Hoax

It should have been a bad day. At six am, while it was still dark, Ian marched into our room, walked over to my side of the bed, and screamed in my face. He usually does that when he’s reached maximum frustration point with talking, but it was still dark out for God’s sake. He just woke up unhappy and pretty much stayed that way all day.

Or so I heard, because at noon I left the family with the inexplicably grouchy tot and went to the other side of Hudson River for a day off with friends.

We went to the Met, which had several nice exhibits. Prague displayed religious art from the 1300s. Lots of rich jewel tones on the tapestries of the Madonna and intricate metal work to encase saint bones and finger tips in reliquaries.

Our favorite exhibit was The Perfect Medium. Here they showed photographs from the mid 1800s of the occult. Mediums in the throws of connections with the supernatural were photographed with ectoplasm coming out of various orifices. Flowers floated mysteriously in front of a curtain. Ghosts hovered above the heads of loved ones. Two photographs showed little fairies talking to girls.

The fact that these little fairies are so obviously paper dolls seemed to have blown past many people of the day. Or that ectoplasm looked a lot like a nice piece of cloth. Or the fact that the floating flowers looked a lot like someone was holding them behind a sheet. What’s a double exposure?

It’s fun to mock the hokeyness of the hoaxes, but also to imagine the great belly laughs that the charlatans must have had. They quickly adapted the new tool of the day to make their living. They are the forefathers of the Weekly World News. Ah, what fun they would have had with Photoshop.

It’s hard not to walk away from the exhibit with the feeling that people are chumps. Human nature is so easily swayed by flimsy evidence, mere parlor tricks, to believe whatever is pleasing or incredible. Alligators in the sewers. Mikey dead from pop rocks and coke. Another sighting of Nessie. Given a choice between science and magic, sometimes magic gets the upper hand.

The exhibits notes that the popularity in the occult followed periods of violent war. Perhaps when reality is harsh, when it’s a scream in the face, magic is a needed escape.