Aether Or ...

A Review of the Introduction to
Swami Panchadasi's Clairvoyance & Occult Powers

Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell the hoax of an Englishmun!

Oprah's been had again.

It turns out that her new Oprah's Book Club selection of 2011, Clairvoyance & Occult Powers, is riddled with secrets, pseudonyms, and far-fetched fabrications. This could prove a new embarrassment for Oprah, after the very public flap with James Frey, her underdog darling of 2006, whose inspirational memoir, A Million Little Pieces, proved to be a fake.

In this latest miff, Oprah had been a big champion of the hardscrabble Hindu who overcame his hardships with a regimen of positive thinking. Panchadasi had self-risen to the status of Swami, and published two books before his discovery by Oprah. Everything might have gone along swimmingly had not Weiser Books decided to print a new edition, and hire an investigative journalist to write the Introduction.

The journalist, Clint Marsh, who had a mild curiosity of the occult, was apparently drawn in too deep after discovering a rack of dusty mystical occult pamphlets by Panchadasi and others at the Psychic Eye in San Francisco. He'd stopped in during his lunch break, and after returning to his cubicle, the Psychic Eye turned back into a deli, never to be seen in the City again. But the pamphlets remained in Marsh's pocket, and thenceforth, strange and inexplicable "coincidences" began to occur, and thus began his life-long investigation into aephemeral phenomena.

As he researched the pamphlets, some mystical and aethereal, some practical and austere, the consistencies unnerved Marsh until he uncovered a big hoax--the Hindu mystic Swami Panchadasi was none other than a pen name for William Walker Atkinson, a businessman from Baltimore, Maryland. It turns out that Atkinson published under several other pseudoynms, including Swami Bhakta Vishita, Baba Bharata, Theodore Sheldon ("Vim Culture"), Dr. Seuss ("Horton Hears a Who"), Dr. Bronner ("All-One-God-Faith-Magic-Soap") and Yogi Ramacharaka. Most surprising, Atkinson had managed the Yankees baseball team under the pseudoynm Yogi Berra for years without a leak. Yogi Berra is famous for the sayings, "It ain't over 'til it's over" and "I shall change our vibrations in an inning."

Clint Marsh asked me to write a review of his Introduction, and a fine one I had written, with highflung praises and highlighted phrases. The intro was so enticing it drew me in deeper, and by a strange coincidence, I found myself in the Psychic Eye bookshop picking up a copy of Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy," which Wikipedia describes as "meta-detective-fiction" and "mysteries about mysteries." The protagonist is a "writer become private investigator who descends into madness" as he investigates a character's identity. The trilogy "explores the layers of identity and reality."

And that night, in an eerie dream, a red dwarf said to me, in backward talk, "Retsua Luap si Hsram Tnilc." And thus, the mystery of the Introducer's identity was solved, and this time, the hoax is on Weiser Books.