A day or two ago I ran into a thread on /x/ which I can't seem to find in the archives. The OP asked if spending a lot of time thinking about the paranormal would cause paranormal events to occur in one's life. One of the replies said something like, "No, but learning a new word will cause people around you to start using it more often." Then there was another cryptic reply, where the anon listed three words -- I can't remember the first, but the second and third were syzygy and perplexed -- and said he was just putting them out in the ether for his own purposes, and that just by reading them, even without understanding them, we would be helping him out.
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To this day there are 'artists' in the East who make a business of carving genuine roots of mandrakes in human form and putting them on the market, where they are purchased for the sake of the marvellous properties which popular superstition attributes to them. . . . The virtues ascribed to these figures are not always the same. Some act as infallible love-charms, others make the wearer invulnerable or invisible ; but almost all have this in common that they reveal treasures hidden under the earth, and that they can relieve their owner of chronic illness by absorbing it into themselves.
This made me think of Joseph Smith, of course, and I poked around online trying to find if he had ever used mandrakes in his treasure-hunting days. I didn't find anything, but in the process of searching I ran across a reference to "The Beast and the Prophet: Aleister Crowley's Fascination with Joseph Smith," a chapter by Massimo Introvigne in the Oxford University Press book Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, edited by Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr.
The chapter wasn't available to read on the OUP website, so I searched for it elsewhere online. That's when I found that, before it became a book chapter, it had been published as an article in a journal called SYZYGY.
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Earlier today I had been thinking about a technique I had read about some time ago in an old David St. Clair book for recalling forgotten facts. I was just thinking today that I wanted to try it but couldn't think of any specific facts that I had forgotten. Everything that came to mind as something I might want to recall, I could already recall perfectly. Well, now I have something to try it on: the first of the three words. Right now all I can come up with is bellicose, but I also have the sense that this is a confabulated memory and that the actual word was something else.
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Update: Never mind, I found the thread. The forgotten word -- actually the second on the list, not the first -- was neoteny. (Odd I would have forgotten that word just months after reading a book on the subject! And where did bellicose come from?)
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