There is a saint in the greek orthodox church, called "saint Phanourios". Now the root of the name is the same as in "epiphane", so folk wisdom has it that he is the saint to supplicate when you have lost or misplaced something. When you find it, you have to make a "phanouropitta", a pie for saint Phanourios, and distribute it in the church to the poor. I substitute for that giving something for good works.

The way I was taught this magic is the following: You visualize what you are looking for and "pin it", i.e. you take a pin, or a needle and stick it in wood and demand to find the missing item. I have been lately told that what you do with this gesture is "pinning the devil", reminiscent of the recent tragedies in stoning the devil's stones in the ME. I usually find what I am looking for, within five minutes.

I will give you an example. My son and daughter in law recently moved with their two children and 388 boxes of stuff. My daughter in law has an expensive watch, whose batteries ran out. My son said: let us put it somewhere safe until we can find a shop that sells batteries in the area, and both say he put it somewhere in the kitchen cupboards. When I went to visit they had already been there for a month, and were still looking for the watch. In addition it had become an easy complaint to land on, when something went wrong in the whole mess "and you lost my watch". I got fed up with that, and one day when I was alone in the house and the baby asleep, I also started looking in all the kitchen cupboards for the watch, with no success. Then I remembered saint Phanourious. I found a needle in my traveling kit, and stuck it between two kitchen cupboards with some difficulty, as they were plastic and not wood. In two minutes I had found the watch. As I stuck the needle, I had an impulse ( actually a tactile "visualization") that I should put my fingers down and sweep around bowls. It was in a small cup way back on the third level.

Now I will give you a scientific method of finding things, taken from the book an acquaintance of mine has written; he has forty years in tutoring mathematical problem solving . The book is very interesting and has been translated into english and will be published by a scientific publisher. It is mainly for maths, but there is a general method that does for any circular loop our thoughts get into, which is what happens when we are looking for something and cannot find it.

I will describe it by the example:
I visited my sister as she was looking all over a walk-in cupboard for a thingy that she could attach on her vacuum cleaner and do a special job. She had given up and so I offered to help her and we went to the closet together. The method requires to write down a list of what you are looking for. In this case she said she was looking for an orange tube that attached to the vacuum.

So I wrote down:

Tube
Orange
short

What one then does is "negate" this statement, and allow in the search the negated terms, putting the emphasis on them.9 The rational is that you are missing finding the item because one of the terms you are scanning for is not manifesting that way).

Tube ------- not tube
orange------not orange
short ------not short

I found it the minute I entered the cupboard. It was a medium black tube with an orange button.

It always works when I remember to use it. For another example, I was looking for my address book.

orthogonal--------not orthogonal
brown-------------not brown
felt---------------not felt.

It was lying down half open under books.

Sometimes the list is quite long.

So both methods, st Phanourios and the scientific one, unlock our unconcious and allow it to envisage other possibilities.

Good luck with those keys, Warden 0f the World .