try to remove the
confusion by telling the person what
the outcome will be, he said.
The Eskimo equivalent of the In
dian medicine man is called a sha
man. Before a hunt, Eskimo hunters
are often uncertain about where to
find game. Instead of engaging in an
undirected search, they ask the
shaman, and he tells them where to
look.
“If the hunters should find deer,
then the powers of the shaman are
confirmed. If they don’t find deer,
then it is accepted that it was be
cause they didn’t believe strongly
enough in the shaman or they didn’t
strictly observe tribal rites,” Green
said.
“For the Eskimo, any direction is
better than no direction at all,” he
said.
And so it often is for people in
modern society. Confused by the
multitude of decisions to be made,
thay turn to clairvoyants and supers
tition for guidance. It is not neces
sarily the logical approach to solving
a problem, but as Brewton Barry
writes in “You and Your Supersti
tion,” man is only semi-logical any
way.
“He is dominated more by habit,
custom, public opinion, and vanity
than he is by reason. Far more,”
says Berry.
That may explain how a clair
voyant is able to make people feel
better and why they seek their ad
vice, but does it mean that all clair
voyants are quacks? And what about
the young man who confessed that
the things the woman said about
him seemed to be true? How is it
that the image she painted seemed
to be the right image?
Kern admits that he once went to
a gathering of psychics in Florida
who knew, without him telling
them, what his mother’s name was
and that she was deceased.
“I can’t explain that,” he said.
“I’m not dogmatically against it (be
lief in psychic abilities), but I’m still
skeptical.”
Kern said part of a psychic’s abil
ity to make judgments about a per
son that that person can identify
with, is due to their use of general
statements that would seem correct
to anyone.
“Suppose that the woman had
told the man instead that his prob
lem with women was that he was
sometimes shy and wouldn’t come
out of his shell. He would have
probably identified with that just as
easily,” said Kern.
Green said he agreed that this is
often true but said nonetheless, that
for many groups of people clair-
t^<TI ills?::
voyant predictions are valid alterna
tives for dealing with problems.
He also said that most clair
voyants in the United States are
quite sincere in their own belief in
their abilities.
They are often very sensitive to
body mannerisms and physical
changes in their clients, such as eye
dilations. It could be that they sub
consciously extrapolate their predic
tions from that, he said.
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