This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 7, Issue 5, from 1993.
Are you tired of reading poorly written fringe speculation books, impenetrable pseudoscientific tomes, pamphlets with outrageous claims? Did you ever wonder how these authors research or fabricate the information presented in their volumes? Most of the time the skeptical reader contents himself with criticism of the finished product on the bookshelves. My suggestion is to approach the issue from another angle: make an attempt to learn how it’s done by writing our own pseudoscientific work. A while ago I did just that in a newsletter I edit, the Cleveland Chess Bulletin. Here’s how I went about it.
First I chose a text with which most of my readers would be familiar. Then I reinterpreted it. The prophecies of Nostradamus, translated, interpreted and reinterpreted for over four centuries, seemed an ideal choice for my purposes since I could collect them all from a single library source (Nostradamus and his Prophecies by Edgar Leoni, Bell Publishing Co., 1985). Also, the over 1,000 four-line quatrains were sufficiently ambiguous to easily fall into my scheme.
All I needed was a subject to arbitrarily ‘read into’ and ‘extract from’ the quatrains (this seems to be the method of choice for many pseudoscience texts) and then to decide how far out my claims should be before selectively presenting the ‘evidence’ for my point of view. Since the publication I edit is about chess, the subject I chose was that game. In addition, the inherent implausibility of a link between the famous quatrains and the ‘royal game’ appealed to me as a challenge to my ingenuity. Here’s what I did.
First I needed a plausible reason, if only as a veneer, in order to explain why Nostradamus’s quatrains might elucidate the history of chess rather than the history of the world. I took as my model the proclamations of the ‘Elvis-is-Alive’ mongers. I derived my initial evidence from the subject’s name. The ‘Elvisers’ almost always point out the fact that Elvis’ middle name on his monument is misspelled, therefore providing a clue that maybe ‘HE’ isn’t buried there.
But what about Nostradamus? The name ‘Nostradamus’ comes from the Latin for ‘Our Lady’ which I interpreted as relating to a modern form of chess, the Chess of the Mad Queens, in which the queen has much greater powers than in previous incarnations of the game. In addition I concocted a theory in which all the quatrains, if properly ordered, can be placed on a sort of enlarged chessboard so that a knight can be hopped about, touching each quatrain/square once and only once and that this knight’s tour unravels the precise chronological order of Nostradamus’ rather random verses.
The Knight’s Tour Chronology is a perfect example of one of the chief techniques of pseudoscientific books: make up something which sounds impressive and superficially plausible but really means nothing. If you think about it, a one-way knight’s tour can be represented as well in a linear fashion. And anyway the choice of which quatrain goes into which square is arbitrary. Now I was ready to tackle the quatrains in order to ‘prove’ my contention that the history of chess was on the ‘prophet’s’ all-seeing mind. A few examples will suffice to give you the flavour of the resulting interpretations.
The greedy prelate, deceived by ambition,
Century VI, Quatrain 93
He will come to reckon nothing too much for him:
He and his messengers completely trapped,
He who cut the wood sees all in reverse.
Here Nostradamus tells the story of Game 1 of the 1972 Fischer/Spassky World Championship Match. Fischer tried to snatch Spassky’s king rook pawn. The greedy bishop was soon trapped and captured and Fischer (‘he who cut wood’ the composition of the chessman used in the match) went on to suffer a ‘reverse’, losing the game.
Because of the crystal the enterprise broken.
Presages, Quatrain 78
Games and feasts, a lion to repose no more:
No longer will he take his meal near the Great Ones.
Sudden catarrh blessed water to wash him.
A concise and detailed exposition of the first American World Chess Champion, Paul Morphy. Morphy’s phenomenal success in the late 1850’s and his triumphant return to America from Europe led to many lionising banquets and gifts, hence the crystal reference. These gifts and the taint of professionalism they implied (which Morphy deplored) were clearly factors in Morphy’s growing disaffection with the chess world (‘enterprise broken’). As a result Morphy’s life became more and more reclusive. He no longer played serious chess (taking his meal near the Great Ones). He finally came to a sad end by dying in his bath.
After the conflict by the eloquence of the wounded one
Century II, Quatrain 80
For a short time a false rest is contrived:
The great ones are not to be allowed deliverance at all.
The enemies are restored at the proper time
A commentary on the aborted first world championship match played in the mid 1980s between Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov. The ‘wounded one’, an exhausted champion, Karpov, though still up 5 wins to 3, is given a series of illegal ‘time outs’ so that he can recuperate after a long string of draws and two badly botched games. In the end the match was halted and the two ‘enemies’ were restored to battle in a rescheduled match six months later.
After the see has been held seventeen years,
Century V, Quatrain 92
Five will change within the same period of time:
Then one will be elected at the same time,
One who will not be too comfortable to the Romans
The five that change, of course, are the first players earning the appellation of Grand Master of Chess, bestowed on them by Czar Nicholas II at the St. Petersburg tournament of 1914: Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tarrasch and Marshall. The year 1914 was exactly 17 years after Lasker began his tenure as undisputed world champion by defeating Wilhelm Steinitz in the latter’s attempt at regaining the title of 1896. Note how I specify counting Lasker’s reign as champion from his second match with Steinitz, not from 1894 when he first won it. This fudging allows me to make the 17 years line seem more accurate and lets me use the five line with its most appropriate chess connotation. Creative accounting like this can do wonders. The other thing to notice is that most of the detail resides in the purported explanation of the quatrains rather than in the quatrains themselves, an extremely common pseudoscience technique.
In addition to these full quatrain expositions I also interpreted one or two line segments by themselves, leaving the other (inconvenient) line of the quatrains off ‘in the interests of space’. In this respect I am still being more honest than many previous Nostradamus interpreters who have plucked portions of several different quatrains and made them into a single whole in order to forge (in both senses of the word) their own meanings from hopelessly ambiguous lines.
Here are some techniques I learned that you may find useful when you write your own pseudoscientific book:
1. Volume, volume, volume.
Reams of bewildering analysis impress by their bulk. My article in the Cleveland Chess Bulletin (of which the present article is a shortened version) referenced nearly 10% of the Nostradamus quatrains, about 100 in all. As a result many readers gave up before they waded their way through it and didn’t even bother to examine all the claims thoroughly. So they had no idea if my later claims were accurate or not. Besides it looked impressive, and many of them probably mistook volume for scholarship.
2. Choose a topic which is famous but not well read.
In this way your readers will find the material to be accessible but will still have to take your word for most of your conclusions unless they want to go through the tedious process of digging out confirmation of your claims (technique 1 comes in handy here too). Most pseudoscientific writers count on their readers not following up, and they are generally right so they rely on the fact that most people think that if they have heard about something or that its name is familiar because they’ve seen it in print, it must be reputable.
3. Use your credentials if you have them.
If you don’t, make up some which seems plausible. Look at the number of preachers who have degrees from their own universities and who call themselves ‘Dr’ and you will see what I mean. Degrees from unaccredited universities are a dime a dozen but that doesn’t stop people from using them.
4. Have fun with it.
I give you this advice only so that you will be able to keep your sanity while writing the stuff. I managed to sneak in all sorts of jokes, puns, crazy anagrams and even read English idioms into the French translation.
Now let’s criticise my effort. The history of chess is probably not accessible enough for a general audience because the average reader may not know enough about it to give them the hook of plausibility although, since they have at least heard of the game (see technique 2 above) this might not be a real problem. Since I am considered an authority on the subject (see technique 3 above) this might even give my pseudoscience more credibility, but you should really choose your own area of expertise.
So how did my audience react? None of the readers of the Cleveland Chess Bulletin came out and said they actually believed that my article proved Nostradamus had predicted the history of chess. However, in spite of all the jokes and clues which I put in the article which suggested that this was satire a number of readers thought that I might actually believe it, and the fact that someone might take it even this seriously is illuminating in itself and justified, at least for me, my exercise in writing pseudoscience.
Who knows – maybe some day someone might find a copy of my article and proclaim me a psychic. The Cleveland Chess Bulletin is kept on file in the John G. White Collection of the Cleveland Public Library. Maybe I’d better write a retraction in a later edition.
