The words of children held mystical significance to the ancient Egyptians; their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) points to his own mouth. The Greeks later adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, and that gesture came to mean “hush”. Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep her many amorous indiscretions a secret. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. In the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the Subrosa Club is an exclusive space for paid System Failure subscribers…
Olympic Gold & Other Bizarre Coincidences
Last week, both the men’s and women’s US ice hockey teams won Olympic gold in Milan. Both teams knocked off their Canadian counterparts in their respective championship games, in overtime, by a score of 2-1.
But these coincidences were only the beginning.
The last time the US men’s hockey won Olympic gold was the famous “miracle on ice” team. In 1980—during some of the darkest days of the cold war—American college kids from Minnesota and Massachusetts managed to eliminate a juggernaut Soviet team.
Just days before the tournament began in Lake Placid, US coach Herb Brooks cut the last player from the roster. Disney’s 2004 film Miracle captured the heartbreaking moment: actor Kurt Russell crosses the name “Jack Hughes” off of a clipboard list of players, before a pair of disembodied hands remove the matching nameplate from above his dressing room locker.
In a bizarre coincidence, the man who scored the overtime game winning goal was also named Jack Hughes, the 24-year-old center from the New Jersey Devils. The Jack Hughes from 1980 played for the Colorado Rockies, who moved to New Jersey and became the Devils after the 1982 season.
Waves of coincidences like these sometimes pile up on each other in constructive interference patterns. Another bone-chilling example is the 1898 book The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility, written by Morgan Robertson. His fictional story anticipated the Titanic disaster that would take place 14 years after publication—in shocking detail.
Robertson’s book is about an ocean liner called the Titan which wrecked on an iceberg in April in the North Atlantic Ocean. Like the Titanic, fatalities were amplified by a lack of sufficient lifeboat capacity. The fictional vessel and the real-life vessel were almost identical in size (882 feet versus 800 feet). The similarities were so eerie that some people credited Robertson with precognition or clairvoyance, which he denied.
Another bizarre coincidence are the Baron Trump novels, written by Ingersoll Lockwood and published in 1889 and 1893. These books raised eyebrows in 2017 for coincidental similarities to the Trump family, including the protagonist’s name, his home at “Castle Trump,” and guidance from a figure known as “Don”.
Strange coincidences like these make us wonder whether we’re truly living in a universe of random entropy, as the current scientific establishment asserts. They make us wonder whether the universe is scripted by some divine author who is lazily reusing plot points. Or maybe events have some kind of frequency or resonance across time that the minds of authors subconsciously pick up on. It could very well be that these bizarre coincidences are merely permutations of probability, but one thing is for sure: they ignite the imagination!
