Every age, it seems, has its oracles and soothsayers, and you'd think we'd be crawling with them as the millennium draws near. But author Kathleen Krull says the closest thing to a modern-day prophet is Microsoft's Bill Gates.
"I wouldn't put Bill Gates in the same book with Jeane Dixon," concedes Krull, whose new children's book profiles a dozen of history's most influential prognosticators. "But there are people who are ahead of their time, and he's a good example of that."
Krull highlights an eclectic group in her new book, "They Saw the Future: Oracles, Psychics, Scientists, Great Thinkers and Pretty Good Guessers" (Simon & Schuster, $19.99, 108 pages). It's aimed at kids 10 to 14, but many adults will want to sneak a peak.
"People throughout history have wanted to predict the future," said Krull, 46, a raven-haired writer with a soft, motherly face. "It's something we're all curious about."
The San Diego writer, who was in Seattle for book signings, profiled scientists and "armchair dreamers" like Leonardo da Vinci and H.G. Wells, plus mystics and seers whose predictions defy explanation. "These are people who were more right than wrong," Krull said. "All were open-minded without being gullible. That's what I try to be myself."
Exploring the mystical is a departure for Krull. She's best known for the light-hearted biographical series that began with the "Lives of the Musicians" and went on to include writers, artists, athletes and presidents. (Up next: profiles of women rulers through the ages.)
Krull highlights the all-too-human foibles of the history's leading lights, tailoring her writing to the big-headed portraits painted by her friend Kathryn Hewitt.
In "They Saw the Future," Krull reins in the humor and plays it straight. Profiles include historical and cultural details that explain each prophet's influence on the times. Likewise, Kyrsten Brooker's stylized portraits are more in a more dignified vein.
"In one sense this is a sort of history of the world," Krull said, "because you have to explain the context of their predictions."
Krull says rulers through the ages have heeded soothsayers, from the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece to contemporary psychic Jeane Dixon, who reportedly advised presidents, congressmen and NASA scientists even though "her overall batting average was not good."
Many prophets were outsiders with acute powers of observation. Some, like the Oracle at Delphi, probably exploited gossip and inside information from visiting supplicants.
They weren't always right, but there are plenty of bull's-eyes that Krull can't explain.
We can only wonder how Hildegard of Bingen, a German nun of the Middle Ages, came to write about the circulatory system 300 years before it was "discovered."
Or how the 16th-century French physician Nostradamus foresaw (depending on whose interpretation you believe) the 1969 moon landing and the death of England's Princess Diana.
Krull thinks Leonardo was the most versatile, creative genius of the bunch but she says Edgar Cayce (pronounced KAY-see) was the most mysterious.
"Nobody has ever explained how Edgar Cayce did what he did," Krull said.
Cayce, a Kentuckian with an eighth-grade education, would go into a trance each afternoon and answer questions posed in letters from everyday people.
He would speak foreign languages he'd never learned, diagnose medical conditions for people he'd never met and display encyclopedic knowledge far beyond his own experience or education.
After The New York Times publicized his feats in 1910, a panel of experts tested Cayce by shoving a pin through his cheek and peeling back the nail of his little finger while he was in a trance. Krull says Cayce showed no pain until he woke up, when he began to bleed heavily. His finger throbbed for a year.
Despite some fakes in the field, Krull thinks certain people do have extra intuition.
Oracles, Psychics, 'Good Guessers' Profiled
SEATTLE — Where is Nostradamus when we need him?
[Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer via Deseret News / UT By Cecelia Goodnow
- July 28 1999]
