[escepticos] RV: Science and Historical Mysteries

["Javier Armentia" <planetario@...>]

----- Mensaje original -----
De: Brian Siano <bsiano en cceb.med.upenn.edu>
Asunto: Science and Historical Mysteries


> This artile turned up on the online magazine Slate, at the URL
> http://Slate.msn.com/Features/FreundFeature/FreundFeature.asp
>
> I was going to send it to Michael Shermer, given his interest in the
> uses of science in history, but I figured it'd be of interest to
> other readers of the list as well.
>
>
> ARTICLES
> The End of Mystery
> The encroachment of science on fantasy's last redoubts.
> By Charles Paul Freund
> Posted Tuesday, June 6, 2000, at 4:00 p.m. PT
>
> In 1981, a former Trappist monk named Laurence James Downey
> hijacked an Aer Lingus flight over France. He didn't want
> money, and he wasn't demanding the release of political
> prisoners. What he wanted was for Pope John Paul II to reveal
> the dreaded Third Secret of Fatima, first vouchsafed,
> according to Catholic tradition, to three Portuguese children
> in 1917 during a series of visions of the Virgin Mary.
>
> Downey thus earned a special place in the curious world of
> wild history, a tradition that seeks solutions to the past's
> more intriguing unanswered questions. It is an
> often-fascinating world of mystery, anomaly, hidden history,
> and occult knowledge. But it is one that is suddenly
> shrinking. More and more of the past's secrets are being
> revealed, especially in the laboratory, and the results are
> considerably different from the drama and romance that are at
> the heart of the wild historical tradition.
>
> The last secret of Fatima-the others had long ago been
> revealed-was certainly one of the world's best-kept
> secrets; some Catholics had staged hunger strikes to force
> Rome to reveal it, and even many non-Catholics wondered what
> sort of apocalypse the Vatican could find literally
> unspeakable. Nuclear war? Schism? The Antichrist? The
> associated papal folklore was quite promising: Popes, on
> learning the secret, were reputed to have fainted or to have
> been left speechless for days.
>
> Last month, the Vatican finally resolved the matter: Fatima's
> remaining secret, it said, prophesied the 1981 shooting of
> Pope John Paul II. While dramatic, the news fell short of the
> Apocalypse that had dominated speculation for over 80 years.
> That the much-feared prophecy had been fulfilled 20 years ago
> was, for some, anticlimactic.
>
> Only three weeks before the church revealed its Fatima secret,
> a pair of geneticists announced that they had resolved the
> mystery of the Lost Dauphin. In 1795, the 10-year-old son of
> Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette died in prison. Or did he? As
> soon as the boy was reported dead, stories arose that the
> real dauphin had been rescued and a substitute left in his
> cell. People have been arguing about little Louis XVII for
> 200 years. Hundreds of books address the mystery, including
> Huckleberry Finn, and a long line of claimants has intrigued
> their contemporaries. Indeed, one claimant is buried in the
> Netherlands under a headstone that identifies him as the heir
> to the French throne.
>
> But scientists have now compared DNA from locks of Marie
> Antoinette's hair with DNA extracted from the heart of
> the boy who died in the French prison. They match. The Lost
> Dauphin has been found, and disappointed romantics will have
> to take what succor they can from the unlikely fact that a
> succession of people harbored the little prince's desiccated
> heart as a curio for so long.
>
> Indeed, disappointed romantics of history had best keep a
> careful eye out for such succor. Last year, DNA findings also
> ended speculation about the "real" fate of Czar Nicholas II
> and his family. That wild history had included the names of
> the Romanovs' courageous rescuers, their escape route, a
> history of sightings, a parade of claimants, a hit movie, and
> a Pat Boone record.
>
> The accelerating use of modern laboratory techniques in
> resolving old mysteries is very good news for history. But it
> may not be such good news for the cause of enchantment. Since
> at least the Enlightenment, enchantment-a sense of
> wonder at the anomalous and the seemingly
> inexplicable-has been in rapid retreat from the world.
> One of its last redoubts (if one omits the purely spiritual,
> a quite different category) has been in the odd nooks and
> crannies of history's unanswered questions. There, nourished
> by an infinity of possibility, history is transmuted into the Romantic.
>
> There are compelling themes running through wild history.
> Among the most common is the Secret Survival. The desire to
> believe that a particular figure is actually alive, despite
> reports to the contrary, is a powerful aspect of celebrity.
> In our own time, JFK supposedly lived on a remote island
> belonging to Aristotle Onassis, and Elvis has of course been
> sighted in Kalamazoo, Mich. The belief that the Doors' Jim
> Morrison faked his death is virtually interchangeable with
> once-popular beliefs about the 19th-century Czar Alexander I.
> He was said to have faked his death to become a monk.
> Persistent survival stories are attached even to such figures
> as John Dillinger, John Wilkes Booth, and comedian Andy Kaufman.
>
> Interestingly, not all such alternate histories gain
> followings. For example, there is an intriguing case to be
> made that Joan of Arc was not burned at the stake after all,
> but returned to France, married, raised two children, and
> died the peaceful death of a country woman. The tale of the
> post-stake Joan was told exhaustively by Jules Quicherat in
> 1841, but the material is infrequently cited. What wish is
> fulfilled by a Joan who survives her burning?
>
> Lost Identity is nearly as popular. Instances are relatively
> rare-the mysterious identities of Kaspar Hauser and
> "The Man in the Iron Mask" are the best-known
> examples-but the enthusiasm is bottomless. Wild
> histories have turned both figures into secret royalty
> (though the most likely candidate for the man behind the
> mask-actually made of cloth-is Gen. Vivien de
> Bulonde, imprisoned for cowardice). Hauser, the total
> innocent who turned up in Nuremberg in 1828-only to be
> mysteriously murdered in 1833-is approaching the
> transcendent: The point of Werner Herzog's 1975 film about
> Hauser is his very lack of an identity or place in the world.
>
> There are many other such themes. Unacknowledged Genius cults
> honor Wilhelm Reich, inventor Nikola Tesla, and the Earl of
> Oxford (as the true Bard). Hidden Murder theorists re-examine
> the deaths of Napoleon, Warren Harding, and Meriwether Lewis.
> Not all of these themes are necessarily false by any means;
> many reasonable persons have been drawn to such subjects,
> sometimes to the benefit of "mainstream" history. But what
> often marks wild history as a field is its tendency to solve
> one mystery by positing another, often greater one. The case
> of Jack the Ripper is a legitimate whodunit, but its wild
> versions involve not only the British royal family but also
> the Freemasons. The suicides of Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolph
> and Mary Vetsera at Mayerling in 1889 are certainly bizarre,
> but wild history turned them into an assassination with
> international implications.
>
> Perhaps the most intriguing such case involves a place called
> Rennes-le-Château, where wild history has grown to
> unprecedented proportions. In 1885, Beranger Saunier, priest
> of a poor, remote French parish, was repairing his
> dilapidated church and found a pair of unusual old documents.
> He was soon very wealthy. Just why is not known, but
> proffered solutions have included the Holy Grail, the Cathar
> heresy, the Knights Templar, the lost treasures of the
> Jerusalem Temple, and the possible survival of Jesus. And
> these are the comparatively reasonable elements of an
> expanding library of wild, cosmic histories.
>
> It would be easy enough to dismiss wild history as tabloid
> history, but that would be missing the point-not only
> of the histories but of tabloids as well. Wild history is
> often a popular art, offering similar satisfactions. The
> admirable survive death; the lost are found; the guilty
> accused. Frequently, wild history takes that which is
> extraordinary but incomplete and fills it out to the most
> extraordinary dimensions imaginable. The world is then made
> marvelous again, enchanted.
>
> Comes science with its DNA and its bioarchaeology, its mummy
> CAT scans, its satellite imaging, its sonar, its computer
> analysis, and soon lost cities are found, dead royalty turns
> out really to be dead, pretenders to be but pretenders. The
> past must then reveal itself in fantasy's ashes.
>
> But sometimes the past pays its debt. Who would have dared
> imagine that a child's heart could have been lovingly saved
> until it could, in effect, speak for the Lost Dauphin and
> return him to history?
>
>
>
>
>
> RELATED ON THE WEB
>
> The Fortean Times [http://www.forteantimes.com/] is a monthly
> magazine devoted to news, reviews, and research on strange
> phenomena and experiences. This site
> [http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/1061/] is a
> compendium of Elvis sightings, including rumors that a
> southern infertility clinic offers artificial insemination
> with Elvis' sperm. The Fatima Network
> [http://www.fatima.org/], dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, is
> skeptical about the pope's release of Fatima's Third Secret.
> This page [http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sites.htm] contains
> links to Web sites about JFK's assassination. Click here
> [http://www.bogwomen.com/] to see a photo of the infamous
> "Spud O' Christ."
>
>
> --
> Brian Siano - bsiano en cceb.med.upenn.edu
> Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
> 724 Blockley Hall, 423 Guardian Drive
> Philadelphia, PA 19104
> Phone: 215-898-0901 Fax: 215-573-5325
>
>