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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.
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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. |
