© New content 1999 PBS Online

Few performers have ever captured the public imagination like Harry Houdini. From his breakthrough in 1899 to his death in 1926, Houdini was one of the world's most popular entertainers, a true star of stage and screen. Time and again, his escapes from seemingly impossible predicaments thrilled audiences, who found in him a metaphor for their own lives, an affirmation of the human capacity to overcome adversity. Escapism in both senses of the word. But while nearly everyone is familiar with Houdini's stage persona, his little-known personal life is equally revealing. Taken as a whole, the public and private views make "The Elusive American" a uniquely powerful window on his times.

His love of America was such that he always claimed Appleton, Wisconsin, as his birthplace. But the man known as Houdini was actually born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary. He would not arrive in Wisconsin until four years later, when he, his mother Cecelia, and four brothers joined his father, who had become rabbi of a small Reform congregation there. Although an educated man, Herman Mayer Weiss (Weisz was changed to Weiss courtesy of immigration officials) was not destined for success in America. His life-long struggle to provide for his family would make a lasting impression on his son "Ehrie," who was forced to work from an early age to help make ends meet. Still, the boy was drawn to performing, making his debut in a neighborhood circus as the nine year old trapeze artist, "Ehrich, The Prince of the Air."

In 1887, after a series of failed rabbinic appointments in the Midwest, Herman Mayer Weiss brought young Ehrich with him to New York, where they lived in a boardinghouse and found what work they could. When he wasn't working, Ehrich excelled in sports, particularly swimming, boxing, and running, developing the natural athletic gifts which would be vital to his future act. He also rediscovered a childhood interest in magic, and in 1891 teamed up with a friend named Jacob Hyman in an act they called "The Brothers Houdini." After his hard-luck father died in 1892, eighteen year old Ehrich left his mother and brothers in New York and took to the road...

By Paul Adams

Harry Price – An Appreciation of his Life and Times: All fields of human activity have their pioneers in whose footsteps the next generations follow, and by laying down the foundations of their particular disciplines they enable these future colleagues to build their contributions and discoveries. Psychical research is no exception. In its modern terms as ‘parapsychology’ it has been defined by the work of the American Joseph Banks Rhine (1885-1980), indeed the ‘Father of Modern Parapsychology’ who began carrying out experiments in telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition at Duke University in North Carolina in the 1930s.

Before Rhine, psychical research as it was still termed continued to be quite a mixed bag which the investigators of the time attempted to study and evaluate - séance room phenomena, spontaneous cases of haunting, crisis apparitions, dream cases and so on. During the early decades of the 20^th century, exponents on both sides of the Atlantic continued the study of phenomena that was the staple fare of the Victorian scientists and academics that had founded institutions such as the Society for Psychical Research at Cambridge and the American Society for Psychical Research in Boston. In particular some of these notables acted as popular educators in bringing the subject of the scientific study of the paranormal before the general public.

In America, British born Hereward Carrington (1880-1958) was a prolific writer who personally carried out much work with spiritualist mediums before the First World War and continued this on into the 1920s and 1930s. His most famous association was with the great Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. Carrington was to be followed by Hans Holzer (born 1920) who began to produce a series of popular guides to the supernatural chronicling his investigations in the 1960s. In England notable Victorian scientists Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) and Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) carried out extensive work with the mediums of the day, Crookes famously with Florence Cook with whose ‘spirit’ entity Katie King he was photographed...

Copyright 1999-2005 HistoryWiz

The Mystery of Aemelia Earhart has captured the imagination of young and old, amateur and professional, since she disappeared on July 2, 1937 on her flight over the Pacific which would complete her around-the-world flight - the longest (following the equatorial route) and the first by a woman. From the time of her first ride in an airplane as a child, Aemelia Earhart was hooked on flying. Her passion led her to break flight records and become a public celebrity. In one of her letters, she hoped that the around the world flight would finally rid her of her compulsion to fly and she could settle down.

Though she did not survive it, it was indeed her last flight. She vanished into the Pacific Ocean 24 hours after leaving Lae, New Guinea. Crossing the 2,500 mile Pacific was the most dangerous part of her flight. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was standing off Howland Island for several days to act as a radio contact for her. Radio communications in the area were very poor and the Itasca was overwhelmed with commercial radio traffic as a result of the celebrated flight.She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left with 1100 gallons of fuel, good for around 24 hours of flight (the flight should have been about 19 hours), but she ran out of fuel 2 hours early.

She carried as much as possible. The plane was so heavy on takeoff she wasn't sure even to the end if she could get it off the runway. Their intended destination was Howland Island, a tiny piece of land a few miles long, 20 feet high, and 2, 556 miles away. Their last positive position report and sighting were over the Nubian Islands, about 800 miles into the flight. After 4 hours and 18 minutes, she called in and reported her speed and height - the right speed and height for optimal fuel consumption. Management tables had been prepared for Earhart by Lockheed's Kelly Johnson. She signed off with her signature line, "everything OK." There is disagreement over what happened next...

Aleister Crowley was born October 12th, 1875 at 36 Clarendon Square, Leamington, Warwickshire, England as Edward Alexander Crowley into a wealthy and religious family at the height of the Victorian era. Crowley despised and rebelled against his family at every turn, even renaming himself 'Aleister' to avoid sharing the same first name as his father, who passed away when Crowley was 11.   Like many naughty young boys, Aleister entertained himself through several activities, notably creating a "homemade firework" with which he nearly killed himself, as well as torturing a cat in several horrible ways to test the "nine lives" theory. He dispensed of his virginity at age 14 with the help of a maid. At 17, he contracted gonorrhea with the help of a street walker.

Crowley went on to attend Cambridge University, where he apparently studied alpine climbing, living in the manner of the privileged aristocracy and having a great deal of sex with both men and women. He also began working in the Diplomatic Service, but as Crowley himself said "the fame of an ambassador rarely outlives a century", and Crowley wished to make a greater imprint on the world.   Having had this epiphany, he began searching for more lasting pursuits and in 1898, at age 23, Crowley began his path of magical enlightenment by joining The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Led by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers other members included such notables such as William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne, Constance Wilde, (the wife of Oscar Wilde), Arthur Machen, Moina Bergson, Arthur Edward Waite, Florence Farr, Algernon Blackwood and possibly, though records for their membership are shaky, Sax Rohmer and Bram Stoker.   The Golden Dawn's contribution to the Western Magical Tradition is definitely worth noting, because it was their synthesis of the Kabbalah, alchemy, tarot, astrology, divination, numerology, Masonic symbolism, and ritual magic into one coherent and logical system which led them to influence countless occult organizations to come...

by Lance S. Owens

This article first appeared in Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions, Spring 1995. In slightly revised form, it also appears in the book The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith (edited by Bryan Waterman, Signature Books, 1999).  It is reproduced here by permission of the author.

Those readers seeking a more in-depth study of the material covered in this short article might be interested in a longer essay,  "Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection" by Lance S. Owens -- published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Fall 1994.

You don't know me--you never will. You never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it; I shall never undertake it. I don't blame anyone for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself. --Joseph Smith, April 7, 1844.

IF THERE IS A RELIGION uniquely and intrinsically American--a religion worked from its soil, and cast in the ardent furnace of its primal dreams--that religion must be Mormonism. Founded in 1830 by the then twenty-four year old Joseph Smith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (as it is formally named) has emerged from relative insularity during the mid-twentieth century to become a world-wide movement now numbering nine million members. Patriotic, conservative, influential, and vastly wealthy: modern Mormonism is a bastion of American culture.

Despite its success and respectability, however, a fundamental crisis looms before Joseph Smith's church--and the crux of the predicament is Joseph Smith. Late twentieth-century Mormonism is being forced into an uncomfortable confrontation with its early nineteenth-century origins--an inevitable encounter given the preeminent import of the founding prophet to his religion. From the start, Joseph Smith has been cast by his church as a man more enlightened than any mortal to walk the earth since the passing of the last biblical apostles. No historical life could be granted a more mythological tenor than has his. To Mormons, Joseph Smith is, simply, "The Prophet". He bares the imago Christi. He alone stands as doorkeeper to the last dispensation of time; to him angels came and restored God's necessary priestly "keys" and powers; he built the Temple and taught the ancient rituals which therein make of men and women, gods.

But now, one hundred and fifty years after his death, Smith's place in Western religious history is undergoing an important and creative reevaluation. Historians and religious critics alike are examining him anew. And in his history's newest reading, themes unrecognized by its orthodox interpreters are quickly moving to stage center. Quite simply put, modern Mormonism--guardian of the Prophet's story--has no idea what to do with the rediscovered, historical, and rather occult Joseph Smith...