Lost & Found

It started with a little book innocently titled “Thought Dial”, by Sydney Omarr. Yes, the astrologer, although the book is about numerology and consistently references some supernatural being called Sepharial. I don’t know who Sepharial is supposed to be, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

I knew a woman who was interesting and eccentric, and died a few years ago well into her 90s. A strict and prudish Republican, yet she followed every single New Age trend decades before they came into fashion. She was expert at the formulae of astrology, and dabbled in numerology. She used to tell me that Omarr was a terrible astrologer and never to read the horoscopes in the newspaper. (I didn’t, but not because of her.) Somewhere along the way she gave me this little book. Apparently although he was a bad astrologer, Omarr was a good numerologist. (Oxymoron?) I happened to keep the book all these years.

Turns out, there’s a chapter called “Locating Lost Articles”. The process is simple: think of three numbers between one and ten, reduce it to a single digit (unless they add up to 11 or 22, dunno why) and look up the result. Sepharial (again, no idea, I’ve never read the rest of the book) tells you where to find the object. Here’s the truly bizarre point: more often than not, it works.

Now, I’m not for a second supporting the mystical. I think the directions just trigger a subconscious memory of where you last saw the thing. But my friends on Twitter enjoy sending me numbers when they lose something, and now I extend to you the same option. To quote my good friend Max Maven quoting Nils Bohr, “They say it works whether you believe in it or not.”

Or, as the charming @radiantfracture put it, “I don’t believe in it either, but that doesn’t seem to stop it from working.”