An Examination of Coincidences In History and Literature Introducing an Anthology of Essays and Works In Various Genres With a Final Apologia

AN EXAMINATION OF COINCIDENCES IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE INTRODUCING AN ANTHOLOGY OF ESSAYS AND WORKS IN VARIOUS GENRES WITH A FINAL APOLOGIA

By Julian Scutts

Copyright Julian Scutts  October 2015

The first chapter of this book outlines remarkable coincidences that have attracted the attention of leading writers, philosophers, psychologists and historians throughout the years. However, the debate as to whether coincidences are meaningful or not is a relatively recent preoccupation, as before the Age of Reason  the common assumption that divine providence guides all events ruled out explanations based on the concept of pure chance. Conversely, rationalism shunned any proposal that divine providence had a part to play. The Romantics and early post-Romantics challenged the arid rationalism of their day by taking an insidious interest in the uncanny, the supernatural and meaningful coincidences to boot, as the following citation from a short story by Balzac will serve to illustrate.

I have been fascinated by this subject for decades now and have my own personal and even idiosyncratic views on the phenomenon, leading me to include my own writings in the form of poems, dialogues and short stories within the scope of discussions that follow on from the introductory chapter.

This book concludes with an apologia. Apart from being a defence of my beliefs concerning the inextricable connection between literature and life, this apologia argues that, however well-ordered and objective an academic thesis may be, it did not descend from heaven in a ready-made condition but owes more than some would admit to the vicissitudes and unforeseen come-uppances of life.

CHAPTER I: ON COUNTING RHINOCEROSES

A:  SYNCHRONICITY, A PHENOMENON  IDENTIFIED BY PROFESSOR C. G. JUNG

‘Ce que nous appelons hasard, c’est peut-être la logique de Dieu.’(‘What  we call Chance is perhaps the logic of God.’) Georges Bernanos

La mort de la comtesse fut causé par un sentiment plus grave, et sans doute par quelque vision terrible. A l'heure precise où  madame de Dey mourait à Carentan, son fils était fusilé dans le Morbihan. Nous pouvons joindre ce fait tragique à toutes les observations sur les sympathies qui méconnaissent les lois de l'espace ; documents que rassemblent avec une savante curiosité quelques hommes de solitude, et qui serviront un jour  à asseoir les bases d'une science nouvelle à laquelle il a manqué jusqu'à ce jour un homme de génie.

The last paragraph in the short story by Honoré de Balzac entitled Le Réquisitionnaire (The Conscript)

The death of the countess was caused by something yet  more grave; it resulted, without a doubt, from  a terrifying vision. At the exact hour when Madame de Dey died at Carentan, her son was shot in the Morbihan. That tragic fact we may add to many recorded observations on sympathies that  disregard the laws of space: records which men in their reclusion are compiling with sagacious curiosity, and which will some day serve as the basis of a new science for which, up to the present day, a man of genius has been lacking.

Carl Jung gave a name to the phenomenon exemplified above: synchronicity. The word refers to what Jung posited as the phenomenon of acausal yet meaningful coincidences that seem to cohere as though they were words or symbols  in a message. To the religious mind the author of the perceived message  must be   a great power working behind the scenes, God for short, or at least a universal coordinating influence that defies any rational explanation at present available, perhaps the collective unconscious in terms of Carl Jung’s central theory.

One might interpret  Jung’s theory  as a revival of an ancient mode of thought so evident in the religious or mystical beliefs of ancient civilizations. Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences"   captures a sense of this universal unity suffusing all sensations aroused by natural objects, sounds and scents, notably in the words of the first stanza.

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.:

Nature is a temple where from time to time living pillars utter confused words. Man traverses forests of symbols which eye him with the looks of those with whom he is familiar.

B: A SURVEY OF COINCIDENCES IN HISTORY DEPARTING FROM  AN ARTICLE ON THE DEATHS OF JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON ON JULY 4TH 1826

Scholars in general are wary of discussing unexplained phenomena, leaving such matters as UFOs, crop circles or the identity of the Antichrist to the exponents of theories aired on the Internet. However, occasionally a noted scholar picks up the gauntlet thrown down by coincidences that crop up in the annals of history, a notable example of which we now consider. I refer to an article appearing  in the journal Historically Speaking: the Bulletin of the Historical Society (July/August 2005, Volume 6, Number 6) by Margaret P. Battin. It bears the title: July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-day  Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Margaret Battin’s article departs from a recognition of the following fact: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826, that fateful day being the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore President Monroe also died on the 4th of July, but in 1831.

In the quest for an explanation Margaret  Buttin runs through  the gamut of  six possibilities which she enumerates in the following sequence of categories.

pure chance

divine intervention

hanging on to ensure a memorable death

suicide pact

foul play

an as yet barely understood psychological force

Margaret Buttin finds within none of the above categories  a completely satisfying  conclusion  of her quest for an explanation. Let us consider each possibility in turn.

She  observes that the statistical  likelihood of two presidents dying on the same prestigious day, the fiftieth jubilee of the signing of American Declaration of  Independence, is  a  very long  shot indeed, as are  the chances that three of the first American presidents should die on the same date. I might add that only one president was born on the fourth of July, namely Calvin Coolidge. Even in this case the odds stacked against his birth on July the fourth were roughly one in nine (the total number of presidents divided into the number of days in the year) and yet these odds were immeasurably greater than the chance that two presidents would die on the same day.

As to the possibility that the phenomenon under discussion was the result of divine intervention, Margaret Buttin feels indisposed to entering into a discussion of the imponderable  theological mysteries and in this matter she reflects the diffidence of scholars in an age when the queen of the sciences no longer occupies her throne. In academic circles it is  becoming increasingly respectable to profess allegiance to theism, but there are few scholars bold enough  confess a firm belief  in a miracle that has occurred over the last two thousand years.

The possibilities delineated within the remaining four categories amount to various speculations based on conjectures for which there is little  verifiable evidence and most scholars are averse to mulling over  anything that smacks of a conspiracy theory. The intriguing  idea of some psychosomatically controlled time switch affecting one’s life span might deserve further investigation. In a history seminar I once attended at the University of Cologne the presiding professor gingerly commented how strange it was that Oliver Cromwell died on the 3rd of September (Old Style),  the same date of two decisive battles at Worcester and Dunbar which  he had won during his military career.

The issue of coincidences is far  wider than the ambit of Margaret Buttin’s particular discussion but  the  framework she uses to explore possible explanations is widely applicable to  a study of the entire question of coincidences in history. One should not imagine that the example of this phenomenon is an isolated one-off case. If it were, one might be tempted to conclude that the case of the coincidences she considers could be dismissed as a statistical quirk on the assumption that it would only be a matter of time before enough moneys typed the entire text of Hamlet. We have other cases to consider, some of them well-known, such as that of the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels or the recurrence of the ninth of November in German history.

As various pages on the internet and other sources point out, there are what some take to be eerie similarities between the facts that pertain to the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. In both cases a president named Johnson was the respective victim’s successor. Both were elected in a year that ended with 60. Both were mortally wounded on a Friday, in Lincoln’s case on Good Friday.  Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre and Kennedy was being driven in a Ford Lincoln, and so it goes on. If we apply the statistical probability test to access the chances that such a row of coincidences could take place, we should at least assess the chances of two presidents sharing the same surname, of being assassinated and dying on the same day of the week. There have been several cases of presidents sharing the same surname, namely Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Roosevelt and Bush, giving us a value of roughly one in seven (35 up to Kennedy’s administration / 5). Four presidents have been assassinated during the course of the history of the United States: Lincoln, Garfield,  McKinley and Kennedy, giving us a factor of roughly one in nine. Add on  to this one in seven for Friday and we arrive at a chance of 7 x 9 x 7, which equals one in 441, a conservative estimate in view of the fact that we have taken no account of Ford’s Theatre, the Ford Lincoln and a few other matters.

What about the explanation of divine intervention? When the speaker in a well-known song of the Rolling Stones raised the question of who killed the Kennedys, he did not have God in mind. As Margaret Bottin warned, the thought of divine intervention in such cases lands us in the prickly thicket of difficult theological questions. How much leeway can God give to Satan in view of the story of Job? The many who claim to have identified the identity of the Antichrist so variously  in President Obama, the Pope, the Freemasons, Islam, the Jews, or Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge (and such a genial and amiable gentleman too) seem to suggest that Satan virtually rules the roost down here, allowing God  the honorary role of clearing up at the End of Days. And then what about more down-to-earth, rational explanations? The various conspiracy theories which revolve  around the assassination of JFK do not to my knowledge incorporate Lincoln’s assassination. To do so would be to construe a monstrous cult whose operations spanned centuries, a cult in possession of  immense powers of control and insight; in other words we are slipping back to the devil again.

Let us take another case, the recurrence of the ninth of November in history, particularly the history of Germany. Major events that took place on this date are, in reverse order:

The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989),

The burning of synagogues and associated crimes against Jews on the so-called Reichs-Kristallnacht (1938),

The abortive Hitler-Ludendorff Beerhall-Putsch in Munich (1923),

The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1918).

Some would add on Napoleon the First’s coup d’etat on the 18 Brumaire, VIII according to the French Revolutionary calendar, which was the ninth of November  1799 in fact. A historian might also mention the less well known execution of Robert Blum by the Austrian authorities (1848). Blum played a leading role in the movement to establish a liberal and democratic pan-German parliament in the Paulskirche  in Frankfurt am Main in 1848, the year in which the historic phase known as Vormärz culminated and tragically ended.

One can offer a rational explanation for at least one repetition in the list cited above. Hitler may well have chosen the 9th of November as the  day on which  to stage his attempted Putsch to indicate an intended reversal of the process that led to the establishment of the Weimar Republic after the Kaiser’s abdication. On the other hand it is difficult to see how any presumed operatives could have engineered the date of the fall of the Berlin wall as the timing of this event seems to have resulted from an unforeseen bungle on the part of an East German functionary. Conspiracy theorists, here’s your cue.

Here is another case to consider. The recurrence of the years ending in 7 that mark the capture of Jerusalem. In any case  the Holy City has an established place in the area of numbers to which a mystical or allegorical meaning has been imputed. In the Jewish religious tradition the ninth of the month of Av (Tish b’Av), marking the destruction of the Temple of Solomon  and Second or Herodian Temple, is a fast day in the Jewish year, and according to certain opinions coincided with tragic junctures in Jewish history, such as the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the beginning of the First World War. Tradition has also linked the city with the symbolic number seven, an association that goes back to the seven branches of the Menorah, the candelabrum that was a sacred object in the Temple. One also speaks of the seven gates of Jerusalem. In reverse order again, I list the years which witnessed the capture of Jerusalem.

1967 In the Six-Day War,

1917 The capture of Jerusalem under the command of General Allenby,

1517 The occupation of Jerusalem by the Ottomans 

1187 The city’s capture by Saladin .

One might even mention the year 70 when the Romans invaded the city after the first Jewish Revolt. Admittedly not all the dates of Jerusalem capture ended with seven (viz. 1099). However since 1187 the chances of dates ending with seven four times are statically slim, being 10 to the power of four, which is one  to 10,000. Or, more conservatively, one to 1,000 if one considers only the repetition of any digit from 1187.  While we are on the subject of recurring sevens, let us look at a case for which there is no obvious allegorical interpretation.

King Edward the First of England died when he was about to invade Scotland on the seventh day in the seventh month of the seventh year in the fourteenth century (July 7th, 1307). The two kings that followed him, Edward II, and Edward III died  in 1327 and 1377 respectively. Richard II was dethroned in 1399 to die in the following year, recalling the year 1199 when his namesake Richard I (Coeur de Lion) died in battle. If one is to interpret these coincidences as the result of divine intervention, it may be just as important to recognize the simple fact  that certain coincidences defy the reasoning mind’s power  to find explanations as it is to decipher the supposed cryptic message itself. This recognition alone  might serve to make scientists, academics and opinionated minds in general less bumptious and more humble, doubtlessly to the benefit of all.

Skeptics challenge the very idea that coincidences are inexplicable and mysterious in the face of all claims that they can be meaningful. They argue that pattern recognition based on similar but unrelated events and images is attributable to apophenia, that propensity of the mind to arbitrarily  project patterns generated by the mind itself onto perceptions of  objects and  random items of data derived from external reality. Hence the Man in the Moon or oddities displayed on You Tube showing grotesque faces in atomic mushroom clouds or mermaids and other strange creatures on the surface of Mars. Such perceptions result from the mind’s tendency to select items that it is predisposed to discern and to suppress those that do not fit a programmed image. Here one can turn the tables. Are not these  skeptics themselves liable to fall into the very trap they warn against if as a matter  of principle they dogmatically rule out the possibility that coincidences are more than the result of chance  and at the same time  ignore the weight  of uncomfortable statistics?

There are things we know to be true. After winter there is spring and after spring comes  the summer. The world is a sphere. Or is it?  flat-earthers will object. Flat-earthers remind us that even knowledge of matters we take for granted results from the aggregate effect of constantly perceiving  coincidences  from which, according to the philosopher Hume,  we only infer a sense  of causality.  Between what we   know for certain and what we know to be untrue lies  the often indeterminate area occupied by personal beliefs, UFOs, crop circles and so forth. On such matters it is best to be open-minded and always prepared to evaluate fresh evidence. I will try to elucidate this point by a somewhat ludicrous example.

If one sees one rhinoceros in the street it is proper  to conclude that a wild animal has escaped from a zoo. Should one see two, three or more rhinoceroses one  might assume that there has been a mass breakout of rhinoceroses from a zoo. Should one see even more and more rhinoceroses, the point will come when, like a member of the audience attending  a famous play by Eugène Ionesco, one must concede that perhaps one is witnessing a phenomenon. Be prepared! There are more rhinoceroses on the way as we consider further cases of meaningful coincidence.

The phrase 1066 and all that is  familiar to old and young in Britain, and there are good reasons for regarding 1066 as the founder year of Britain as a political, cultural and linguistic entity. As though gifted with vatic prescience, Edward the Confessor inaugurated Westminster Abbey, where thenceforth the monarchs of England and later Great Britain were to be crowned. From 1066 the monarchs of England have been designated by number, beginning with William the First until Elizabeth the Second today (apologies to those Scots for whom she is Elizabeth the First). There has been one Republican interlude that interrupted the monarchal line established by William the First (or the Conqueror) and it was in 1660, an anagram of 1066, that the monarchy was restored. London rose from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666, a dire event prophesied by seers such as Mother Shipton, Nostradamus and William Lilly. Many regarded the appearance in 1066 of the heavenly body later identified as Halley’s Comet as an omen of a drastic change in England.  Those who established the first English colony on Virginian soil left England in 1606 and a few months after establishing a base at Jamestown witness a sighting of the same comet.

There have been two historic Norman invasions, the first in 1066, the second at dawn on the sixth of June (6/6) in 1944. On both occasions a man named Montgomery played an active role in the respective operation and when being driven in a  staff vehicle through the village of Montgomery Foy, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was badly shot up. The Battle of Hastings took place on October the 14th according to the Julian or Old Style calendar. General Eisenhower was born on October the 14th according to the Gregorian or New Style calendar and Rommel was to take his life on October the 14th under orders from Hitler. He was absent from the Normandy front on that most crucial of all days, June the sixth, as he returned to his wife to celebrate her birthday. To the great consternation of the secret service, on the eve of the invasion  the codenames assigned to the Normandy beaches cropped up  as solutions to a crossword puzzle in the Daily Telegraph, another interesting coincidence!

I anticipate that references to the Julian and Gregorian styles of dating have raised  objections in readers’ minds. How can dates that correspond to both styles bear comparison in any way if the  days to which they assign a date diverge by ten days? Has  the fact  that William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on 23 April 1616, albeit in accordance with the two styles of dating, any claim to our attention, as it might well have  done if they had died on the same day? But  then perhaps the coincidence is even more striking for this reason. Shakespeare was born on Saint George’s day and the 23rd of April 1616 fell on Saint George’s Day too ( An interesting parallel can be drawn between this and the fact that the great painter Raphael died on his 37th birthday, which fell on Good Friday). Can we  recognize two sides to an equation here, on one side  the common date (the 23rd of April) and on the other, an apparent message, if you will?  Shakespeare and Cervantes were kindred spirits who respectively  marked the highest   pinnacles of literary achievement  in English and Spanish  literature. Let us be cautious here. They were not born on the same day as the dates of their  deaths lay ten days apart in accord with the adjustment  of Gregorian calendar, so where is our   great coincidence. Let us consider a similar case.

It is sometimes  maintained that  that Isaac Newton was born  in the same year in which Galileo died, 1642. Again, one cannot help feeling that some implicit  pointer  suggests that an  overruling influence, presumably God or the all-pervading collective unconscious, saw to it that Newton was to continue  Galileo’s good work, or - to purloin a biblical metaphor -   that the mantle of Galileo should fall on the shoulders of Newton. An article by Brian Gee published in The New Scientist in1977 has this to say on the subject, countering such a conclusion:

Returning to the problem of Newton’s birth date we note that it is commonly recorded as 25 December 1642. To compare this with Galileo, who died on 8 January, 1642 (ns) we would need to translate Newton’s birth date to the Gregorian calendar date of 5 January, 1643, a date with no standing in 17th century England. Personally, I prefer to think of Newton being born on Christmas Day 1642 (Old Style)

Brian’s Gee’s preference for Christmas Day would certainty have received a full endorsement from Newton himself, who understood the day of his birth as a providential omen. Brian Gee’s nostalgic hankering after an association rooted in religious tradition leaves no trace in his attitude to what many others will see  as a meaningful coincidence. Does he not foist his own assumption that such a coincidence cannot be meaningful on his readers as though this were some incontrovertible fact, - on readers who may not all share his strictly rational attitude? If you admit the possibility at least that some Inscrutable Guiding Force uses dates as semiotic indicators comparable  to  words in speech and writing, to  arbitrary signs after all, you can assume that  the IGF in question would not be much bothered by the thought of divergences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. I might add that the year 1879 saw another passing of the baton from one great physicist to another, for in this year James Clerk Maxwell died and Albert Einstein was born. Maxwell was the first person to  demonstrate the unity underlying the physical properties of light and electromagnetism, thus preparing the way for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. As a matter of interest, both Newton and Maxwell were alumni of Trinity College Cambridge.

I am in the fortunate position of having no reputation to defend. Far from being apologetic on this issue I make so bold as to point to another possible message pertaining to the transfer of Elijah’s cloak. John Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation died in the year 1384, just in time to avoid a painful martyrdom. Martin Luther was born in 1483, a rearrangement of 1384. Wycliffe spent his final years as the parish priest of Lutterworth in the Midlands, and Lutter and Luther share the same etymological root. Against their expectations and wishes, the teaching of both reformers  excited hopes of social freedom among the peasantry and this resulted in bloody uprisings followed by brutal repression at the hand of the powers that be.

Words can be understood as arbitrary signs in accordance with Juliet’s assertion that a rose would still be a rose if that flower went by  a different name. On the other hand, to refer to a well-known Latin tag, nomen est omen The name of Christopher Columbus (derived from the Latin word meaning dove) constitutes  a reference to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, so as to involve two thirds of the Holy Trinity in Christian doctrine. Like Jonah, the Hebrew word for dove, or  Noah, who released a dove from his ark, Columbus was a voyager over the watery deep in search of a new world lying in the west (at least in the prophet’s case). As though to stress the theological basis of his voyage, Columbus sailed aboard the Santa Maria and one of the three ships that sailed on the bold mission to reach India and the one that  sank in Nativity Bay on December the 25th. In a similar connection, one might adduce a possible theological implication the  District of Columbia,  enclosed as it is by Virginia and Maryland, though the immediate causes that gave rise to the words Virginia and Maryland lay in references to Queen Elizabeth the First and  Henrietta Maria, the consort of King Charles the First. Perhaps those agitated fundamentalists in the headlines should not worry so much  after all about the United States failing to come up to their theocratic expectations. The dome of the Capitol was modelled on that of Saint Peters in the Vatican.

C: COINCIDENCES THAT LINK PASSAGES IN LITERARY FICTION WITH REAL INCIDENTS AND HISTORICAL  EVENTS

The discussion so far labours under a heavy burden. There is no commonly accepted measure that could help us to reach a consensus on central questions that arise from the issue of coincidences. To return to the rhinoceros test again, who is to say how many sightings of rhinoceroses can no longer be attributed to pure chance? There is a great gulf between the subjective domain of the reflecting mind and the objective domain of cold statistics. Is there a middle way and can literature help us to find it? After all, this investigation began with a citation from a story written by a great French novelist.

As the citations from Balzac and Bernanos show, the issue of coincidences is a matter that has attracted the interest of a great writers of literature apart from that of scholars working in the area of historical studies. By extending the scope of this inquiry to the literary sphere we stand a greater chance of examining Carl Jung’s claim that