Category: D

From the Latin dualis meaning “containing two”; the belief that the universe has a double nature, and that therefore “the real” is either of two kinds of, or controlled by, two powers. The opposite of this, monism, from the Greek monos, “sole,” is the doctrine that everything is of the same fundamental kind. The term…

A member of the American Naturopathic Association and a licensed osteopath, Drown treated patients from her radio room in Los Angeles by a process that she called Drown Radio Therapy. She used an electronic machine of her own devising to diagnose patients from samples of their blood kept on blotting paper. The sample was then…

Method of finding things, often hidden or underground, with a simple device such as forked stick or a pendulum. The dowser holds the tool and watches or feels for movement that indicates the sought material or object. Perhaps most commonly known as a way to find underground water sources, dowsing has also been used to…

Mammals whose history has been speculated upon, with two very different stories resulting. First, the Darwinian scientific explanation tells how their ancestors originally came out of the sea when other forms of life started to inhabit the land, and then later as mammals they returned to the sea to make a living. Then there is…

One of several 19th-century “science” religions. Divine Science was founded in 1888 by Melinda Cramer, a former Quaker residing in San Francisco in the 1880s. She seems to have absorbed Christian Science from two of Mary Baker Eddy’s students, Miranda Rice, who opened an office as a Christian Science practitioner in San Francisco in 1883,…

A theory pertaining to Noah’s Flood that attributes certain geological features of the earth to this specific Deluge. Stories that describe a universal deluge that obliterated mankind and changed the earth’s surface are found in many religions. The best known are the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of Noah in Genesis.  

A system for understanding the human mind developed by well-known 20th-century science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Hubbard speculated that the true human being (which he termed the The-tan, analogous to the soul of Greek philosophers) inhabits the body. Hubbard taught that the natural ability of the The-tan to express itself positively in the…

Located off the southeastern coast of Japan, it is considered to be a Japanese equivalent of the Bermuda Triangel Like its parallel region in the Atlantic Ocean, it is supposed to be a section of the ocean that periodically swallows planes and ships without a trace usually before they have a chance to put out…

A simple device used to measure psychokinetic power. It was invented by the Count de Tromelin at the beginning of the 20th century. It is similar in operation to the Biometer developed by Hyppolite Baraduc just a few years earlier. It consisted of a paper cylinder with crosspiece of straw that revolved on a fine…

Often shortened to DOP, a claim for eyeless sight, whereby blind or blindfolded people are said to have the mysterious ability to read or recognize and describe colors without using their eyes. Sometimes the ability is said to be clairvoyance, but usually the claim is that parts of some people’s skin, especially fingertips and toes,…