True Believers
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. The creator of the most rigorously rational detective in crime literature was taken in by five crudely-doctored color photographs showing two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, standing in a garden in Cottingley, gazing at several tiny, scantily-clad women fluttering around them on gossamer wings. He wrote a letter about his belief to the Strand Magazine (which had published all his Sherlock Holmes stories), citing the photographs as proof that fairies existed. When the Strand published his letter, Doyle was widely mocked, and in a fit of pique he killed off his sleuth in a story called “The Final Problem.” Holmes and his friend Doctor John Watson go to Switzerland to track down Professor Moriarty, a criminal mastermind who has perpetrated numerous felonies in England. The detective finds Moriarty at the edge of the Regensburg Falls, and grapples with him. They both fall into the raging torrent hundreds of feet below, and a brokenhearted Watson returns to London alone. But the readership of the Strand implored Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes, and he relented, publishing four more tales about the great detective: “The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” “His Last Bow,” “The Field Bazaar,” and “How Watson Learned The Trick.”
However, Conan Doyle remained fascinated by the paranormal. A Russian occultist named Madame Helena Blavatsky had founded what she called The Theosophical Society some years previously, and Conan Doyle became a member of it. It based its teachings on a combination of Hindu Vedantic traditions and Tantric Buddhism, and Conan Doyle wasn’t the only prominent writer to join the cult. A partial list of English, Irish, and American members includes Jack London, W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Edison, Thornton Wilder, and even Elvis Presley.
Sir Isaac Newton, the chief figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, a physicist and mathematician who formulated the law of universal gravitation, laid the foundation for modern optics, and discovered infinitesimal calculus, believed in alchemy, especially the transmutation, by chemical means, of base metals like lead, into higher metals like gold.
Thomas Huxley, who introduced the study of science to the British public school system, was an outspoken atheist and the first scientist to champion Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species, believed in reincarnation. So did Henry Ford, a pragmatist who thought that history “was the bunk,” along with religion.
Albert Einstein, formulator of the Special and General Theories of Relativity, was the foremost nuclear physicist of the 20th century, unleashing the power of the atom for better or worse. But he had trouble accepting his younger colleague Niels Bohr’s quantum physics, even though it was based on his own theories, which in turn were influenced by discoveries made by Max Planck in the late 19th century. For Einstein, the trouble with Bohr’s theory was that it seemed to suggest that some subatomic particles can exist and interact in two places, or states, at once, which would invalidate c, 186,000 miles per second, the speed limit of the universe. “Spooky action at a distance,” Einstein scoffed at first, because he was bent on discovering a unified field theory, which would unite the fundamental forces between elementary particles – electricity, magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear interactions, and gravity – into a single theoretical framework.
He relented a bit toward the end of his life, when quantum theory had been widely accepted by the physics and mathematics communities, but it should be mentioned that by 1955, he recognized “a miraculous order which manifests itself in all of nature, as well as in the world of ideas,” although this order is devoid of “a personal God who rewards and punishes individuals based on their behavior. Einstein’s was a cosmic religion, wherein the rational discovery of the secrets of nature is a religious act.
“There are no laws of nature without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified.”
– “Ideas And Opinions,” 1955
I can lose myself for most of an afternoon contemplating the intricacies of the magnificent hemlocks that rise into the sky just across the front yard of Patsy’s and my house in New Hampshire. So Druidism attracts me as a belief system, but the Romans maintained that the Druids of Gaul and Britain practiced ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It would be delightful to shut Donald Trump in a wicker basket, hoist him up a tree, and shoot arrows at him until he stopped blathering. And after being cut down, beheaded, eviscerated, and singed to remove his bodily hairs, he could be slow-roasted in a pit, the way the Samoans roast boar. He’d make enough to feed a dozen Druids, and I do like roast pork.
Unfortunately, the logistics of capturing Der Drumpfenfuerer are far beyond my resources, unless I could persuade some of his Secret Service guards to rebel and turn on him, as Caligula’s Praetorian Guard did when “Little Boot’s” atrocities finally enraged them. But the Secret Service is unlikely to aid in the assassination of a President, no matter how atrocious he is. Kerry O’Grady, the agent who posted on Facebook that she would rather do jail time than take a bullet for the misogynistic Groper In Chief, was promptly fired, and is currently being questioned by the FBI.
Fortunately, I have a fallback religion. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by the young physicist Bobby Henderson in 2005 to challenge the fundamentalist Christians’ belief in Intelligent Design, has won converts all over the world, rather to Henderson’s surprise. But what’s not to like about a god who stands for tolerance, champions rationality, and looks like a bowl of pasta with tomato and meatball sauce?