The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal

Gordon Steins The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal could have provided an answer to my astronomer's question. The section on astrology, written by Geoffrey Dean, Arthur Mather, and Ivan W. Kelly, traces astrology from its Mesopotamian origins through the Alan Leo-inspired rebirth in the early 1900s to the advent of today's personal computers, which make days' worth of calculations the routine work of a second. Along the way, they analyze the main arguments for and against, and critique the most significant evidence. If Geoffrey Dean's name sounds familiar, it should: he was the author, back in 1987, of a two-part series on astrology for the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Many of the other contributors' names should be just as familiar to SI readers: James Alcock, Paul Kurtz, Larry Kusche, Bernard Leikind, Persi Diaconis, Martin Gardner, and Terence Hines. The editorial board for the book includes Carl Sagan (who also wrote the foreword), Antony Flew, and Stephen Jay Gould.

Many of the book's other topics have also been covered in SI: crop circles (written by Joe Nickell), palmistry (Ray Hyman), biorhythms (Terence Hines), and skepticism and the paranormal (Paul Kurtz). What's difficult to figure out is how the particular topics were chosen. There are entries for the mediums Leonora Piper, D.D. Home, Margery Crandon, and Eusapia Palladino, and 1960s guru Carlos Castaneda, but no separate entry for Uri Geller. Geller does get a couple of pages in the entry on CSI-COP itself, and another under psychokinetic metal bending. The Society for Psychical Research, Charles Fort, and Harry Houdini get entries, but not James Randi (although he is quoted in a number of articles). There are vampires, exorcisms, coincidences, and miracles - but only a single paragraph on homeopathy, and no separate section or index listing for either the scientific method, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or quantum mechanics.

This book loosely shares its category with a number of other titles. Leslie Shepard's two-volume Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Gale Research, 1991) is much more complete on paranormal topics and claimants, but much less skeptical. James Randi's An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (St. Martin's Press, 1995) covers much of the same ground but in a series of short, popularly written entries. Simon Hoggart's and Mike Hutchinson's Bizarre Beliefs (Richard Cohen Books, 1995), reviewed in this issue, is aimed at the mass market of people who have never thought about these issues rather than at informed skeptics. But the best all-round introduction is probably still Terence Hines's textbook-style Science and the Paranormal (Prometheus, 1983), which manages to be both readable and thorough.

But Stein is trying to do something different from all of these: His goal is to produce a scientifically based encyclopedia. This explains many of the puzzling gaps in coverage. Stein says for some subjects he was unable to find suitable scholarly experts. Rather than commission articles by people whose credentials or background were, he felt, insufficient, he preferred to leave some subjects out. At the same time, he limits his definition of "paranormal" to include only phenomena - or anomalies - whose truth would depend on a violation of currently known principles of science. This means he sticks to phenomena that are scientifically testable, leaving out purely religious phenomena. Exceptions like the Shroud of Turin are included because science is used to justify the claims made for it.

Fair enough. The result, though, is to leave you frustrated when the subject you want isn't covered. The sections on statistics and assessing coincidence are really useful, but most of us would really be glad to have a convenient place to grab briefings on the scientific principles that paranormal claims violate. How do you argue against the often-repeated claim that quantum mechanics supports a number of parapsychological claims?

It's inevitable that a book of this size and scope will be somewhat uneven, since no two authors will approach their topics in exactly the same way. So the graphology article (Barry Beyerstein) details the history and claims of graphology and summarizes the relevant research, but the Castaneda piece (Jay C. Fikes) is disappointingly diffuse. For a layperson who doesn't understand the methods and accepted practices of scientific anthropology but has read Castaneda's books and found their metaphors valuable, it's difficult to accept the dismissal of Castaneda's stories on the grounds that his reports are untypical.

That example illustrates why constructing an encyclopedia like this is such an ambitious and difficult project. Much of this encyclopedia is really excellent. I've already mentioned the astrology section; there are many other well-researched sections such as graphology and psychic healing (Chris French) that lay out the history and significant research relating to a particular topic. I'd like to think that this encyclopedia is only the first version of a work that will be regularly updated and enlarged.

Wendy Grossman is a writer and the founder of The Skeptic (U.K.). She lives in Richmond, Surrey.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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