Get Lost in a Corn Maze That Looks Like a Microscopic 'Water Bear'
by Jessica Leigh Hester
August 12, 2020
When Angie Treinen first learned about
tardigrades a few years ago, at a family-friendly science event at the
University of Wisconsin, she couldn’t believe it. She loved their
squashed little faces and their wonderfully rotund bodies, which look
like a puffy stack of partly melted marshmallows. “I just stood there
the whole time like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Treinen says.
Treinen studied zoology
and worked as a veterinarian, but had never encountered teeny tiny
tardigrades, which are variously known as moss piglets and water bears.
Immediately, they captivated her. Typically less than a millimeter long,
tardigrades thrive in both mundane and extreme conditions, including
bone-rattling icy landscapes, oceans, and ultra-hot environments.
(They’re probably flourishing near your house, too, and it’s easy to meet them.)
Internet audiences love them because they’re endearingly goofy, like
claymation creatures loping around on impossibly spiky claws.
Researchers, meanwhile, are fascinated by their ability to stay alive: Tardigrades persist in the face of pressure changes, temperature fluctuations, and vanishing water and oxygen.
So when Treinen sat
down to plan out the annual corn maze for the eponymous farm she owns
with her husband in Lodi, Wisconsin, it seemed obvious. 2020, a year of
disease, economic recession, and crushing ennui, would be the year of
the tardigrade. Treinen talked to Atlas Obscura about designing, planting, sculpting, and welcoming visitors to the 15-acre corn maze, which is open at Treinen Farm through November 8, 2020.
Corn mazes are popular autumnal activities in the Midwest and beyond—but they’re typically not tardigrades. Bruce Guenter/CC by 2.0
What makes for a good maize maze?
We have a lot of parameters. It typically
needs to be a story, or something really intriguing—we’ve done Aesop’s
fables and some Greek myths, like Icarus. It has to be a recognizable
figure: When the picture of the maze is online, I don’t want people to
be confused, like “What is that?” But I try to do a completely different
art style each year. We did a Picasso-sketch style one year, and Art
Nouveau another. Sometimes it looks like stained glass; sometimes it
looks like folk art. I don’t want my mazes to all look exactly the same.
I’m also aware of what is challenging for visitors to navigate in the
maze. I want people to get lost, and I want there to be a lot of
challenge—but not so much that people are like, “I’m outta here and I’m
never coming back.”
How do you design them?
I fill up my Pinterest page with
interesting things, and then I start sketching by hand—just rough, rough
sketches so that I have an idea what the main figure and layout might
be. Then I do almost all of it in Illustrator. My ultimate product is a
black-and-white line drawing.
How does maze design affect the planting?
My husband plants the field
in vertical and horizontal rows, which is not how you normally grow
corn. But he does this so there’s literally a grid growing right into
the field, with each row about 30 inches from the next, so it becomes a
dense field. When I am done with the design, I put a grid on a layer in
the Illustrator, which matches the grid he’s planted in the field.
The design typically takes me about 10
days. I start in June, on the day that the corn goes in. Ten days is the
time between when you plant the corn and the time it’s going to be up
in visible rows—and if the weather’s warm, it comes up even faster. You
have to cut the corn while you can still see what the rows are. Once it
gets to be about knee-high, the leaves of the corn are starting to
overreach, and you can’t distinguish the rows anymore. So that’s the
deadline. One year it came up in six days, and my husband was like, “The
corn is up. I need the design.” I need that pressure.
I print the plans out and
give them to the maze-cutting crew. They’re able to find a point on my
plan and then, by counting rows, they put stakes and flags out and find
the corresponding parts in the field. They paint where the trails need
to be, and they mow them first before tilling the fields [and ripping up
the roots]. We have a commercial mower about five feet wide. If there’s
a mistake when you mow the corn, it’ll grow right back (and I can
usually alter the map to match the mistake). It takes about 120 to 150
person hours to cut the maze. Periodically, I take my drone up to verify
things are looking ok.
The maze crew loves it when there’s a lot
of circles or parts of circles, because circles are easy to cut. I can
mark on the design the center of the circle and the radius. Somebody
stands at the center, takes a measuring tape, pulls it out to the
radius, and then just walks around in a circle. Anything geometric is
also easy for them to cut, because of the clear angles. Art Deco
borders, or specific flourishes which need to be precise, they get a
little complain-y about those things. But they always do it just fine.
This year, the maze is more organic. All of those paths are not set in
stone.
What’s the experience like for a visitor? Will they have any sense that they’re exploring a tardigrade?
The corn is about 10 feet tall now. The
only way you can see the tardigrade is to be up in the air. We have a
tower that you can walk up and overlook the maze, but you can’t really
see the design—just some of the swirls. You have to be up in an airplane
or use a drone to really see it. What the visitors are seeing is
corridors of corn that all look the same, basically.
Past mazes at Treinen Farm include this massive trilobite. Courtesy Treinen Farm
You’ve done other science mazes in the past, such a trilobite,Wisconsin’s state fossil, in 2017. What appealed to you this year about tardigrades?
This year, when I was designing the maze,
I was anxious, as everybody else probably was, too. I didn’t know what
the future was going to be. I didn’t even know for sure if we were going
to be able to open our business at all. But my husband said, “You know
what, we’re going to put all the pumpkins in, we’re going to put the
maze in. We can’t do it if we don’t have those things.” I was thinking
how resilient water bears are. I mean, come on. That has to be the 2020
corn maze. A lot of people said to me, “Oh, why don’t you do a virus?”
I’d like to be a place where people don’t have to think about it for two
hours. But I did want to acknowledge that it’s really hard right now.
How does a maze made of living corn change over the course of its run?
Right now, the corn is as tall as it’s
going to be. But even after it stops growing vertically, it grows these
tassels, which hold pollen. Then the pollen falls where the ears are
going to be, and then the ears grow. The most important thing is that
the corn stalks be really strong and that the leaves stay green for as
long as possible, because when they dry, they get brittle and kind of
break, and then your maze looks really sparse. Ours will get killed by
the frost around the beginning of October. By the end of the season,
it’s brown. Eventually, we harvest it and sell it [typically for animal
feed].
This year’s maze recently opened to the public. How have visitors reacted so far?
One of the first people
who came in had a tardigrade tattoo. That is honestly one of the most
amazing things I’ve seen in a really long time. The visitors we’ve had
so far really want to talk about tardigrades; they’ve gone to our
website and clicked on all the links and learned about them. Somebody
said they had found tardigrades and had a microscope and were taking
care of them. I thought, “Wow, okay, I think I probably need to do
that.”
A slanted metal roof and deck help to shelter this cabin in Argentina, designed by STC Arquitectos using reclaimed materials like scrap metal and oil pipes.
Called
Refugio en La Paisanita, the cabin is in the Argentinian town of La
Paisanita on the Anisacate River and is nestled into a sloping, forested
site with winding stone walls. STC Arquitectos
said it designed the 60-square-metre project to be mindful of the
environment, using recycled materials and elevating it on stilts so it
doesn't damage the forest floor.
"In terrain with a steep slope
and vast vegetation located in the heart of Cordoba, Argentina, we find
this small refuge that respects the characteristics of the natural soil
and preserves the existing flora without altering the mountain
landscape," the studio said. Using disused materials also created a structure that was affordable to build and maintain, and weather resistant.
"The
project pursues an awareness speech about recycling, proposing a
sustainable solution that reuses different materials based on an
austere, economic and easy-to-maintain architecture that adapts to the
conditions of the site," STC Arquitectos added. The
cabin features a frame of metal pipes sourced from disused oil pipes
that are placed vertically and horizontally. A deck laid on top
comprises recovered eucalyptus boards.
"Disused materials were
recovered, processed in the workshop and transferred to the site for
assembly, the choice of materials and finishes combine technological
sustainability with a strong adaptation to the local climate and low
environmental impact," said STC Arquitectos. At the rear of the property, a concrete barrier wall nestles into the slope.
A
feature of the cabin is a large corrugated metal roof that slants
upwards in the opposite direction of the hill below. The metal panels
rest on a series of vertical pipes around the perimeter of the deck. The
roof creates a covered patio that wraps around the cabin in a U-shape
and also protects the smaller roof of the cabin itself, which is a boxy
construction clad in more metal panels. All of the metal sheets were
sourced from an old field shed or from demolitions and have a rusty
appearance. Windows
and glass doors with black frames puncture the three sides of the cabin
and can be covered by sliding doors also of corrugated metal. The
design allows for the dwelling to be closed off, depending on the
weather or if not being used.
Inside,
the unit accommodates a living room and kitchen, a bathroom and a
bedroom. Wood floors, white walls and recycled barn doors outfit the
minimal space, while openings are also made with scraps of pipes. Outside, the deck is complete with stools, two overhead lights and a reinforced concrete counter built into the barrier wall.
STC
Arquitectos is based a 30-minutes-drive north from the cabin in the
city of Alta Gracia and is led by Juan Salassa, Ivan Castañeda and
Santiago Tissot. Other cabins in South America are ZeroCabin in Chile, a black unit by Felipe Lago and Minimod Curucaca in Brazil, while the top ten cabins on Dezeen in 2019 included a shelter on the water in Norway and a silvery outpost in the Swiss Alps.
Photography is by Gonzalo Viramonte.
The location was perfect for a
new capital city. There were, of course, the standard prophecies that a
great metropolis was destined to arise there. Even more persuasive,
perhaps, were the reports that of all the districts along the Tigris
River, the site was said to be the least infested with mosquitoes. But
the main reason the caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur chose to build his capital at Baghdad was that, with the absorption of Persia into Dar al-Islam, the “abode of Islam” had spread far to the east, and the place that would be Baghdad lay right at its heart.
But what good is the right place if it’s not also the right time? Accordingly, al-Mansur summoned his top astrologers—Nawbakht, a Persian, and Masha’allah, a Jew—to determine the optimal moment to inaugurate construction. Remarkably, the horoscope of Baghdad’s foundation has been preserved in the writings of al-Biruni, one of the foremost astronomers of a few centuries later. Baghdad’s
founding can therefore be dated with especially high confidence to the
afternoon of July 30 in the year 762. At that precise instant, Jupiter,
the planet of kingdoms and dynasties, was rising in the east, while
Mars, the planet of war, was setting in the west. Indeed, no horoscope
could have been more appropriate for a city that al-Mansur insisted be called Madinat as-Salam, the “City of Peace.”
A
1915 painting by Edmund Sandars depicting Baghdad as it would have
appeared in the eighth century, in the days of Abu Jafar al-Mansur. The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Looking back at Baghdad’s founding, there is a strong case to be made that al-Mansur’s personal obsession with astrology was the not-so-secret impetus for his city’s
scientific pursuits. Certainly, the almost manic translation of Greek
texts into Arabic that took place in the city appears a lot less
eccentric if it’s understood as part of a government initiative to harness the power of the stars. Prior to seizing the caliphate, al-Mansur
had cultivated his power base among the conquered provinces of Persia.
There, in return, he was influenced by a Persian tradition that saw the
fall of Persia and the rise of the Arabs in explicitly astrological
terms. One of the earliest expositors of this idea was none other than
Masha’allah, the Jewish astrologer hand-picked
by the caliph to cast the horoscope for his new capital city. Just as
the planets rose and set in their allotted times, so, too, it was said,
did kingdoms, dynasties, and even religions. The most importance of
these cycles, insofar as they were supposed to herald events of global
significance, were the successive conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn.
Astrology’s insistence on linking earthly events
with celestial causes in this way may seem, today, like an easily
dismissed irrationality. Yet the astrologers of antiquity were no
mushy-headed mystics. On the contrary, astrology was the ancient world’s
most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis
enterprise sustained for centuries by some of history’s most brilliant
minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. Astrology’s demand for
high-precision planetary data led directly to Copernicus’s revolution
and, from there, to modern science. Astrology’s challenge—teasing out
inferences from numerical data, determining which patterns are real and
which aren’t—remains fundamental in science today, too, especially as
society relies increasingly on complex, data-driven algorithms.
Astrologers were the quants and data scientists of their day; those who
are enthusiastic about the promise of data for unlocking the secrets of
our world should note that others have come this way before. Our
irrepressibly human penchant for pattern-matching makes the history of
astrology—a history that can bring together astronomy, statistics,
cryptology, Shakespeare, COVID-19, presidential assassinations, and even
the New York Yankees in a dance of coincidence and
correlation—surprisingly timely and always fascinating.
Saturn, the outermost planet visible to
the naked eye, takes about 30 years to complete an orbit through the
zodiac constellations of the night sky. Jupiter, the largest and the
next-most-distant planet, takes about 12 years. As these two astral
giants chase each other around, Jupiter catches up to and passes Saturn
roughly once every 20 years. The moment when these planets, or any two
heavenly bodies, line up in ecliptic longitude is called a conjunction.
As a curious consequence of orbital mechanics, every conjunction of
Jupiter and Saturn occurs almost exactly one third of the way around the
zodiac from the spot of the previous conjunction. Thus, three
successive Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions will trace an almost-perfect
equilateral triangle in the sky.
To give an example: If
Jupiter and Saturn come into conjunction in the zodiac sign of Aries,
then approximately 20 years later, their next conjunction can be
expected to occur in Sagittarius. The following conjunction, 20 years
after that, will be in Leo, before it cycles back to Aries. Aries,
Sagittarius, and Leo are the three zodiac signs associated with the
element of fire. Thus, in this example, the sequence of Jupiter-Saturn
conjunctions occurred entirely within the triangle of fire signs, a
pattern also known as the fiery trigon or triplicity.
Of course, the astral triangles traced out this way don’t
exactly overlap, and so after about 10 conjunctions, or roughly 200
years, the entire pattern migrates to the next triplicity of signs. Over
about 800 years, the sequence of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions will
slowly cycle through all four triplicities: fiery, earthy (Taurus,
Capricorn, Virgo), airy (Gemini, Aquarius, Libra), and watery (Cancer,
Pisces, Scorpio).
Masha’allah
and his successors saw in this sequence an organizing principle for the
entire history of the world. Local political changes, they suggested,
were augured by the regular or “little
conjunctions” that occur roughly once every 20 years. Larger shifts of
kingdoms and dynasties, about every 200 years, were heralded by “middle
conjunctions,” when the sequence migrates from one triplicity to
another. Finally, the most momentous historical upheavals, such as the
fall of empires or the rise of new religions, were portended by “great
conjunctions,” once in a millennium, when the sequence of conjunctions
has completed a full cycle through all four zodiac triplicities: fire,
earth, air, and water.
The chronology Masha’allah
developed with this theory placed the creation of the universe in the
year 8292 B.C., with the first conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn
assigned to the year 5783 B.C., in the sign of Taurus. Masha’allah
then hopped through the history of the world, conjunction by
conjunction, pausing only to comment on a select few that he deemed to
be especially history-altering.
The Deluge, the frontispiece to Gustave Doré’s illustrated edition of the Bible, depicting the Great Flood. Public domain
There’s
the Great Flood, which he dated to 3361 B.C., naturally during a watery
triplicity. After leaping past several cycles of great conjunctions, he
arrived at 26 B.C., the time of a shift from a watery to a fiery
triplicity. According to Masha’allah,
this transfer heralded the birth of Christ and the advent of the
Christian era. It also adds an interesting spin to John the Baptist’s prophecy that, although he baptized with water, the one who followed him would baptize with fire.
Skipping ahead a half-millennium, Masha’allah
next examined the conjunction of the year 571, which brought the
sequence back to another watery triplicity. This transfer presaged the
birth of Muhammad and the rise of the Arabs, whose sign, according to
Masha’allah, was Scorpio.
Finally arriving at the events of his own day, Masha’allah regarded the conjunction of 769—the end of a watery triplicity and the beginning of a fiery one—as an indicator of an ebb in Arab power and a resurgence of Persia. As for Masha’allah himself, it’s
believed that he died around the year 815. He did, however, extend his
chronology to predict, entirely accurately although rather
unimaginatively, continued political strife between Arabs and Persians.
Recreating Masha’allah’s
chronology of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions using modern data reveals
that his approximations for the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn
were actually pretty decent, even if there’s never really a sharp
transition between one triplicity and the next. The pattern of small,
middle, and great conjunctions still stands out in modern data, a
charmingly captivating system. It’s easy to see why anyone with a knack
for historical dates might get engrossed in its narrative possibilities.
Were the renewed conquests of Islam under the Ottomans due to the
return of a watery triplicity? Is the Middle East more susceptible to
European invasion, by crusaders or colonialists, when an earthy
triplicity holds sway? It hardly seems any more arbitrary than, say, the
ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods taught in school.
In fact, astrologically organized histories were considered quite scientific during the Medieval Period—or,
if you prefer, during the seventh great conjunction cycle between the
fiery triplicities of 769 and 1603. The most prominent popularizer of
this approach was Abu Mashar, the preeminent astrologer of Baghdad the
generation after Masha’allah. And among its notable proponents was Abraham ibn Ezra, medieval Spain’s famed Jewish poet and philosopher, who inserted the theory into his commentary on Exodus.
Christian chronologists were similarly
swept up. The dreaded return of the fiery triplicity in 1603, a year
that saw the death of England’s
Queen Elizabeth I, was examined at length by no less an authority than
astronomer Johannes Kepler. Several writers even went so far as to rely
on the scheme for some pretty bold predictions. German monk Johannes
Trithemius, for example, writing around the year 1500, bluntly asserted
that liberty would not be restored to the Jews prior to August 1880. In
fact, this is more or less exactly when the first wave of Zionist
settlers immigrated to Ottoman Palestine. The medical faculty of Paris
blamed the Black Plague, which arrived in Europe in 1347, on a
corruption of the atmosphere caused by the conjunction of Jupiter,
Saturn, and Mars in Aquarius the year 1345. (Incidentally, this is the
exact same configuration that has prevailed during the COVID-19 pandemic
of 2020.) But most notoriously of all, French Catholic cardinal Pierre d’Ailly,
writing around 1400, concluded his astrological history of the world
with a warning that the Antichrist could be expected to arrive in the
year 1789. Depending on how reactionary your views are regarding the
French Revolution, this may strike you as humorously prescient.
An illustration of the Storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789. Photo12/UIG/Getty Images
Unlike with other astrological
assertions, where an analysis might entail an elaborate hunt for the
faintest hint of a correlation, the correlations in the conjunction
theory of history seem to leap out from everywhere. It is roughly
analogous to the engineering distinction between noise, in which nothing
looks like a signal, and clutter, in which everything looks like a
signal. Perhaps, though, an even better analogy can be made to
cryptology: History, here, is like a secret code, with astrology as its
key.
The art of concealing a message
in secret writing is called cryptography and its practice is as old as
writing itself, but deciphering a secret message without a key requires
cryptanalysis—which emerged as a science only in Baghdad under the
Abbasids. The father of cryptanalysis was Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, a man who was deeply devout, deeply mathematical, and deeply obsessed with astrology. His treatise On Rays, for example, has to be history’s most valiant attempt to give astrology—and magic—a firm, philosophical foundation.
As al-Kindi
recognized, the art of writing is itself an act of magic, in its power
is to transmit thoughts and emotions across vast distances with symbols
alone. Given al-Kindi’s sensitivity to the power of symbols, it’s altogether apt that he, together with his famous contemporary al-Khwarizmi,
was instrumental in promoting the adoption of Hindu numerals. The magic
of this system derives from the digit 0, which permits, through its use
as a placeholder, every natural number to be expressed with just 10
abstract characters.
The Arabic word for the digit 0 is صفر, sifr. When this system was introduced to Europe by Fibonacci (of the famous sequence), sifr was Latinized as zephirum, which gave rise both to the word “zero” and the word “cipher.”
To medieval Europeans, who were used to seeing a quantity such as
one-thousand, two-hundred and two written as MCCII, the characters 1202
doubtless did look like a secret code, or cipher.
Living in Baghdad, where transcription,
translation, and interpretation rose to the level of a spiritual calling
as well as an intellectual one, al-Kindi would have been well aware of
the power of symbols to conceal. But al-Kindi outstripped all of his
predecessors in compelling symbols to reveal their secrets. His
“Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages” was the first to show
that simple ciphers can be cracked by a technique known today as
frequency analysis.
And yet, not all of the universe’s
secrets are encrypted with a cipher. Occasionally, some of the deepest
secrets can be found hiding right before our eyes. The practice of
concealing a message in plain sight, so to speak, is called
steganography, from the Greek stego (στέγω), meaning “cover,” and grapho (γράφω), meaning “write.” Steganography is a much more devious craft than conventional cryptography since, while it’s
obvious that a text in cipher is concealing a secret message, however
difficult it may be to decipher, the object of steganography is to
deflect suspicion that there’s any secret at all.
Simply put, anything can, and most
everything has, historically, been used to cloak secrets in settings
that are otherwise perfectly public, be it poetry, music, botanical
drawings—or star charts. In fact, as recently as 1996, a hidden message
was discovered to have been concealed in the astrological tables of a
notorious occult manuscript from the 1500s. The mischievous monk who
devised this scheme was Johannes Trithemius, the same one who predicted
the political fortunes of the Jews. Remarkably, he even went so far as
to write an entire book about steganography which, appropriately enough,
he disguised to look like a book of spells for summoning spirits. (A
pretty neat trick, don’t you think?)
The ability to look at the world and see what others cannot is generally taken as a mark of genius. But for every al-Kindi, Copernicus, or Einstein, there have been thousands who insist on seeing connections that simply aren’t
there. Astrology likes to hover on the boundary between the two,
presenting endless layers of planetary patterns, from perfectly real to
positively paranoid.
Returning to Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions,
why were they so often interpreted as a code to the secrets of history?
With a traditional cipher, the correct key results in a perfectly
readable message, while the wrong key returns gibberish. With
steganography, however, nothing can be ruled out. Anyone who maintains
that there’s no correlation between
the conjunctions of the planets and the events of world history is in
the unenviable stance of having to prove a negative. The mathematical
procedures pioneered by al-Kindi, the
original father of cryptology, are powerless here. We can, however, turn
to the man who is rightly called the father of modern cryptology:
William Friedman, best known for breaking the Japanese diplomatic
ciphers in the run-up to World War II.
An
allegorical engraving, from 1941, illustrating William Shakespeare
doffing his “cap of maintenance” in honor of Francis Bacon, who some
believe was the true author of the Bard’s works. Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images
Oddly, William Friedman, America’s
preeminent 20th-century codebreaker, began his cryptologic career when
he was hired, with no prior experience, to search for hidden messages in
the works of William Shakespeare. Specifically, he was asked to verify
the existence of certain ciphers, to use the term loosely, supposedly
proving that the works of Shakespeare were actually authored by Francis
Bacon, the essayist, philosopher of science, and onetime chancellor of
England. Proponents of these ciphers claimed that individual letters in
the early printings of Shakespeare’s
plays were marked in subtle ways. With a generous eye and a suggestive
mind, true believers had managed to combine these letters into
startlingly elaborate confessions that Shakespeare had been a mere front
for the genius of Bacon. Friedman thought all of this was lunacy.
Later, during his retirement, Friedman
was determined to settle the matter once and for all. In this, he was
joined by his wife, Elizebeth, whom he had first met as a fellow skeptic
in the original Shakespeare cipher group. Like William, Elizebeth would
become a distinguished cryptologist in her own right, leading, for
example, the U.S. Treasury Department’s efforts to decipher the codes of bootleggers and rum-runners during Prohibition.
Operating according to the principles of unbiased scientific inquiry, the husband-and-wife cryptology team published The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined in 1957, which demonstrated, one by one, that none of these so-called ciphers could stand up to scrutiny. Their work is directly relevant to astrology because they address head-on the question of how to determine if a signal, or pattern, or secret code is real. (Or if you’re just nuts.)
Generally speaking, there’s
no mathematical formula or algorithm that can solve a steganographic
cipher. The Friedmans did, however, stipulate two general conditions
that any such solution must satisfy. First, whatever decryption
procedure is proposed must give a sensible result when applied
rigorously. The main problem with the so-called Baconian ciphers was that their “discoverers”
were constantly inserting letters here or skipping letters there to
make their systems work. Such arbitrariness should be taken as an
argument against these ciphers having been used in the first place. The
conjunction theory of history exhibits a similarly ample amount of
wiggle room, since the conjunctions themselves don’t need to coincide with any historical date exactly. Instead, it’s
enough for a conjunction merely to foreshadow, in some vague way, an
upcoming event or era. Thus the fiery triplicity said to presage the
birth of Jesus is permitted to begin a full quarter-century earlier. And plenty of other conjunctions, unattached to world events, are simply left out.
Yet, to give a counterexample, if I told
you that the first letters of the nine preceding paragraphs, including
this one, spells out ASTROLOGY (“And,”
Simply,” … “Yet”), there should be no doubt that this message was
placed there on purpose. The method is applied rigorously, and the
probability of these nine letters occurring this way by chance is
impossibly small.
The second general
condition stipulated by the Friedmans is that the solution must be
unique. As they demonstrated colorfully in their book, a decryption
method that tells you that Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s
plays can hardly be valid if the same method can be used to reveal that
Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, and even William Friedman himself
were in on the plot. The significance of any one solution is diminished
in accordance with how easy it is to produce competing, if not
contradictory, solutions. As the Friedmans put it, “Just
as there is only one valid solution to a scientific or mathematical
problem, so there is only one valid solution to a cryptogram … to find
two quite different but equally valid solutions would be an absurdity.”
Thus, whatever we conclude about the
conjunction theory of history should, properly, depend upon how uniquely
we think it correlates with one sequence of historical dates and not
any others. This, in turn, suggests a pattern-matching
game. For instance, looking back at just the last 200 years, we can
observe a remarkably strong correlation between the nine most recent
Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions and the terms of U.S. presidents who either
died in office, were assassinated, or survived near-death mishaps.
Jupiter-Saturn
conjunctions appear to be harbingers of presidential deaths in office,
assassinations, or near-death mishaps. New York Yankees’ championships
follow a similar pattern. Courtesy Alexander Boxer
We could also, if we wish, note an intriguing connection between the conjunctions and the development of space exploration: 1901—Orville and Wilbur Wright experiment with powered flight; 1921—Robert Goddard experiments with liquid-fuel rocketry; 1941—Wernher von Braun begins development of the V-2 rocket; 1961—Yuri Gagarin is the first man in space; 1981—the maiden launch of Columbia, the first space shuttle; 2000—the initial manned mission arrives at the International Space Station.
And yet, maybe the true,
cosmic significance of a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction is to ensure that
the New York Yankees make it to the World Series, as, indeed, they have
in every conjunction year since the game has been played: 1921, 1941,
1961, 1981, and 2000. (The first modern World Series was played in
1903.)
So, how many patterns can
you pick out? Whatever you predict, get ready to have it tested. The
next Jupiter-Saturn conjunction is coming: December 21, 2020, the exact
date of the winter solstice.
