Serious woo-woo. It seems that Father Pellegrino Ernetti, sometime around 1952 or so, invented a “chronovisor”: a machine that allowed video and audio recording of past events. Father Ernetti was assisted in his endeavor by physicist Father Agostino Gemelli, Enrico Fermi, “a disciple of Fermi”, “Portuguese physicist Professor de Matos”, “a Japanese Nobel Prize winner in physics”, and Wernher von Braun. As evidence for his invention, Father Ernetti produced part of the tragedy Thyestes by Quintus Ennius, previously only known from fragments quoted by other classical authors, and a photograph of Christ’s face on the cross. The Chronovisor, alas, was much too dangerous an invention – since it allowed the user to see and hear any place, any time, thus completely destroying privacy. Thus it was disassembled and the inventors sworn to secrecy.


The part of Thyestes supposedly transcribed by Father Ernetti was analyzed by Latin scholars – who found it of dubious authenticity; it used words and constructions not attested in Latin until several hundred years after the putative date. The photograph of Christ turned out to be a left-right reversal of a cheap picture available from a souvenir stand outside Rome.


There’s a convenient block diagram on how to build a chronovisor – you’ll need:


*An Active and Passive Probe Analog-Magnetic-Digital Device “forming the innovative core in the acquisition of known data”;

*Signal Generators “with the acoustical frequency of one microwave”

*an Analyzer “with four audio and video ports” (while the other components are simple blocks, the Analyzer has a number of crosses, dots, dashes and internal rectangles, vaguely reminiscent of an oscilloscope. Or something. And it has four lines coming from other “devices” and going to what I presume are the “audio and video ports”)

*and a General Enhancer “capable of operating with analog or digital programs” (in a footnote, we find that the “Enhancer” is a “general purpose device” with “A/D and D/A converter, filters, bulk memory, and device [sic] providing comparison with already-recorded data”).

* and connect everything to everything else. (There are double-headed arrows doing that in the diagram; there’s also a double-headed arrow going to the “past” on the right of the drawing, and another going nowhere on the left).


The diagram concludes with the helpful note that “Three blocs: generator-analyzer-enhancer which may be made into one unit with simple hardware which already exists commercially more or less perfected”. Radio Shack®, here I come.


Author Peter Krassa is firmly in Father Ernetti’s camp, and uses the Racehorse Haynes defense: the device was too dangerous for Father Ernetti to tell the truth about it; the Vatican ordered him to lie; the “souvenir” picture of Christ had been drawn under the instructions of a psychic Spanish nun who had seen the Crucifixion in a vision, and therefore Father Ernetti’s “photograph” was authentic; Father Ernetti had been possessed by a demon during an exorcism who forced him to lie (to “fib”, according to Krassa); etc.


Interestingly, Father Ernetti never wrote anything about the “chronovisor”. He was primarily a musicologist, author of a multivolume history of Gregorian chant; his sole scientific output (despite being described as a “physicist”) seems to be a popular article about the use of the oscilloscope in music analysis. All of the various statements about the “chronovisor” attributed to him seem instead to be from one-on-one interviews with various other people – most notably Father François Brune, a French priest who had written a couple of books on communicating with the dead, and Professor Giuseppe Marasca, a Latin instructor at an Italian middle school who was also an “expert” on paranormal phenomena. Krassa never makes the suggestion, but I will – Father Ernetti may have been simply a tool used by others.


Only a small amount of the book – which isn’t that thick to begin with – is directly devoted to the chronovisor. Most is a Who’s Who of the woo-woo world – capsule biographies of Franz Mesmer, Oswald Wirth, Helena Blavatsky, John Keely, Rudolph Steiner, Karl von Prel, Thomas Edison*, Baird T. Spalding, and Edgar Cayce. I hadn’t heard of some of these people and knew only the names of others – the main value of the book for me (other than the humor factor) was being introduced to them). The common theme here is a belief in the “akashic records” (or attribution of a belief). “Akashic records” were invented/discovered by Madame Blavatsky (who had the information “channeled” to her by a pair of Hindu/Tibetan “masters” named Mahatma Morya and Koot Hoomi); the “records” are a astral library (or, more recently, a sort of computer database) of every act of human existence, past, present and future. This, according to Krassa, is how the chronovisor worked – it accessed the “akashic records” (apparently Edgar Cayce did the same thing just by falling asleep).


I am, I suppose, slightly grateful for the biographies of Blavatsky and Spalding – both of whom seem to be interesting pieces of work. Spalding, interestingly, also claimed to have a chronovisor-type device: “the Camera of Past Events”, which he developed with the assistance of Charles Steinmetz and used to film the Sermon on the Mount and Washington’s Second Inaugural Address. Needless to say, the recordings were lost, somehow, and the device suppressed. I’m also intrigued by the way all the woo-woo fits together in the minds of the believers; for example, I always thought of John Keely as a perpetual motion fraud but now discover he was subconsciously channeling the “ether” (which is where the akashic records are kept) and that’s why his machines would only run when he was around. I’m also pleased to find that Karl von Prel coined the word “od” for a sort of ether-ectoplasm-magnetic fluid that permeates people, since “od” is a great Scrabble® word.


*Eddison’s here because he reportedly once talked about a machine to contact the dead.
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You can't judge a book by it's cover. Or its title, or its premise.

The idea is that an Italian monk, working away in his cell, invented a machine that allows the operator to view, and hear, past events. The chronovisor, not a time machine proper, but a past time viewer. Intriguing, but the "author" and "translator" should beaten for crimes against Clio.

The book is mainly a haphazard paraphrase, or long block quotes, of various hearsay reports of Father Ernetti Pellegrino's hush-hush work on the chronovisor. These are frustratingly contradictory and maddeningly incomplete. Then the text descends into hermetic madness, trying to show how the chronovisor could work by claiming it accesses the "akashic records," a nebulous theory cobbled together from misguided souls like Rudolph Steiner and that charlatan Helena P. Blatavasky. The author is obviously a HPB and theosophy fan, as he spends a few chapters detailing her theories and biography. As such, it took me way too long to read this, as it was so disjointed and awkward. The book doesn't even end with Father Ernetti, but with Thomas Edison and then a crazy not-so-conclusion concluding chapter.

The "bibliography" and "endnotes" are hilarious. The "translator" seems to have taken the original German manuscript and typed it into Babelfish or Google Translate. There are so many errors and tough passages that seem to be literal translations of German phrases that it quickly turns from laughable to sad.

What could have been a neat book on a possible "chonovisor" and its plausibility turned out to be a mish-mash of hearsay and ill-studied research on the ether and akashic records. For instance, see Where God Lives: The Science of the Paranormal and How Our Brains Are Linked to the Universe for a better take on the theory that memory may be extra-cerebral, which means that maybe "history" can be seen one day.

At least it was only $4.98 at Half Price Books. ( )