What are the chances?

What do Green Arrow, the Titanic, and The West Wing have in common?


They're all examples of life imitating art, without a causal mechanism.

The superhero Green Arrow, in the comic book miniseries "The Longbow Hunters", discovers a CIA plot to use money from an arms deal with Iranians to fund the Contra rebels of Nicauragua.

The miniseries was published in 1987. However, the author, Mike Grell, has stated that he created the plotline years earlier.

I can concede that we don't know for certain whether Grell is embellishing or not, though we have no real reason to believe that he is engaging in fabrication. He has stated that he simply tried to think of something the CIA was capable of. And he turned out to be right.

Similarly, the 1898 novel "Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan" uncannily evokes the real sinking of the Titanic--fourteen years later, that is:

How did he do it? Probably he simply observed the ocean liner economy of his time, and wrote a novel about what was capable of happening. And he was right.

And finally, Aaron Sorkin seems to have scripted the events of the 2008 US presidential election in 2006.

"But," you might protest, "couldn't it be the case that The West Wing did, in fact, cause certain events of the 2008 campaign, like early media support for the Santos-like candidate, or the somewhat remarkable popularity of Palin among US conservatives, and McCain's somewhat unusual choice of her as his running mate?"

Maybe, but...it turns out it's the other way around--it's the West Wing writers who modeled their characters from life!

Obama, McCain, et al. were not trying to live out a TV series. They were just trying to live out their real ambitions (which they held long before The West Wing came along) in their real lives. The writers just took certain elements from those real lives, took a look at the contemprary electorate, and wrote a plausible story. And they were right--in the sense that they correctly read the character of those real people, and successfully predicted the real consequences of their real ambitions.

So we have three examples of art prefiguring life, simply based on the fact that authors are students of life, whose job it is to tell stories that, under other circumstances, would be true. And sometimes, those circumstances come about.

What does this have to do with Secret Mark?

Well, what if James H. Hunter simply managed to pull off the same feat?

James H. Hunter is the author of The Mystery of Mar Saba, a 1940 thriller that some claim is so similar to Smith's story of discovery, that it must be the cause of his announcement--meaning, that Smith forged Secret Mark.

But we see above that it's not impossible that Hunter simply got lucky, so to speak; sometimes, art accidentally prefigures life.

We'll spend the next couple of posts examining this. But for now, one must concede it's not unprecedented for a work of fiction to prefigure history.