Like The Graduate, the film Rosemary's Baby calls for explanation as a phenomenon of the times. Both movies are polished, professional products of the film-maker's art; both are stories of highly educated, urbanized persons who face the problem of making it in modern America. And, strangely, the message of both is the same: The only way to make it is to give up your soul.

In The Graduate, Benjamin and his girl make a last desperate effort to remain free, but fail. In Rosemary's Baby, on the other hand, persons succeed through giving up their souls, and to the devil at that. This film asks us to believe that, in a fantastic review of the Nativity story, Rosemary's baby is sired by the devil,¹ and that Rosemary's husband cooperates in arranging his wife's maculate conception simply in order to further his own career as an actor. In the end, Rosemary herself, after withdrawing in horror from the baby (“What have you done to his eyes!” she screams), slowly overcomes her revulsion and, since she is the mother after all, approaches the baby with a soft, half-smile of loving acceptance. Then, while everyone in the movie audience is waiting to see what happens next, the scene closes and it is the end.

Despite its musty locale in the Dakota apartments, the movie is no period piece. In fact, the arresting point about Rosemary's Baby is that in spite of its invocation of the occult, it finally comes through as being quite modern—every bit as modern as The Graduate—and completely appropriate to the New York City streets and aseptic doctors' offices in which it takes place. The setting is plainly believable. The events, however—a coven of witches possesses the diabolical power to blind, to kill, and finally to find a woman to serve as a vessel of the evil spirit, a mother of a sort of Black Christ—are scarcely believable.

It is perhaps for this reason that film reviewers have either ignored Rosemary's Baby or refused to take it seriously. The New Yorker dismissed it as a “horror film about pregnancy,” the Saturday Review was content to label it “sly [and] . . . stylish,” and Time called it a “wicked argument against planned parenthood.” Several reviewers made it clear that the only reason they were reviewing it at all was because of the previous reputation of its director, Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water, Cul-de-Sac, Repulsion). These reviewers have quickly gone on to express disappointment that Polanski has let us down this time with what the New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann calls an “intelligent” thriller, “clever and insubstantial.” Expecting significance, explains the Nation's Robert Hatch, “you hang about for almost two hours to discover what is behind all the seeming devil worship, only to discover that it is devil worship.” Still, audiences kept on paying high prices at first-run theaters, week after week, to see Rosemary's Baby—something they will rarely do for intelligent thrillers, or for mere devil worship. The interesting question, then, turns out to be not what the movie says, but why people want to hear about what it says.

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Sociologists argue that in a stable society religion provides the necessary answers to the great questions of life, death, and man's fate. But when the stability is upset, persons experience a sense of being lost, and, in a peculiar state of receptivity they turn desperately about, looking for new answers. But they will not listen to just any answers. How is it that they come to listen to the message of witchcraft?

Let me review for a moment some rather striking cases of magical beliefs, which persist for a very simple reason: They work. Not long ago, my young daughter accompanied my wife and me to the racetrack and proceeded to pick a winner by observing the colors of the jockey's silks. Similar stories, I know, are told by many (usually by racing pros in reference to their—by implication, stupid—wives) and the method does indeed work, once in a while, else the story would not persist.

A possible explanation is spelled out in a striking analysis by Omar Khayyam Moore of scapulimancy among the Naskapi Indians of Labrador. This tribe is confronted with the problem of forecasting the location of the periodically migrating reindeer which they hunt for food. Their technique consists of killing a reindeer, extracting a scapula, and letting it dry in the sun. As it dries, cracks appear which, when read by a skilled scapulimancer, tell where to look for reindeer. Moore, speculating on the apparent success of this practice, suggests that it is not merely that it gives hunters self-confidence so that they look harder for the reindeer. More important, he thinks, is that the cracks in the scapula provide a randomizing device which makes sure that hunters will never return to the same place two years in a row. The cracks will always present a different picture. If hunters were to return to the same (that is, the most probable) places, such as water holes, salt-licks, or known paths, then they would decimate the reindeer population and eventually destroy it, or else the reindeer themselves would, by gradually learning, turn to different paths. Hence, like a boxer who takes care continually to shift his strategy in the ring so that his opponent never knows what's coming next, the Naskapi are enabled by scapulimancy to keep changing their strategy so that the reindeer are always caught by surprise.

Choosing horses by the color of jockey's silks is surely also a randomizing device. And, since the variables associated with picking the winner seem to be beyond man's intelligence, perhaps a random choice is as good as any other.

As soon as we bring in the concept of the “randomizing device,” it should be recognized that we are in the high-level area of probability theory, one of the more esoteric fields of modern science. It appears that the scientific design of experiments is impossible without tables of random numbers, and computer software routinely includes “random-number generator” programs to overcome bias in scientific investigations. If one wishes to draw a random sample of the population to study, for example, the distribution of lung cancer cases, or the number of unemployed, it is unsafe to let interviewers select, say, 10 per cent of the houses on a street. For they will tend to choose houses near bus stops, near places where they can park their cars, or on corners. And such households, it seems, are likely to be higher in average income. So one forces them to go rigidly down a sequence of houses, with the stops determined by some formula, e.g., every tenth house in order, with the first house chosen from a table of random numbers.

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Which brings us back to the opening scene of Rosemary's Baby in which we meet Rosemary and her husband, Guy. Our innocent couple is apartment hunting and, by chance it would seem, they stumble on an apartment which happens to be next door to that of the witches. But the presence of witchcraft is not random, and the witchcraft itself is taken seriously. In fact, when it dawns on Rosemary that she is in the clutches of witches, she does a remarkable thing. She goes to a bookstore (no pornography house off Times Square, but a bona-fide, high-class bookstore) and buys two fat books on the subject. Further, the clerk has no trouble finding authoritative source books on witchcraft for her.

Rosemary's ability to find such books can be easily tested in any bookstore, and paperbacks on the occult are appearing in all the places books are sold. There is evidence that hippies and their kind are shifting from sex to mystical and mysterious practices, with drugs being used not for the sheer pleasure of the drug experience, but to secure readier access to hidden worlds. An alphabetical listing of the “psychic sciences” in one study provides us with the following: aeromancy (divination by study of cloud shapes, comets, etc.), alchemy, alectryomancy (letting a bird pick grains of corn from a circle of letters, thus indicating words or names), aleuromancy (fortune cookies), alomancy (divination by salt), apantomancy (chance meetings or passages of animals or birds, as in the story of the choice of location for Mexico City in which Aztec soothsayers are supposed to have seen an eagle carrying a snake), arithmancy (early form of numerology), astrology, augury, astromancy (study of winds), axiomancy (observing quivers of an ax when driven into a post), belomancy (tossing of arrows), capnomancy (smoke from fires), cartomancy (fortune telling with cards), ceroscopy (study of bubbles formed by melted wax poured into cold water), clairaudience and clairvoyance, cleromancy (casting lots with pebbles), clidomancy (working with a dangling key), critomancy (study of barley cakes), crystal gazing, daphnomancy (listening to laurel branches crackling in an open fire), divining rods, geomancy (interpreting doodles), graphology, gyromancy (persons walk in a circle marked with letters until they become dizzy and fall on some letters), haruspicy (entrails examinations), horoscopy, hydromancy (color of water, its ebb, ripples; reading coffee grounds), lithomancy (use of precious stones), numerology, oneiromancy (dream interpretation), palmistry, phrenology, premonition, prophecy, pyromancy, spirits, stichomancy (opening books at random), tephramancy (seeking of messages in ashes), xylomancy (use of pieces of wood). Long as this list is, it could be made ten times longer. Some of the sciences it lists are enormously complex in themselves, especially astrology, graphology, numerology, palmistry, and phrenology. To these can be added all the legends and myths told of ESP, the cosmic force of OM, mystical experiences, and other mysteries whose very inexplicability is felt to carry the implication of profound meaning.

Many, perhaps most, would prefer to dismiss magic, divination, and witchcraft as aberrations, as the superstitions of the ignorant or demoralized. Some, recognizing that believers have included persons of unquestioned integrity and probity (like Crookes, Hyslop, William James, Sidgwick, Gilbert Murray, Lombroso, William McDougall), are more charitable and concede these sciences to have some legitimate place as precursors of modern science, as in the well-known cases of alchemy and astrology, or in the way that skill in manipulating kabbalistic numbers eventually resulted in skill in manipulating natural numbers. But whether one wishes to dismiss the whole business or grant it a limited historical place, it ought to be declining, and the impression one gets is that it is not. Of course, good data on the matter are impossible to come by, but it is apparent that it has never been easier to secure books on the subject (the novel by Ira Levin which the film of Rosemary's Baby follows very closely is reported to have come close to two and one-half million paperback copies in print) and there were those lines of persons waiting to get into the movie house. Furthermore, they were there not to see voodoo practices in some hidden backwoods mountains that civilization has passed by, but to witness the persistence of the supernatural right in New York City. And what they saw was witchcraft being firmly accepted by such an urbane character as Rosemary's husband, and eventually by Rosemary herself, as educated and slick a chick as ever dangled a tannis-root charm from her neck.

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Yet is this credulity so surprising after all? The unexplained and terrifying were never so great as they are right now. We know more and more, but the sense of control hardly seems to grow at all, and nowhere is this more the case than in our cities. Long ago, nature was the problem. We used to worry about being struck by lightning; now we are more likely to be electrocuted or burned up from faulty electrical wiring. Rocks falling from a hillside crushed an occasional ancestor; we are more likely to be crushed by a car-driver on alcohol or LSD. Wild animals have been replaced by berserk gunmen. And worse still are the evils we only dimly suspect—the howling Arab, the dark Chinee, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the bureaucratic university, the National Council of Churches.

Are we left, then, with only the notion of chance and accident to explain our present, precarious condition? Writing of “luck” as a social function, Robert Merton finds it to have a special appeal to the powerless: “For the unsuccessful and particularly for those among the unsuccessful who find little reward for their merit and their effort, the doctrine of luck serves the psychological function of enabling them to preserve their self-esteem in the face of failure.” And following that argument, we duly note the frequency of gambling and faith in lotteries among the wretched of the earth. But the trouble with luck or chance as an explanation is that it leads to resentment and an even greater sense of hopelessness. Particularly in as rationalistic a society as the United States, we will accept chance as an explanation only in the last resort. Our apparent success in taming nature, raising productivity, reducing disease, and fighting our enemies inclines us to believe that little need be left to chance. The modern corporation leaves nothing to chance—that's why it works so well and crushes all opponents.

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So “just luck” simply will not do—not for the educated American who has achieved a little success (and knows that chance has had very little to do with it), and certainly not for the American who cannot face meaninglessness or absurdity as explanatory theories. For what is chance but another name for the absurd? Which brings us back once more to Rosemary's Baby. For witches don't leave anything to chance: The world for them is determined and controllable. When Rosemary first confronts her baby, she covers her face, raises her fists to the ceiling, and screams: “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” But Roman Castevet, her neighbor and the head witch, thunders back:

God is Dead! God is dead and Satan lives! The year is One, the first year of our Lord! The Year is One, God is done!

And that, I am constrained to argue, if not a contribution to the Christian atheism controversy, is at least a nice try.

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There are of course situations where chance leads to the best predictions, as in the case of the Naskapi Indians, and where it is also the best guide to behavior. The use of lots to choose leaders, as with the Athenian jurymen and councilors, has been often noted. In jurisprudence, perhaps the most striking example is the medieval method of uncovering the guilty through trial by ordeal. Some have sought a supposedly psychological explanation for that technique: The guilty would reveal themselves by their nervousness. But since such a test would make anyone nervous, this explanation appears inadequate. Rather, suggests the Norwegian sociologist Vilhelm Aubert, chance seems to have been deliberately used in such tests not in order to find the guilty, but in order to decide who would be punished. In situations where definite proof of guilt is hard to come by because of poor police methods, or where there are simply too many crimes to solve (even modern police forces seem to solve very few crimes), social control by random choice may represent the most workable method.

The only difficulty with initiating such systems is that people must believe they are deterministic if they are to work. Thus, a system of punishing every tenth person in a town might work, since secrecy won't help hide a crime, and there is at least a chance that a really guilty person will be caught every once in a while. As for the rest, well, crime is very widespread and there are few who would be unable to think of a crime they had once committed for which punishment was now being meted out. However, if people know or believe that the system is really random, they will rebel or commit suicide, for life is then indeed bitter and absurd.

The Naskapi Indians, of course, believe that gods are speaking to them through the scapula cracks; they believe, that is to say, that their randomizing device is deterministic. So, too, does the medium who shuffles the Tarot cards and the witch who mutters over “tannis root.” They believe that they are personally not causing anything; they are merely invoking forces which are there. From this point of view, then, witchcraft and all the psychic sciences turn out to be socially legitimized randomizing devices. They make sure that a random choice is made, and, in the absence of better knowledge, this choice may be the best one. But they also make sure that the random choice is acceptable by founding it on the powerful, shared belief that the choice is an expression of orderly principles.

That is why we shall not have a lottery system to substitute for our present muddled, prejudiced army draft system. In spite of the argument, advanced by many, that a lottery is more “fair,” since otherwise the black and disadvantaged are more likely to be sent to war, the doctrine of fairness is not so powerfully entrenched among us as is the doctrine of reason or “justice.” Some people “deserve” exemption; others have less right to demand it. We have trouble with defining this doctrine but we will not abandon it.

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But then, what does determine the course of our lives? Maybe the gods don't go for all our worshiping and praising and sacrificing, or our striving, honesty, and self-denial. Maybe they prefer instead to observe good and evil and make known their decisions by controlling the course of the winds, the shape of the clouds, the bubbles from melted wax dropped in water, or the number that comes up on the wheel. We'll never know—unless, of course, someone runs for President on a kabbalistic ticket. At the very least, if he won, we'd end up with a draft lottery.

¹ In the novel by Ira Levin on which the movie is based, Rosemary's name is made doubly significant when she is worshiped with the phrase: “Hail Rosemary.”