Coincidence and magic

Several times on this blog I've noted the difficulty of deciding whether a given striking correspondence should be classified as synchronicity or precognition. To take a fairly recent example, in my July 13 post "Silver in the ears," I describe how I was trying to come up with a good historical example of cruelty and thought of Genghis Khan pouring molten silver into a prisoner's ears. Then later the same day, the vet gave me some ear drops of which the active ingredient was silver particles. I introduced the story as "a random sync," but by the end of the post I was wondering whether it might not actually have been "subconscious precognition" on my part. All instances of possible precognition are subject to this ambiguity. If some thought or dream of mine turns out to correspond to some real event that had not yet happened at the time, did the future event somehow cause my thought (precognition), or is the correspondence between the two just a striking coincidence (synchronicity)?

In Dreaming Ahead of Time, Gary Lachman discusses this question. The context is some precognition experiments carried out in the 1970s by the physicist Helmut Schmidt:

Schmidt devised experiments to test if volunteers could predict random sub-atomic events. Over a series of some 60,000 trials he arrived at positive results that were a billion to one against chance. 'Against chance' means that the results were better than could be expected if arrived at randomly, that is, by coincidence. So the tests were actually a means of sequestering coincidence, limiting its importance as a causal factor.

This is true of practically all parapsychological experiments: they aim to show whether some agency other than chance was at work in producing the results. If a scientist intent on dismissing precognition wanted to, he or she could say that what Schmidt's results showed was a strange ability in his volunteers to 'create' coincidences, to 'make them happen'. In this case, it would be a coincidence between the guesses of his volunteers and the actual random sub-atomic events. So it could be said that what Schmidt and other parapsychologists had statistical evidence for wasn't precognition, or other paranormal powers, but a peculiar and hitherto unknown ability in some humans to produce coincidences -- which, on the face of it, seems rather odd. I would say that an ability to produce coincidences does not seem that distant from what we call 'magic'.

Well, some stories of magic obviously go beyond the realm of coincidence -- if a witch turns someone into a newt, it is meaningless to try to calculate the odds of his spontaneously turning into a newt by chance -- but an awful lot of "magic" does seem to fall under this umbrella. Magically knowing what should be unknowable (precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.) can be conceptualized as a coincidence between one's thoughts and reality. Magically controlling people and things can -- provided they don't do anything physically impossible -- be thought of as a coincidence between what you want them to do and what they do in fact do.

Certain people, myself included, do seem to be "coincidence magnets" who experience more than our fair share of striking coincidences. I think this falls short of magic, though, because although we can be said in some sense to "cause" coincidences to happen, the coincidences themselves are spontaneous and unpredictable. There is no ability to cause specific coincidence to occur "in conformity with the will" (part of Crowley's famous definition of magic). Divination counts as magic because, as John Opsopaus notes, "Synchronistic phenomena are usually spontaneous, but in divination we arrange for a synchronistic event to take place." Just being a coincidence magnet doesn't count, though.

Suppose, though, that you were a coincidence magnet who wanted to graduate to magician. How would you go about it? Well, suppose you wanted some event, X, to happen, but it was not something you could easily control. You would find things you could easily control which "corresponded" to X in some way, such that if you did them and then X happened, people would say, "What a coincidence!" One common form of coincidence is that you think about something and then it happens, so you could spend lots of time thinking about and visualizing the desired event; you've reinvented the "law of attraction" and "affirmations." You could create symbolic objects and do symbolic actions specially designed to correspond to the desired event; you've reinvented "sympathetic magic." None of this would be a surefire abracadabra, but if you really are a coincidence magnet, such actions should greatly increase the odds of the desired event happening.

Back in 2012, in the post "Coincidences in connection with my late cat," I noted a coincidence that reminded me of voodoo:

A day or two after the diagnosis [of feline leukemia], my wife was taking her keys out of her motorcycle and dropped them on the pavement. Her keychain has a figurine of a seated black cat (the Egyptian goddess Bastet), and when it hit the pavement, one of the cat’s legs broke off. I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, man. That’s an omen.”

I was thinking in general terms -- bad news for the cat -- but the omen turned out to be a pretty literal one. Several days after the keychain broke, MacGyver, whose eyesight was the first casualty of the leukemia, wandered off the edge of a staircase and fell, injuring one of his legs. It wasn’t the same leg that the Bastet figurine lost -- you can’t expect that kind of voodoo-like precision -- but it was close enough to seem uncanny. Fortunately, the injury was not serious, and he recovered quickly.

This is almost certainly how people first got the idea for actual voodoo dolls and similar practices. First you notice an omen that seems to prefigure injury, and then you reason that if you deliberately create such an omen, you can cause injury. And if the "coincidence magnet" premise has any truth to it, you probably can.

(I suppose I should mention at this point that I myself do not and will not ever practice black magic of this kind -- though I have to admit that if Joe Biden ever spontaneously combusts, I'll feel a little guilty.)