SO FAR, WE HAVE CONCENTRATED LARGELY ON INDIVIDUALS WHOSE SPIRIT contacts influenced the course of human history indirectly. But there have been others who took a much more central role. One example was a man seriously believed (by many English) to be the Antichrist predicted in the book of Revelation.
On August 22, 1779, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been for a time a virtual prisoner in Egypt, slipped away by sea from that country. He was accompanied by a handful of his companions and, as one historian later put it, their two frigates “surprisingly” escaped interception by the British. The adjective is mild. Napoleon’s escape, coming as it did at a crucial point in his career, was little short of miraculous. And there are aspects in the background of the adventure that were distinctly odd.
The Continent had been at war for five years when Napoleon concluded the peace treaty of Campo Formio with Austria. Only the sea war with Britain remained to be won. An invasion of England was planned and Bonaparte was appointed to command it. His army was assembled along the English Channel coast, but after a brief inspection in February 1798, Napoleon announced that the invasion could not take place. He reasoned that only command of the sea, which France patently did not have, could ensure success.
There are those who believe he did not reach this conclusion unaided, that he was, in fact, influenced by powers beyond his comprehension. According to a legend popular in wiccan circles, with the French poised to strike, witch covens gathered along the southeast English coast and engaged in a rite designed to raise a “cone of power.” This carried into Napoleon’s mind the utter conviction that his troops would be unable to cross the narrow strip of water. The experiment was repeated almost 150 years later when Hitler appeared poised to invade the British Isles. The source for this story, which has wide credence among the esoteric community in Britain, is the author and traditional witch Patricia (Paddy) Slade,1 whose family had been involved in both the Hitler and Napoleon rituals. Mrs. Slade was twelve years old at the time of the threatened Nazi invasion and learned from her parents that a human sacrifice had been involved. The covens worked the rite “sky-clad” (i.e., naked) but greased themselves like Channel swimmers in order to keep warm. An elderly coven member volunteered to give his life force in order to lend power to the rite, refused to use grease, and died from exposure. Mrs. Slade heard about the ritual to stop Napoleon—unfortunately without details—from her grandmother, who claimed her great-grandmother in turn had actually taken part.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who may have had an experience of the spirit world while visiting the Great Pyramid in Egypt
The idea that a mind might be influenced in this way is not without some foundation. Psychical investigators in the days of Queen Victoria were already claiming that it was possible to induce the hypnotic state telepathically—a fact more recently confirmed by the Russian scientist Dr. Leonid Vasiliev.2 It is a very short step from this discovery to the possibility that an occult group might indeed be able to influence someone at a distance.
But whether influenced by magic, or merely considerations of strategy, Napoleon decided against invasion. He suggested instead that France should strike at the heart of the British Empire by invading Egypt and threatening the route to India. The French Directory agreed, probably not because they thought the idea brilliant but because they were becoming wary of their little general’s popularity and wanted him out of the way.
The Napoleonic genius and a measure of good luck made the expedition a striking success. Malta was taken on June 10, 1798, Alexandria stormed only weeks later, and the entire Nile delta rapidly overrun. Then, on August 1, disaster struck. Nelson’s fleet engaged the French at anchor in Abu Qir Bay and destroyed every French ship. The myth of Napoleon’s invincibility was shattered. Of more immediate importance, Napoleon found himself a prisoner in the land he had conquered. Turkey, which had a nominal suzerainty over Egypt, declared war on France in September. By February 1799, Bonaparte had marched into Syria in an attempt to prevent a Turkish invasion of Egypt. But his progress was halted by the British at Acre and by May he was forced to retreat.
On the broader front, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey entered into a new alliance against France. One result was the defeat of the French armies in Italy, followed by almost total withdrawal from that country. The developments were far from popular in France and a coup d’état on June 18 pushed the moderates out of the ruling Directory, replacing them with Jacobins. A confused situation developed and it seemed possible that the Directory itself might fall. Cut off in Egypt, Napoleon remained in ignorance of the situation until, during an exchange of prisoners, the British commander in Palestine sent Napoleon a file of English newspapers as a courtesy. In them he discovered that a member of the Directory, Emmanuel Sieyes, had voiced the opinion that only a military dictatorship could prevent the restoration of the monarchy and commented, “I am looking for a sabre.” Napoleon saw himself as that saber. With typical decisiveness, he made up his mind to return to France, even if it meant leaving his army behind.
The problem, however, was how to reach France. Nelson’s blockade was solid and had remained so for months. But Napoleon, for reasons that have never been explained, began to act as if it did not exist at all. He gave orders for his frigates to prepare to sail, made all the necessary personal arrangements, and instructed that any change in the positions of the British warships be reported to him instantly. It was as if he was waiting for something he knew was about to happen. And happen it did. An inexplicable change in the British pattern gave him the opportunity he needed. Two fast ships slipped through the blockade and Bonaparte arrived in Paris on October 14.
Although the crisis in France had, in fact, diminished, Napoleon allied himself with Sieyes and successfully carried out a coup d’état on November 9 and 10. The Directory was disbanded and a consulate set up composed of Napoleon himself, Sieyes, and a former director, Pierre-Roger Ducos. In theory, each member had an equal share of power. In fact, Napoleon was master of the consulate and master of France.
The American author A. H. Z. Carr, intrigued by Napoleon’s actions in face of the naval blockade, has put forward the theory that he was not acting blindly.3 Carr felt he was, somehow, aware of undercurrents in the historical process that he could turn to personal advantage. This is an interesting suggestion and one that deserves to be taken seriously. Far too many turning points in history (as this one certainly was) seem to have come about through extraordinary manifestations of luck or chance, so many, in fact, that one begins to wonder if chance really is the explanation.
In 1894, for example, Guglielmo Marconi first began serious experimentation with radio waves on his father’s estate near Bologna. Heinrich Hertz had already produced and transmitted such waves, but Marconi’s tinkering enabled him to increase the range to about a mile and a half—enough to convince him the system had real potential as a means of communication. But he received no encouragement to continue his experiments in Italy, with the result that, in 1896, he went off to London where his first patent was filed a few months later. By the summer of 1897, the young physicist had shown it was possible to communicate at distances of up to twelve miles. By 1899, he had succeeded in pushing communication distance up to seventy-five miles. Some experts felt he was approaching the theoretical limit of his system. Marconi disagreed. In December 1901, he succeeded in transmitting signals from Cornwall in Britain to Newfoundland across the Atlantic Ocean. It was a staggering demonstration, not only because of the distance involved but because it was theoretically impossible.
Experts of the day were aware of two facts. The first was that radio waves traveled in straight lines. The second was that the surface of Earth was curved. Given this information, it was obvious that, pushed far enough, a radio wave would simply form a tangent to the planetary sphere and beam out into space. A simple calculation showed that, given these facts, the maximum effective range of radio was somewhere between one hundred and two hundred miles. Various physicists made this calculation and it is inconceivable that Marconi himself was unaware of it. Yet he continued with his experiments and succeeded not because of his genius, but because of his persistence. Unknown to Marconi or his fellow experts of 1901, there was in the upper atmosphere an electrically charged layer (now called the ionosphere) that bounced radio waves back to Earth instead of allowing them to stream off into space.
It is widely believed that the great scientific and technological achievements of our age came about through patient inquiry and the careful application of scientific logic. In fact, many breakthroughs have been a matter of luck—or something suspiciously like the process our ancestors called divine revelation. Most students are aware that Darwin’s ideas on the origin of species were anticipated by the English naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace. It is far less well known that the idea of natural selection came to Wallace in feverish inspiration while he was raving through a malarial attack. August Kekule hit on his structure of the benzene molecule through a dream he had in 1865. He saw a snake biting its tail while in whirling motion. Adrenaline was discovered when Dr. K. Oliver was attempting to test a device he had invented for measuring the diameter of an artery. During the course of his tests, he injected his son with an extract from the adrenal glands of a calf and thought he detected a decrease in the size of the artery. Today we know this could not have been the case. Nevertheless, he convinced a fellow scientist to examine his findings. The glandular extract was injected into a dog and a measurable increase in blood pressure took place. Medical science took another immense step forward through luck.
Sometimes the element of luck intertwines with itself in a fascinating mosaic. Marconi could never have made his discovery of the long-distance potential of radio waves without the discovery of these waves in the first place. The man who made it was Heinrich Hertz, who was lucky enough to notice a tiny spark emitted by a piece of apparatus across the room from the equipment he was currently using. The development of photography, a vital element in our culture, came about through a lucky chance. A silver spoon left lying on an iodized metal surface produced an image that was noticed by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. The discovery of X-rays was equally accidental. Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen forgot to remove a fluorescent screen from a table on which he was using a cathode ray tube. Louis Pasteur freely acknowledged the part played by chance in a number of his most important discoveries. The whole apparatus of immunization sprang from carelessness on the part of one of his assistants. The man neglected a culture of chicken cholera and it lost its virulence. But Pasteur noticed that it prevented chickens from becoming infected by the more powerful strain. Alexander Fleming searched for an antibacterial agent since his discovery during World War I that existing disinfectants damaged tissue. An airborne mold contaminated one of his culture plates and he noticed that bacterial growth around it had been stopped. The mold was Penicillium notatum. The cyclotron, an essential piece of equipment in the history of atomic energy development, worked by accident. Theoretically, it should have been grossly inefficient, but an unexpected effect of a magnetic field enabled it to become a practical proposition.
Taken singly, any one of these developments has had a revolutionary effect on our culture. Taken together, they have produced a profound change in the course of history. One must wonder how far the arm of coincidence can reach in such important matters, especially as the list is far from exhaustive. One is almost struck by the feeling that those involved were somehow guided.
Napoleon certainly believed he was guided. Among the discoveries of his savants during his occupation of Egypt was an oracular text found in the Valley of the Kings that he had translated into French for his own use. Following Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813, the work was discovered by a Prussian officer in a cabinet of curiosities and subsequently rendered into German. In 1835 it was issued in book form and became a publishing phenomenon, remaining in print throughout the entire nineteenth century and republished by the astrologer Judy Hall in 2003.4 The oracle, which generates more than a thousand answers to a limited set of general questions, shows certain similarities to other ancient systems of divination, notably the I Ching, which, as we have seen, appears to have been spirit driven. The oracle may not have been Napoleon’s only brush with Egyptian spirits. There is a speculative possibility of direct contact during his visit to the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid has long been considered a repository of occult mysteries—or, alternatively, of scientific knowledge bequeathed by a high civilization now vanished from the face of the earth. Investigators have been particularly interested in the King’s Chamber, a bare, flat-ceilinged room of polished red granite, some thirty-four by seventeen by nineteen feet high. This chamber, set deep in the heart of the pyramid, is empty except for a large, open sarcophagus of polished, chocolate-colored granite. When Napoleon entered it with a small group of advisers in 1798, he insisted that he be left alone for a time. His colleagues reluctantly agreed and filed out, leaving their leader to meditate on the mysteries of the ancient edifice. Napoleon subsequently emerged, white and shaken, but flatly refused to discuss what had frightened him. Years later, nearing death in exile on the small Atlantic island of Saint Helena, he recalled the experience again and seemed, momentarily, to be about to describe it. But he changed his mind and died with the mystery unexplained.
In the absence of facts, we may only speculate. But our speculations might be guided by the experience of Dr. Paul Brunton, a British author who, in the early 1930s, was one of the last men to receive permission to spend a night in the King’s Chamber. In his record of the adventure,5 Brunton describes a visionary experience in which he appeared to leave his body and learn the message of the pyramid (that men must turn their attention inward for salvation) from the spirit of a high priest of ancient Egypt.
Brunton’s experience is in line with an esoteric doctrine that the Great Pyramid was originally built as a device for separating the soul from the body of a living initiate, thus allowing a foretaste of life after death—the essential shamanic experience. Whether Brunton’s vision was subjective or a hallucination is almost beside the point. It is an observable reality that certain environments react on specific people in very similar ways and the sensation of leaving one’s body is far more commonplace than most people imagine—surveys in Britain and the United States show that anywhere between 25 percent and 46 percent of people claim to have had an out-of-body experience at least once in their lives. We are entitled to wonder if Napoleon, an intensely religious man once quoted as saying that a state without religion was like a ship without a rudder, also believed that he left his body and conversed with a spirit.
Here again, the objective reality of his experience is beside the point, for a vivid, subjective vision would have been quite enough to produce a profound effect on his mind. It may have imbued him with a sense of destiny or a sense of history. Certainly he possessed both in his later days and could scarcely have done what he did without them. He was, like Hitler and Churchill in a later age, very aware of the contribution he was capable of making to the fate of nations. His answer to the British announcement of his exile in 1815 was typical: “I appeal to history!” In the light of all we have so far discovered, it would seem to be a history profoundly influenced by spirit intervention.