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By Frank Joseph
Synchronicity is the most mysterious thing in the world.
Synchronicity is the term parapsychologists use for “meaningful
coincidence.” It happens to everyone, more often than we realise.
But synchronicities are not “mere” coincidences, random
accidents without significance.
Going through a half-forgotten collection of
old photographs, you’re surprised to find the snap-shot of a
friend you lost contact with years ago. Just then the telephone
rings and the voice on the other end of the line belongs to the
same person in the photo.
You’re desperate to find a parking place
because you’ve got to be on time for a crucial appointment.
There’s not an open spot as far as the eye can see. Suddenly, a
car pulls out in front of you, leaving you a space right in
front of the address where you’re expected.
You’ve just finished reading a book about
rare birds, when the first humming-bird you’ve ever seen in your
back yard is drinking nectar from a nearby flower.
These are typical incidents of
synchronicity. And while most people brush them aside as
insignificant happenstance, some of the greatest minds in
history have grappled with this universal enigma.
“Synchronicity” was coined by last century’s leading
psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung. Fascinated as he was by it, even
Albert Einstein could not understand how it worked.
A synchronous event of my own in 1991
prompted me to interview, over the next six years, eventually
100 persons about their feelings on this elusive enigma. The
meaningful coincides they shared with me proved more
illuminating than anything I ever read on the subject.
Collecting them into a loose order, I was
somewhat astounded to see that these synchronous events
experienced by my friends and acquaintances arranged themselves
into repeating categories. Although many of the persons
interviewed differed widely in age, spiritual beliefs or
education, the meaningful coincidences they recounted all
belonged to specific groups of common experience.
Widening my research, I found that persons
belonging to other cultures, sometimes long dead – often many
hundreds of years ago – fell into the same seventeen categories
which emerged from the men and women who told me of their own
fortuitous occurrences. Their often dramatic, occasionally
funny, always numinous testimony formed the basis for a book I
wrote, Synchronicity & You, Understanding the Role of
Meaningful Coincidence in your Life. Synchronicity is
fundamentally a form of guidance that enters into the personal
lives of every human being. Even if we knowingly discard it, at
least part of its influence enters our subconscious.
Some guiding synchronicities form a category
best described as “Warnings.” A representative incidence of
admonitory synchronicity not included in my book was recounted
by the California poet, Miriam Hohf:
“Many years ago, when I was a small child
living in the Pennsylvania countryside, I took long walks by
myself across the fields and into the forest, listening to the
birds and talking to the rabbits and squirrels. I never felt
afraid and deeply loved all the trees and animals. But on one
otherwise beautiful, sunny day, my surroundings felt different
somehow.
“Everything was absolutely calm and
motionless. Just when I approached the edge of the forest,
however, a gust of wind suddenly arose, loudly rustling the
leaves. I stopped and listened to them, because I felt they were
speaking to me. They seemed to be saying, ‘Go away! Do not come
into the woods today! There is danger here! Danger! Not safe to
play here today! Go away!’ For the first time, a chill of fear
ran through me and I fled, almost in tears. I did not visit the
forest again, too afraid to return.
“About a week after my experience, mother
told me about a terrible story just published in the local
paper. It seems that on the same day the leaves spoke to me the
body of another little girl was found by the police. She had
been brutally raped before being murdered. Did the spirits of
the forest warn me in the rustle of their leaves?”
Another prominent category of synchronicity
falls under the heading of Numbers, which thread together
mystical human experience, often with surprising results. The
number 57, for example, is an intimate characteristic of the
American Revolution, as investigator Arthur Finnessey abundantly
demonstrates in his well-researched book, History Computed.
Among the outstanding examples he cites is
the last time the Liberty Bell rang, in tribute to George
Washington, before it cracked on February 22, 1846 – 57 years
after his 57th birthday. Together with his titles and signature,
the closing paragraph of the US Constitution, following its
original seven articles, makes up 57 words. It was ratified by
57 yes-votes from New Hampshire, and all Constitutional law
begins with the Constitution’s 57th word – that word being,
“All.” On February 6, 1777, 57 weeks to the day after the
pivotal Battle of Princeton, another turning-point took place
when the French joined the American cause. They fought off 19
British warships, making it possible for Washington to defeat
Cornwallis on October 19, 1781, in a war which began on the 19th
of April, 1775 – 57 is the sum of these three significant 19s.
Washington’s only two victories over British
Commander Cornwallis were 57 days apart. So too, 57 days
separated the other decisive battles of the war, at Cowpens and
the Guilford Courthouse. The final anniversary of Lexington and
Concord celebrated during the Revolutionary War was precisely 57
months, 57 weeks and 57 days after they were fought. In South
Carolina’s most famous assault at “Fort Ninety Six”, 57
Americans were killed. Interestingly, “96” is the sum total of
the number of men who signed the Declaration of Independence
(57) and the Constitution (39). The American Revolution’s 57th
month concluded on 19 January, 1780; the Redcoats took
Charleston exactly twice times 57 (114) days later. Twelve times
57 (684) days before, the decisive Battle of Monmouth was
fought.
In numerical symbolism, 57 is the
combination of two numerals, 5 and 7. Five is associated with
male energy (i.e., war), while seven signifies the completion of
cycles. Together they form a symbolic concept perfectly
reflecting the completion of major military cycles running like
inter-linking themes throughout the history of the Revolutionary
War. Isodore Kozminsky refers to any number from 55 to 64 as
“the Sword,” associated with military victory (Numbers, Their
Meaning & Magic, NY: Samuel Weiser, 1977, page 51).
These ancient interpretations of 57 make its
frequent recurrence throughout the War of Independence very
appropriate. Yet, we stand in awe of its historical
significance: Was it somehow an out-growth or expression of
America’s violent struggle for freedom, or did it from the
beginning (from before the beginning) determine historical
events?
The outstanding feature of 57, around which
acausal incidents revolved, was a major rift in the fabric of
history – the American Revolution. All other, similarly powerful
historical events likewise produce extraordinary high levels of
meaningful coincidence. In fact, the more dramatic, even
traumatic, the event, the greater the intensity and sheer number
that appear.
An outstanding example was the Titanic
disaster. Hardly any other single occurrence in the 20th century
generated such a large collection of impressive examples. So
many, in fact, they embraced all 17 categories of synchronicity.
The meaningful significance of particular numerals played its
part in the Titanic disaster, too – in that classic bad-luck
symbol, Number 13.
That this traditionally unfortunate number
was factually associated with the most infamous of unlucky ocean
liners should come as no surprise. Two, separate examples serve
to illustrate. A British journalist, W.T. Stead, demonstrated
his contempt for superstition by deliberately concluding a story
on the 13th of April, 1912. Further tempting fate, his narration
described the discovery of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus and
the curse of violent death alleged to overtake anyone who
verbally translated its inscription. The next day, R.M.S.
Titanic met the disaster in which Stead perished.
A fellow passenger who lightheartedly
challenged the deadly number was from Youngstown, Ohio. George
Wick had been traveling with his family through Europe for
several months and booked homeward voyage on Titanic. While in
transit to Cherbourg, where the doomed ship would make final
docking before attempting her transatlantic crossing, he stopped
at Paris. There he purchased a Grand Prix sweepstakes ticket,
choosing Number 13 on purpose, just to prove to everyone that he
was not superstitious. “Watch and see what it does for me!,” he
exclaimed. Several days later, Wick went down with the vessel.
The “Warnings” cited in Miriam Hohf’s
childhood experience proliferated around the Titanic before she
sailed. A White Star insignia crumbled to pieces in the hands of
Mrs. Arthur Lewis while she was pinning it to her husband’s cap.
He was just about to board R.M.S. Titanic, where he was a
steward. At the time, she regarded the incident as a bad “omen,”
although he dismissed her expressed anxiety as foolishness,
until the ship foundered a few days later. Fortunately, Mr.
Lewis survived.
In another Titanic-related warning, Colonel
John Weir, a mining engineer with a worldwide reputation, almost
canceled his first class ticket because of distressful feelings
about the voyage. Staying at London’s prestigious Waldorf
Astoria, he awoke on the morning of April 10th to find that the
water pitcher atop his dresser had unaccountably shattered,
soaking his clothes. He seriously expressed his premonitory
feelings to the hotel manager, who allayed the Colonel’s
“superstitions” enough for him to reluctantly board the great
ocean liner. While at sea, Weir told his secretary about the
burst water pitcher, could not shake his sense of foreboding,
and said he must get off Titanic at the next opportunity, when
it docked in Queenstown, Ireland. Again dissuaded, he remained
aboard, only to go down with the ship he intuited was doomed.
As some measure of the magnitude of
synchronous phenomena associated with the disaster, no less than
899 persons who initially booked passage for Titanic’s maiden
voyage eventually refused to board her because of warnings they
experienced in the forms of various omens, premonitions, dreams
and precognitive events. An additional 4,066 would-be passengers
either missed the boat or canceled their reservations, usually
under apparently normal circumstances, but sometimes through
unusual coincidences that prevented them from sailing.
Blanche Marshall suffered a hysterical
outbreak on April 10th, 1912, as she and her family watched the
Titanic steam past the Isle of Wight from the roof of their home
overlooking the River Solent. In a virtual panic, she said the
liner would sink before it reached New York and railed against
her husband, daughters and servants for being blind to her
vision of masses of people drowning in the freezing waters of
the North Atlantic.
While neither Mrs. Marshall nor anyone she
knew sailed aboard the Titanic, she was prevented from boarding
another doomed liner just three years later by similar
precognition. In 1915, her husband had booked tickets for their
return trip to England from America aboard the Lusitania. She
thought nothing of it until she saw the May 1st date of the
tickets. Convinced the ship would be torpedoed and sunk on that
passage, Blanche convinced him to change their booking.
Interestingly, she felt safe traveling on Lusitania at any other
time. It was only the prospect of the May 1st crossing that
alarmed her. True to her sense of foreboding, the vessel was
torpedoed and sunk with heavy loss of life on the same voyage
she refused to take.
A sub-category of “Premonitions” is
synchronous literature. Published in 1892, From the Old World
to the New described the sinking of an ocean liner after
colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The “fictional”
name of its captain, E.J. Smith, likewise belonged to the man
who commanded R.M.S. Titanic, twenty years later. Interestingly,
the author of From the Old World to the New, W.T. Stead,
lost his own life on board the same ship.
While Titanic was being readied for her
maiden voyage, the May issue of Popular Magazine was
coming off the presses with the story of Admiral, an 800
foot-long ocean liner crossing the North Atlantic through calm
seas at 22 1/2 knots. She strikes an iceberg and sinks, leaving
the survivors among her thousand passengers to be rescued by a
steamer. Similarities to the real-life tragedy convinced readers
the story was based on Titanic’s particulars. But author Mayn
Clew Garnett was said to have received the details for his
novelette in a dream he had while sailing on the Titanic’s
sister ship, Olympic. While he may have been influenced by
physical parallels noticed during his passage aboard the
virtually look-a-like vessel, Garnett’s selection of 43 north
latitude for Admiral’s collision with the iceberg was virtually
the same position at which Titanic met her identical fate.
Literature is not alone among the arts which
figure into synchronous events. More in black humour than
conscious precognition, a crewman and his wife made recordings
for each other, the husband singing “Only To See Her Face Again”
to her “True Til Death,” on April 7, 1912, prior to his service
about the world’s greatest ocean liner. Three days later, he
sailed on the Titanic, never to return.
Animal interaction in human experience forms
its own, distinct category of synchronicity, and was not missing
in the fate of R.M.S. Titanic. The age-old sailor’s belief that
rats leave ships long before any apparent danger of sinking was
exemplified aboard R.M.S. Titanic, when two crewmen in a forward
boiler room saw panic-stricken rodents scampering aft, away from
the starboard bow. Next day, an iceberg struck that very spot.
Both men escaped the disaster with their lives, because the
rats’ sudden appearance had made them uneasy enough to station
themselves, as often as possible, in the immediate vicinity of
the lifeboats.
Another incident of animal synchronicity
associated with Titanic concerns Bess, a thorough-bred horse
belonging to Isadore Straus, the co-founder of Macy’s Department
Store. The same night he and his wife were killed in the
sinking, six-year-old Bess suddenly died of causes the
veterinarian was unable to determine.
Tactile sensations comprise a sub-heading of
“Death” in synchronicity. The unaccountable perfume of flowers
associated with someone close and recently deceased is not
uncommon. Another example belongs to May de Witt Hopkins, who
experienced the fragrance of roses in her London home one day
after R.M.S. Titanic sank. Although word of the disaster had
spread by that time, names of those on board were not yet
published. But with the flowery scent filling her room from no
apparent source, Hopkins suddenly felt that someone she knew was
trying to make her aware of his or her death. She later learned
that a friend, who was, unbeknownst to her, a passenger on the
ship, had indeed perished when it went down. Interestingly, her
own mother, during the late 19th century, had been similarly
alerted to the death of a loved one by a mysterious, flowery
odour.
“Inanimate Objects,” like the White Star
insignia that fatefully disintegrated in the hands of Mrs.
Lewis, comprise a wide-ranging group of synchronous experiences.
The Managing Director of the White Star Line, Joseph Bruce
Ismay, survived the Titanic, but thereafter resigned his post,
because he was publicly, although unfairly, blamed for the
tragedy. He spent the next 25 years of his life in virtual
seclusion, dying on October 17, 1937. That same Sunday
afternoon, a framed, oval mirror that hung in Ismay’s office
during his tenure at the White Star Line suddenly crashed from
its hook, scattering broken pieces across the floor.
Two weeks after Titanic was lost, a large
wooden crate left unclaimed at Pier 61, in New York harbour, was
opened by port authorities. They were surprised to see that it
contained a meticulously detailed model of the sunken vessel. It
had originally been sent to the US for promotional purposes on
behalf of the White Star Line and was supposed to be returned to
the London offices on the doomed ship’s return voyage. But the
30 foot-long representation was accurate in more particulars
than anyone could explain. Although it presented a full
compliment of 20 davits, there were only a dozen miniature
lifeboats. Moreover, the bow was partially ruined and a long
crack appeared from the keel toward the upper deck, mimicking
the actual damage sustained by Titanic.
As might be expected, “Dreams” are an
important category of synchronicity. While traveling in Europe
during the spring of 1912, a New York lawyer, Isaac C.
Frauenthal, dreamt of being aboard a large ship which collided
with some floating object and began to sink. His was a long,
vivid nightmare, in which he clearly recalled the sights and
sounds of calamity. Several nights later, the identical
psycho-drama repeated itself, and he told his brother and
sister-in-law that it must be a warning against their up-coming
voyage on R.M.S. Titanic.
But they laughed at his dream and convinced
him to go through with their return trip to America aboard the
doomed White Star liner. All three survived the sinking foretold
in Isaac’s recurring nightmare.
Perhaps the most inexplicable aspects of
synchronicity are those more infrequent instances of “Parallel
Lives.” When Lucien P. Smith narrowly escaped death during the
terrible fire on Viking Princess, in 1966, it was his second,
major disaster at sea. A survivor of the Titanic, he was in his
mother’s womb when that ship sank, just as Mrs. Astor, also
aboard, was pregnant with her son, John Jacob. Both children
were born eight months after the sinking, in which their fathers
perished. Their mothers died in the same year, 1940.
Individual lives and major conflicts are
events sometimes so powerful they echo beyond their own time and
appear to replay themselves in the future. Such an extraordinary
case of parallel history began to unfold when William C. Reeves
went aboard the tramp steamer, Titanian, as an ordinary seaman,
departing Scotland for New York on April 13, 1935. Ten days
later, at 2300 hours, he was ordered into the foc’s’le head to
stand watch.
Although the sea was calm, the darkness was
moonless and impenetrable. Reeves began to feel increasingly
uneasy, not only because of the very poor visibility conditions
he now faced as ship’s look-out. He thought, too, of the
premonitory novel he had been reading in his cabin, Morgan
Robertson’s Futility. Reeves was unable to keep his mind
from drifting back to a dramatic moment in the book when Titan’s
look-out missed seeing an iceberg in time to avoid disaster.
Also, he could not help but notice the ironic similarity of his
ship’s name, Titanian, and Robertson’s Titan with Titanic.
As his sense of irony deepened into anxiety,
he realised that the time was now 23:35, just five minutes
before the hour Titanic struck the iceberg. Reeves knew that
penalties were severe for raising a false alarm, the darkness
ahead showed no sign of danger, and for some moments he
hesitated to act. But at last his feelings of imminent collision
overwhelmed him and he ordered the bridge to stop engines,
“Iceberg ahead!”
No sooner had the ship’s speed dropped off,
than she smashed into several large fragments of ice, which
twisted her bow and disabled her propeller. Slowing to full
stop, Titanian’s crew were astonished to behold an enormous
iceberg looming directly ahead out of the darkness. The floating
mountain appeared at 23:40, the same hour of Titanic’s
collision.
Doubtless, had the Titanian not stopped in
time, she would have followed her predecessor to the bottom. An
SOS sent to Cape Race, Newfoundland, brought rescue to the
stranded crew.
The
multiple synchronicities of this parallel event – the similar
ships’ names, Reeves’ powerful premonition, his reading of
Robertson’s book, precisely the same hour for meeting with a
deadly iceberg – far out-strip all considerations on behalf of
mere chance. Instead, they clearly define the operative
principle of meaningful coincidence as a legitimate phenomenon.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Frank Joseph
is the editor-in-chief of Ancient American, a
bi-monthly, popular science magazine describing overseas
visitors to the Americas centuries before Columbus. His books
Destruction of Atlantis, Survivors of Atlantis, Edgar Cayce’s
Atlantis and Lemuria, and Atlantis Encyclopedia resulted from
Joseph’s world travels in search of clues to the ancient past.
He has also written a book on the subject of the above article,
Synchronicity & You. He is a member of The Oriental Institute at
the University of Illinois (USA) and Japan’s Savant Society.
Joseph lives in Colfax, Wisconsin, USA. |
