ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO

 MERLIN-CLASS MAGICIANS

In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.

—BILLY JOEL

Here we’ll consider three real-world examples of magical power far beyond anything that we typically see in the laboratory. All three of these individuals were observed to do mind-blowing things by dozens to thousands of multiple, credible witnesses. Evidence based on eyewitness testimony can never be as certain as measurements taken in controlled experiments, and there is always the problem that history embellishes a good story. But as you’ll see, there are persuasive reasons to pay attention to the documented evidence in these cases. Each involved many witnesses over long periods of time. In such instances the mundane explanations boil down to mass hallucinations, collusion, or blatant fraud. My take on these individuals is that they probably had genuine talents.

ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO

The first case is Joseph Desa, born in Copertino, Italy, in 1603. Like most ordinary people in the seventeenth century, Joseph was poor and born during a time of widespread poverty, plague, hunger, and war. The Catholic Church was the principal authority among European nations, and its power was enforced with an iron hand in the form of the Inquisition. The general population was constantly on the edge of desperation, quickly inflamed by rumors, and easily spooked. It was a time when the mass mind vacillated between moments of panic, dismay, and fanaticism.

Within this context, when Joseph was nine years old he fell ill from an infection, which led to gangrene. It crippled him for five years, much of it spent bedridden and in pain. Without access to the Internet (Wi-Fi would not arrive for another four hundred years) or even a book, Joseph escaped the prison and pain of his body through daydreams, reveries, and fantasies. In some of those states he was spontaneously transported into states of ineffable bliss.

Finally, a hermit with a reputation as a surgeon operated on the boy, and Joseph encountered his first miracle: he survived the surgery. But without schooling and stunted in social skills, Joseph was perceived as dimwitted. He easily fell into trances and gained the nickname “Boccaperta” (Gaping Mouth) for his tendency to look up with his mouth open when entranced by Church music. Hired and fired from many workaday jobs, he felt attracted to the contemplative life of the Church. After a harrowing series of failures and near misses, he was ordained when he was twenty-five years old.

The Church suited Joseph, but his special talents soon became a problem. Early in his career, if a member of the town displeased him, there were consequences. For example:

A certain Count don Cosimo Pinelli had an ongoing sexual liaison with the daughter of Martha Rodia; Joseph said that if the count didn’t desist from his amours, he would go blind. This turned out to be what happened, and Joseph bragged about his prediction, but later restored the man’s sight, this time getting him to leave the girl alone and pay reparations to the family! Before long nobody in Copertino dared enter the company of the friar unless their conscience was squeaky-clean; otherwise they shrank in terror from the gaze of the black-bearded friar.1Fortunately, Joseph’s tendencies toward becoming Lord Voldemort were suppressed.2 But as he grew older his abilities became stronger, more frequent, and more difficult to hide. He gained a reputation as a prophet and a miracle healer, and he exhibited telepathy, precognition, the odor of sanctity, power over animals and natural forces, and—the icing on the cake—when giving Mass he spontaneously levitated, not just once but hundreds of times in front of many startled congregations.3 This became a big problem, because living miracle-makers threatened to deflect the public’s attention away from Church authority. And that was strictly forbidden.

Church officials kept moving Joseph from town to town and tried to keep him away from people by prohibiting him from doing priestly duties. The strategy didn’t work. Besides hordes of ordinary people wanting to witness his feats, stories about him began to attract nobles, clergy, and royalty. And that in turn led to unwanted attention from the Inquisition. While on trial by the Inquisition in Rome, Joseph was ordered to say Mass in public to see if the rumors about him were true.

They were. He lifted off the ground in the presence of the inquisitors.

You can imagine how freaked out they must have been. But Joseph experienced another miracle that day. He was just given a stern warning to stop all this levitating nonsense, and somehow he escaped being burnt as a witch. But his abilities were not completely under his control and continued to persist, attracting more and more attention, until a second encounter with the Inquisition put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Still, given his history, he was extremely fortunate, for this was during the peak years of the witch-burning craze.

A century after his death Joseph was canonized by Pope Benedict XIV as St. Joseph. Pope Benedict, born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, had previously served as the Church’s Advocatus Diaboli, or “Devil’s Advocate.” This position was charged with arguing why a person nominated for sainthood was not worthy of that position. Any suggestion of fraud, exaggeration, or collusion regarding miracles attributed to the nominee was thoroughly examined. The materials amassed in the case of Joseph amounted to thirteen volumes housed in the Vatican Archives (they are still there today). They include the Inquisition’s trial records, biographies written over the years, diaries, letters, and official Church documents from the different cities and convents Joseph lived in or visited.

Joseph lived for sixteen years at Grotella Convent near Copertino, one of the longest stretches he spent in one location. During that time it was documented that he levitated at least seventy times in front of multiple witnesses. I’ll give just one example of the kinds of documented reports involving Joseph’s levitations:

April 30, 1639: After stepping inside the Church, Giuseppe [St. Joseph] glanced at a painting of the Holy Virgin located in the vault above the wooden frieze of the altar of the Immaculate Conception, a Madonna painted with the Baby Jesus in her arms in a way that strikingly resembled the Madonna of the Grotella [convent where Joseph had spent many years]. At the sight of her, Padre Giuseppe gave a huge scream and flew about thirty meters in the air and, embracing her, said, “Ah, Mamma mia! You have followed me!” It all happened so quickly that those present were filled with sacred terror, marveling to each other, and remaining in a stupor over the Padre’s performance.4For many more details about St. Joseph, I recommend philosopher Michael Grosso’s 2016 book, The Man Who Could Fly. Grosso reviewed the evidence for Joseph’s abilities and compared his case with similar instances of miraculous behavior recorded throughout history. Grosso concluded that Joseph was for real, basing his judgment on the written historical record: thirty-five years of multiple eyewitness testimonies from ordinary people as well as popes, cardinals, ambassadors, dukes, and kings from all over Europe. And that was just the formal written testimonies. An untold number of congregants, probably numbering in the thousands, had also witnessed Joseph’s abilities.5

DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME

Two centuries after St. Joseph, Daniel Dunglas Home was born near Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1833. He was one of eight children of Elizabeth McNeill, a descendant of a Scottish Highland family said to have the gift of “second sight.” Today we’d call that gift clairvoyance, or remote viewing.

Unless you’ve read about the history of psychic phenomena, you may never have heard of Home (it’s pronounced “hume”). But his psychic feats—including levitation—were just as prodigious and in some ways even more startling than St. Joseph’s.

The case of Home is especially interesting because his abilities were subjected to scientific tests. The testimony of Home’s abilities is also better than St. Joseph’s because the former’s performances were extensively covered in the newspapers of the day, and they were repeatedly observed by the most accomplished illusionists and conjurers (stage magicians) of the day, who naturally assumed he was cheating.

When he was nine years old, Home was adopted by his aunt and her husband and they emigrated to America, landing in a town near Norwich, Connecticut. Like St. Joseph, Home was an unusually sensitive child. As an infant he was so weak he wasn’t expected to survive, and he had a lifelong highly nervous temperament. Also like St. Joseph, the “feats Home performed were so extraordinary that when witnesses described what they had seen, they were dismissed as foolish, even insane.”6 That quote is from a 2005 biography of Home by University of Edinburgh historian Peter Lamont, entitled The First Psychic. The title of Lamont’s book refers to the first time that the word psychic was used in the popular press to describe someone with Home’s abilities.

Lamont’s book is especially useful in assessing Home’s feats because Lamont is a historian of psychology, an experienced illusionist, and a member of the Inner Magic Circle, a special branch of the London-based organization for magicians called the Magic Circle. One becomes a member of the Inner Magic Circle by invitation only, based on proven expertise and other significant contributions to the art of conjuring. Being a member of that fraternity, Lamont naturally regarded Home with a practiced, skeptical eye. But despite a strong inclination to regard magic solely in terms of tricks and illusions, that’s not what Lamont concluded about Home. He was just as puzzled as everyone else:

What are we to make of Daniel Dunglas Home? It is true that there were many accusations of fraud, but most of them were entirely without base, and actual evidence for fraud was both rare and inconclusive. He might have been a cheat, but if he was, then he cheated successfully for two decades, before hundreds of witnesses in thousands of séances. Many of the witnesses were hostile to spiritualism, and many remained unconvinced by what they had seen, yet time and again they admitted that they were unable to explain what had happened.7

The best conjurers of the day tried, and failed, to explain Home’s feats. Scientists investigating Home, including one of the most prominent chemists and physicists of the day, Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), reported evidence in support of Home’s claims. Crookes’s critics were reduced to making ad hominem attacks and misrepresenting the nature of his research.8

The phenomena produced by Home were in the context of a rising cultural interest in spiritualism, especially in the form of physical mediumship. These performances involved speaking to spirits via rapping sounds, levitating tables, invisible spirits playing musical instruments, sitters at the séances being touched by spirits, and so on. Many of these séances were conducted in rooms that were completely dark, or dimly lit by candles or gaslight. Demand for such performances was high, and because of supply and demand, many mediums were only too happy to perform séances for tidy sums. Many of them were subsequently unmasked as frauds.

It was in this context that Home was performing his séances throughout Europe, both for secular and scientific people highly skeptical of the claimed phenomena and for spiritually inclined people sympathetic to it.

Lamont’s book provides a full accounting of the kinds of phenomena associated with Home and the settings of his performances. To give a flavor of that history, I’ll recount one episode involving a group of highly skeptical Dutch rationalists who were openly hostile to spiritualism. They were members of the Dutch Radical School of Modern Protestantism, which virulently denied all biblical miracles, miraculous divine intervention, and the concepts of spirits. Like other skeptics, they had loudly dismissed Home’s claims without having seen them. But Home wasn’t intimidated by skepticism, so he agreed to perform a series of séances for them.

Home arrived in the Netherlands on January 31, 1858. The following day he conducted a séance for Queen Sophie of the Netherlands. A few days later in a hotel in Amsterdam, Home held a séance for ten of the Dutch rationalists, none of whom he had previously met. The group included a doctor of philosophy, a physician, a lawyer, an optician, and a Dr. Gunst, who reported the setup:

[The skeptics] sat round a large mahogany table, which they examined sufficiently to note that the top, column and base were “directly and immovably fixed” together….On top of the table were four [bronze] candelabras, with two more below, which “made it possible to obtain an undisturbed view of what was happening under the table.”9

The group placed their fingertips on the table in plain view, and Home told them that if they wished to remove their hands they could do so. They tested themselves to make sure they weren’t being manipulated by suggestion, were allowed to talk freely among themselves, and “laughed mockingly concerning the matter at hand.”10Within this context one would not expect much to happen. But then:

These expressions stopped soon enough. For as they mocked, “the table started to make a sliding movement,” and those towards whom it was moving “were requested to try to stop this movement; this, however, they could not do.” When the table stopped, raps began, and when raps were requested “in a certain manner, and as many times as we should indicate, [t]his wish was carried out to the full.” As Daniels’ skeptical witnesses watched in characteristic disbelief, the table “started to rise up on one side…so high that all of us were very much afraid that [the candelabras] would fall off.”11

Two more séances were held with this group, with increasingly inexplicable phenomena. Dr. Gunst later reviewed the normal interpretations that critics had offered as an explanation for Home’s effects. The first was that Home was using some sort of conjuring trick or gimmick. This was dismissed because, according to Dr. Gunst, the “Amsterdam séance room was well illuminated all the time the sittings lasted. Furthermore, the skeptical observers were crowded around Home (the performer) and not restricted in any movement or observation they desired to make.”12

The second explanation, that the table movements were due to unconscious motor movements by the sitters, was dismissed because the séance table was large and sturdy enough to seat fourteen people, and besides the thickness of the wood it had a very heavy central column. Despite the weight of the table, it was observed by multiple witnesses to levitate at least twelve inches off the floor.

The third explanation, regarding faked “spirit hands” touching the sitters, was deemed insufficient because the séance room was well lighted, so they were able to keep Home under constant surveillance and the sitters were still touched in quick succession, as they had requested, with one person being correctly touched after making requests mentally.

The fourth explanation, hallucination, was dismissed because, unlike claims that Home could perform only in front of “believers” who might be inclined to imagine things, these séances were conducted for a group of avowed skeptics, none of whom Home knew.

Other common interpretations, such as Home deflecting attention while using his feet to perform the trick, were excluded because the skeptics could easily see under the table and noted that Home had not moved. Still other objections asserted that the room must have been prepared by confederates in advance, using hidden wires and gimmicks. That too could be ruled out because “the séances were conducted in a hotel where Home had never been before and where he arrived only a few hours before the commencement of the first sitting.”13

Dr. Gunst concluded that strange things really had happened but could not be explained. He added, “And nothing could be observed that could give rise to even the slightest suspicion that Mr. Home was acting in a fraudulent manner.”14 This was consistent throughout Home’s career. No one ever brought forth evidence of fraud, nor was there any evidence that the effects were due to hallucination. In sum, Home, like St. Joseph, remains a genuine mystery.

So far we’ve discussed people who lived centuries ago. In such cases, even with excellent documentation it’s difficult to know with any certainty what happened back then. What about a modern Merlin?

Dean Radin

Real Magic