Open your eyes to see the obvious

The Addison Independent
June 30, 2011

Last week in this column, I declared that I, a professor of medieval history, believed in magic. You're probably expecting me to say this week that I also believe in fairies, but since the Tooth Fairy failed to make an appearance when I had my wisdom teeth out and the Laundry Fairy gives my house a wide berth, I've given up on the entire fairy kingdom.

Instead, I’d like to consider three words encountered in a 14th-century inquisitorial deposition:  “intellect,” “subtlety,” and “philosophy.” They are a perfect example of the funny little detail that just seems wrong – the person who used them to describe his revelations (a man named Limoux from a tiny town in the Pyrenées) had no business using such a sophisticated vocabulary. It’s the kind of anomaly that has the power to shift paradigms and can turn a whole world of understanding upside down.

I take the idea of anomalies and paradigm shifts from an influential book by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).  Kuhn proposed the idea that science does not progress linearly, but by means of revolutions. In what he calls “normal science,” our understandings are shaped by a particular paradigm, and we solve problems and puzzles inside the paradigm.

But in the course of “normal science,” anomalies appear: phenomena that just don’t fit the paradigm, no matter how hard we try to make them fit, or tweak the paradigm to fit the new evidence. At first, we are completely blind to the anomalies, because we aren’t expecting them. They are there, but we do not see them.

Kuhn cites a psychological experiment as an example of how anomalies can be completely invisible. J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman published a study in 1949 that used an ordinary deck of cards with a few anomalous cards, like a red six of spades. When the subjects of the study were quickly shown one card after another and asked to identify them, at first they “saw” either a six of diamonds or a six of spades.  After being shown more and more of the anomalies, the subjects got ever more confused.  Kuhn writes, “And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!”’  It’s a light bulb moment – in reverse.

My light bulb moment took me almost sixteen years – and even then, I needed help.  I first read Limoux’s description of his revelations in the fall of 1993, when I was working on another project. I put it aside, but it kept niggling me, and I puzzled over it time and again. There was something wrong. The paradigm I was trying to fit the deposition into was that of heresy, my field as a historian.  Limoux was interrogated as a heretic, was condemned as a heretic, and was burned as a heretic. Therefore, when I looked at him, that was what I saw.

But when my colleague Paul Monod listened to me describe Limoux’s beliefs in the fall of 2009, he heard (or saw) something completely different. What if Limoux wasn’t describing religious heresy at all, but alchemy?

“My God!” The light bulb. My Limoux was indeed an alchemist, something like a cross between a magician and a chemist. “Intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy” occur over and over again in magical texts and alchemical texts from the Middle Ages, and detail after detail in his deposition checks out:  Limoux had been seeking the Philosopher’s Stone and wanted to create the Elixir of Life. He was a scientist in his experimentation, and a magician in his language and understanding. I am now working on uncovering his sources, his methods and his collaborators.  But I had to learn to see in order to even begin.

I may not believe in fairies, but I do believe in miracles.  Sometimes, the blind really can learn to see – and so can we.

Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke:  The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).