A colleague suggested that the lost weight might have been air expelled from the dying rodent’s lungs. No slouch, H. decided to test for this, too, a process he describes, with his characteristic flair for insensitivity, like this: “A mouse was thrown into a tank of water.” A test tube was slipped over the head of the drowning mouse to catch the air it expelled as it died, and this was weighed and found to be negligible.
H. quickly moved on to more pressing matters, such as the author of a book on Rosicrucian theory who had misstated some of H.’ s conclusions and misspelled his name. “This is inexcusable,” he crabbed. If humans, like mice, could be killed at will, I know just who would have been found in a tank with a test tube over his head. And along with him, the animal rights advocates who chastised Twining for his cruelty. (An account of his work had run in a local newspaper.) Here is Twining in defensive overdrive:
Nearly every person who reads these lines has suffered more from the tooth ache, a thousand times more, than any of these mice did in dying….
Even though suffering does not take place, there is no reason why dumb animals should not have their share of suffering. Human beings during a lifetime are subjected to hours, days, and years of mental and physical anguish inflicted upon them through no fault of their own….
The human family lives on the products of death…. We eat either animal or vegetable food and in either case life is destroyed…. To kill low forms of life is just as bad, if killing be bad at all, as the killing of the higher forms of life, and there is no need of becoming hysterical over it.
The point to take away from H.’ s work is that if you put a dying mouse in a sealed container—such that moisture, expelled breath, drool, et cetera, are trapped—its weight won’t change. So H. LaV.’ s work with mice is in line with Duncan Macdougall’s dog findings, neither showing evidence of a departing soul.
IN 1998, DONALD Gilbert Carpenter published a whole book about soul-weighing (Physically Weighing the Soul). It’s a long book but lightweight, as light as a soul, for it exists only in cyberspace, available by download at 1stBooks.com. According to Carpenter, the reason the dogs and the mice might have shown no weight loss at death is that their souls are so light they were below the scales’ detection thresholds. Macdougall said his dog-weighing scale was accurate to one-sixteenth of an ounce (1.8 grams), but a dog’s soul weighs less than 1.8 grams. How do we know this is the weight of a dog’s soul? Because Donald Gilbert Carpenter has calculated it. (I love this guy!) Using Macdougall’s findings for human beings—that the soul weighs about 20 grams—Carpenter calculated the ratio of soul-weight to body-weight-at-birth: 1 to 140. Applying this to a typical puppy birth weight, he deduced that the average dog soul weighs one gram—about half the 1.8-gram sensitivity of the scale. Same problem with Twining’s mouse souls—too light to register. (But not Jesus’ soul. The discarnate Jesus is calculated in Chapter 17 to weigh 364 grams—close to a pound!)
Elsewhere, Carpenter calculates the volume of the human soul—or Mac, as he prefers to call it, in honor of Duncan Macdougall. Here is how he came up with his volume amount. The smallest infant to survive at birth, he says, weighed ten ounces and had a volume of three-tenths of a quart. (I do not know the formula for calculating the volume of a premature baby; perhaps he hired H. LaV. Twining to throw one into a graduated cylinder and note how much water it displaced.) The volume of the baby’s Mac would be identical to its birth volume because, quoting Carpenter, “if the volume of its… Mac had been bigger than that, it would have stuck out of the child’s body.” Once again, Jesus is the exception. His Mac had a volume of 5.25 quarts, meaning that half a quart’s worth of excess soul stuck out of his body when he was born. Carpenter surmises the protruding material took the form of a glow, rather than the more pedestrian hump or goiter that leapt into my mind.
Carpenter points out that leprechauns have a volume similar to that of the human Mac. “This makes me suspect,” he writes, “that Leprechauns… are most likely discarnate humans.” This makes me, in turn, suspect that Donald Gilbert Carpenter is most likely not the staid scientist that his many equations and tables suggest. (Carpenter’s bio says he knows more about materialistic research on the soul than anyone else alive, but it doesn’t say what kind of degree he has or what he does for a living.)
Carpenter had not, at the time his book was published, undertaken any soul-weighing experiments himself, but he had some intriguing ideas. Rather than put dying people on scales, he thought it would be instructive to do the experiment with pregnant women, and look for a sudden weight gain around the moment the Mac enters the fetus—which he figures happens at forty-three days, when brain waves can first be detected. Carpenter outlines a variety of unique uses for pregnant women. On page seventy-seven he tells us, “An excellent way to de-haunt a house would be to make it the residence of newly fertilized women just prior to normal entry of the Mac into the fetus.”
LEWIS E. HOLLANDER, JR., is a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon. Sometime in 2000, Hollander, intrigued by Duncan Macdougall’s work, became the second man in history to set up a soul-weighing operation in his barn. He rigged a seven-by-three-foot platform to a Toledo model 8132 electronic digital indicator, a quartet of load cells, and a computer. His subjects were eight sheep, three lambs, and a goat, all of which were sedated and then euthanized, and all of which, he assures us, were headed that direction anyway. The animals were wrapped in plastic to, as he put it, contain any voiding. This was important because (a) voided material might drip off the weighing surface, creating a spurious weight loss, and (b) you try getting sheep urine out of your load cells.
Though his goals march lockstep with Twining’s, the similarities stop there. Hollander is a kindly, soft-spoken guy, and he genuinely likes sheep. “They’re easy to deal with,” he told me, “and there’s a whole lot of warm things about them.” Hollander did not relish extinguishing that warmth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever killed anything, but it’s a very traumatic thing to do. To sit and watch this animal…” That was why his subject pool was limited to twelve. (He had actually contacted local doctors about the possibility of weighing end-game hospital patients, but ethical issues proved insurmountable.)
Here is the odd thing. All the sheep Hollander tested showed a temporary weight gain at death—most between 30 and 200 grams. One notable ewe put on 780 grams: nearly two pounds (or 37 Macs, or two discarnate Jesuses). The gain lasted from one to six seconds and then it disappeared. The three lambs did not, however, gain any weight, and neither did the goat. I called Hollander and asked him what he thought this meant.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said sensibly. He acknowledged the possibility that the weight gain was an artifact of his equipment malfunctioning, but his instinct was that the blip was real. “If you were there at the time, you could see the whole scenario coming together and you could see this moment… It’s weird. There was something happening there.”
What could possibly have been happening? Hollander’s feeling is that the changes had to do with what he called a portal to the beyond. “I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we’re all connected to something bigger than we are.”
I’d buy that notion. But why would opening it make an organism gain weight? Is the window a Dairy Queen drive-through? Carpenter, who has a section on Hollander’s experiment in his book, theorized that the added weight was that of visiting Macs. (By his calculations, a seventy-kilogram human being holds a standing-room capacity of 280 Macs—one to direct the body and other optional ones to “perform less clear roles.”) He noted that the sheep’s mysterious weight gains got progressively larger. “It was as if each sequential death attracted more Macs to the scene,” he wrote, though he couldn’t say why, or why they departed again after six seconds, or what they have against goats.