Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
At the turn of the millennium, Kathleen Krull's "They Saw the Future" gives kids a look at futures past.
Jun 22, 1999 | The future is upon us. No more than usual, of course. It just seems that way because of a conjunction of accidents having to do with the year of birth of a visionary figure and the number of fingers on our hands. If we had nine fingers, the second millennium would have burst forth at the height of the Renaissance, 44 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue -- arguably a more appropriate era. However, since we count off the years on our 10 digits, we have the honor of living at what is known as the dawn of the future. It's a once-in-two-dozen-lifetimes chance to see how few predictions actually come true.
Amid the endless parade of top-10 lists and published forebodings that mark the millennium, Kathleen Krull's "They Saw the Future" stands out. This large-format book for 10-to-14-year-olds is a uniquely forward-looking history, illustrated with handsome collage paintings. In 12 chapters devoted to "oracles, psychics, scientists, great thinkers, and pretty good guessers," it explores the human longing to understand and thereby control the future.
Is such a thing possible? Well, maybe, depending on the technique. While Krull expresses orthodox admiration for Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, which were far ahead of their time, she refrains from committing herself to the musings of less universally respected seers, such as 20th century Americans Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon. She mentions some of their failed predictions and leaves it at that.
Krull organizes the book chronologically, beginning with the Oracle at Delphi, the collective name for a series of ancient priestesses called Pythia, whose mysterious pronouncements influenced the Greek-dominated world for 1,000 years. When supplicants arrived with valuable gifts and questions, the Pythia would chew laurel leaves, breathe fumes that rose from earthquake chasms nearby and fall into a trance. The god Apollo would then use her as a mouthpiece -- or so she and her auditors believed. Male priests transcribed and interpreted her utterances for the questioners.
The oracle's success, writes Krull, was due partly to its vagueness. "As one observer said, the oracle 'neither reveals or conceals, but hints' ... These were statements about the will of the gods that you had to interpret ... The Pythia never apologized. Any disasters were due to misinterpretation -- your own fault." But the oracle also relied on a familiar turn-of-the-21st century source of power: "The biggest clue to the oracle's success is, simply, information. The area quickly became a magnet for current news." With so many travelers passing through, the priests and priestesses learned, for example, where to send aspiring conquerors in search of vulnerable areas.
Hildegard of Bingen, the focus of Chapter 4, is the first individual seer whose story is taken on by Krull (Chapters 2 and 3 cover the Roman sibyls and the Mayan astrologers, with their astonishingly sophisticated understanding of mathematics and astronomy). Born to a noble German family in 1098 -- that's not long after 2000 in a civilization of people with eight fingers -- Hildegarde became a nun, one of the few careers open to female intellectuals. In the convent, she became a painter, composer and healer. She interpreted her visions -- which modern scientists believe were visual hallucinations that accompany migraines -- as "ways to treat medical conditions, solutions to scientific and theological problems, guidelines for human conduct, and images of an ideal future where women were honored."
Hildegard's male counterpart in the next chapter, Leonardo da Vinci, was born in 1452 -- or 2006 if you only have nine fingers. Unlike most of the people whose stories Krull tells, he didn't so much predict the future as invent it. His notebooks contain designs for everything from the snorkel to the helicopter, from the bicycle to the machine gun, from the flush toilet to the steam engine. But since he kept most of his inventions secret, the world had to wait hundreds of years for others to reinvent and manufacture them.
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