Sanpaku: the cursed legend that surrounds people with too much white in their eyes (from Kennedy to Billie Eilish)
A particularity in the eyes, shared by Marilyn Monroe, JFK or Amy Winehouse, has given rise to a form of precognition that augurs dramatic existences and tragic deaths. We are talking about the sanpaku.
For centuries, the observation of the lines of the hand has been considered a method of divination and clairvoyance. However, not because it is the best known is it the only one that exists. The variety of organs and recesses of the human body, added to the quackery of some people and the credulity of others, has meant that the future can also be read in other parts of the human anatomy. Omphalomancy, for example, seeks answers by scrutinizing navels, onychomancy on the nails, and rumpology, on the buttocks and anal folds.
At this point, some of these seers must have thought that, if they continued down that path, they would not be taken too seriously, so they decided to give their prediction methods a certain scientist halo. Thus arose phrenology, a pseudoscience with an important racist charge, which caused hundreds of people to be sent to prison in a preventive manner because their facial features suggested, according to the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall and his followers, criminal drives that, sooner or later, would come to light.
In any case, if the unusual and the pseudoscientific is not effective, the followers of these divination methods can also resort to archaic knowledge, which always packs a punch. Among the most popular millennial knowledge are the oriental ones, from which comes a method of precognition called sanpaku. This Japanese term means "three targets" or "three gaps", which refer to as many holes in the sclera, the white part of the eyeball. While the vast majority of people show only two whites, those to the left and right of the iris, a minority have a third in the upper or lower part of the eye.
This peculiarity is nothing more than an eyelid retraction that makes one of the two eyelids more open than normal. This can happen due to anatomical issues, such as having malar bones that are too small or orbits that are too large, or due to certain pathologies. For example, high myopia, produced by the posterior elongation of the eyeball or a thyroid orbitopathy, that is, a thyroid problem that causes an increase in volume of the extra-traocular muscles and orbital fat. When the lower eyelid is affected, the causes can be more varied, although one of the most frequent is natural aging of the skin, which causes sagging, or the effects of a blepharoplasty, which is surgery to correct eye bags. .
In most cases this peculiarity can be corrected. For example, if the upper eyelid is still retracted after orbitopathy treatment, it is possible to intervene surgically. The same happens with the consequences of blepharoplasty, which can be reversed by re-tightening the eyelid or by "lifting the cheek with a midface lift."
However, these scientific explanations and conventional medical solutions did not prevent the founder of macrobiotics, a Japanese named George Ohsawa from giving wings, starting from palpebral retraction or sanpaku, to a peculiar method of divination that he theorized in a book, You are all sanpaku, which in the late 1960s became a countercultural sales phenomenon.
Ohsawa and the imbalance
Follower of the theories of Ying and Yang as a metaphor for the balance of the universe, Ohsawa argued that human beings should also seek that harmony through their diet and their daily activities. In fact, it would be precisely the lack of balance with the Whole that would cause the sanpaku: "The sanpaku means that the entire system of a person, physical, physiological and spiritual is unbalanced," explained Ohsawa, who continued: "It is a sign of the nature that one's life is threatened by a premature and tragic end.
As in the case of palmistry, phrenology or rumpology, Ohsawa's theory lacked scientific basis and perhaps would have passed without pain or glory had it not been for the fact that, in 1963, two key events happened to its success. In August of that year, Ohsawa, guided by the sanpaku of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, predicted a dramatic end for the president of the United States. A few months later, Lee Harvey Oswald confirmed his prediction.
Kennedy's death brought other of Ohsawa's claims about the sanpaku back to the present day. For example, the one related to Marilyn Monroe, an actress who died under strange circumstances in 1962, according to him, due to her particularity. These events caused the public to start looking into the eyes of celebrities with more interest, and thus it was discovered that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, assassinated in 1968, also had sanpaku. The same as Natalie Wood, Charles Manson, Sal Mineo and, more recently, Lady Di, Michael Jackson or Amy Winehouse. As the Japanese had predicted, all of them had tormented lives, emotional imbalances, tendencies to addictions and, some, dramatic deaths.
Extrapolating this to the total population, and even to successful celebrities without any fateful shadow in their biography (like Billie Eilish or Robert Pattison, their looks are clearly 'sanpaku') it is easy to show that the joys or sorrows of a life do not depend on a little more or a little less sclera.
In any case, logic, statistics, medicine or common sense have not succeeded in stopping the supporters of the sanpaku from seeing in this trait a sign that will tragically mark the existence of the one who has it. In the same way that the birth of a son with a pig's tail brought about the tragic end of the Buendía family, the evocative power of legends is always more persistent than the asepsis of scientific data.
