Word: occult
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...Chicago public library?where he spent his spare time while on a summer job inspecting telephone switchboards?McDonnell chanced upon an obscure book about psychic emanations: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, by English Essayist Frederic W. H. Myers. It turned his interest abidingly toward the occult. "I was fascinated with the idea that this realm of the mind and soul and survival after bodily death ought to be susceptible to investigation through a scientific approach," says McDonnell. Rebuffed by one of his Princeton professors when he asked for help in such an inquiry, the eager student attended...
Like words, numbers have near-occult importance. This is apparent from the ancient Book of Changes, according to which all the laws of nature can be condensed into eight tri-grams and 64 hexagrams, down to such didactic concepts as the five relationships, the six domestic animals, the seven apertures of the head, etc. The mystical rather than analytical preoccupation with numbers, plus a practical concern with ethics, explains in part why China failed for so long to develop natural sciences. In a society where scholarship emphasized rote memory of officially interpreted historical accounts rather than deductive reasoning, there...
BEWITCHED (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Those unconvinced by official stories about what caused the great East Coast blackout last year now have an occult explanation in "The Short Happy Circuit of Aunt Clara...
Like any other voodoo mystic, Haitian Dictator François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier has his good-luck day: the 22nd. He was elected "President" on Sept. 22, 1957, inaugurated Oct. 22, then installed as "President for Life" on June 22, 1964. Some Haitians even credit his occult powers with the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, a longtime foe. But last Jan. 22, Duvalier's luck suddenly seemed to turn when one of his two DC-3s crashed on Haiti's southern peninsula, crippling his rickety little air force. Haitians hopefully spread the word that Duvalier might...
Better with Rats. All of these teachers, and the others on the cover, have some common qualities that tend to dispel what Cornell's Perkins calls the "marvelous smoke screen" teachers have thrown up to convey the notion that "what they are doing is an occult mystery." All have demonstrated sound scholarship through publication. All are immersed in a conviction that their scholarship has an irresistible relevance to life, and feel compelled to convey that relevance. And all believe that in sights, ideas, ways of thinking, methods of inquiry, are far more important to implant in young minds than...