In the autumn of 1957, a bulky, powerfully-built Cambridge don moved into a fourteenth-century house at Branscombe, on the south coast of Devon. For most of his life, Tom Lethbridge had been an archaeologist. He had lived in Cambridge—with a few interruptions—since the end of the First World War, and had been for many years Honorary Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities in the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Lethbridge was emphatically no ‘occultist’. His interest in the supernatural was minimal. Yet there was one branch of the paranormal that aroused his interest: dowsing. Any archaeologist will understand the reason. Archaeology consists mainly of digging for things that are buried under the ground. Some of the great archaeologists—Schliemann and Evans, for example—have apparently possessed a kind of sixth sense that led them to dig in precisely the right spot. Less gifted workers have to make do with trial and error, and everyone wishes there was some simple method of looking straight through the soil. Dowsing seems to be such a method. For some unknown reason, the dowser’s forked twig twists in his hands when he walks over underground water. What is stranger still is that most dowsers can ‘programme’ their minds to look for almost anything. Lethbridge had discovered this when he was on an archaeological expedition to the island of Lundy and decided to try dowsing for volcanic dykes, now hidden under centuries of earth. A friend had led him blindfolded along the cliff path, so there was no chance of visual clues. Periodically, the hazel rod would twist in his hands. As he removed the blindfold, his friend told him that he had accurately located every one of the dykes.
Lethbridge was fifty-six when he retired to Devon. The past few years had been hectic and soured by controversy; now he looked forward to a time of peace and relaxation—country walks, a little archaeology, perhaps some fishing and boating.
It was not to be as simple as that. To begin with, he and his wife quickly discovered that their neighbour, the old lady who lived down the hill, was a witch. This is not as alarming as it sounds. In most country areas in England, you can find old ladies—or men—with certain curious powers—to charm warts, heal sick cattle, foretell the future, and so on. It has always been so throughout history. In primitive tribes such people are revered as shamans or priestesses; nowadays, most country people take them for granted, and ask their help on occasions. The Lethbridge’s neighbour was not a particularly frightening specimen—a good humoured, eccentric, talkative lady who enjoyed relaxing in the local pub over a glass of gin and occasionally had difficulty in navigating her way home. She told them she was able to leave her body—the technical term is ‘project her astral body’—and travel around at night, making sure that her friends were safe. They were at first inclined to treat these claims as fantasy, but a curious event convinced them that there could be more to it than that. Their neighbour one day explained to Tom how to ‘throw pentagrams’—an ancient magical ritual for protecting oneself; she mentioned that it was useful for keeping away unwelcome visitors. All that was necessary was to draw a pentagram—a five-pointed star—in your head, and imagine it on your gate. That night, before he fell asleep, Lethbridge lay in bed, practising drawing a mental pentagram round their two beds. A few nights later, his wife woke up in the dark to see a faint glow of light moving around the foot of their beds; then it vanished. Shortly thereafter, they met their neighbour, who asked them if someone had been ‘putting protection’ on them. ‘Why?’ asked Tom. ‘I came to your bedroom the other night and I couldn’t get near the bed because there were triangles of fire around it.’ (I assume that Lethbridge drew the pentagram in the form of interlocked triangles:)
But what intrigued Lethbridge even more than her talk of ghosts and astral projection were her comments on the use of the pendulum. Lethbridge had known for years that a pendulum could be used for divining and had even performed a few simple experiments, locating coins that were hidden under a pile of books. But he had treated it as a simple alternative to the divining rod—and of rather less use outdoors because it blows in the wind. Their neighbour assured him that it was altogether more accurate, and could convey far more complex information than a forked twig.
At this point, I suggest that the reader should spend five minutes deciding for himself whether this assertion is an old wives’ tale or piece of wishful thinking, or not. Almost anything will do for a pendulum—a button or wooden bead on a thread, a locket on a chain. Shorten the thread to about three inches and hold it about an inch above your left hand. If nothing happens, give it a gentle forward swing to start it off. After a few seconds, the pendulum will cease to oscillate backwards and forwards and take up a circular motion. Try the same thing over the other hand. This time, the motion will probably be in the opposite direction. For most people, it swings in a clockwise direction over the right hand, and anticlockwise over the left. The sceptical reader will, of course, bear in mind that he may be unconsciously causing the movement himself—if so, the experiment simply demonstrates the power of suggestion. A few readers may get no reaction at all—I found this to be so the first time I tried it. In which case, it is worth keeping the pendulum in your pocket and repeating the experiment at intervals. When I was trying it rather absent-mindedly one day, I suddenly seemed to ‘tune in’, and the pendulum began to revolve unmistakably in circles. A majority of people seem to ‘tune in’ the first time they try it.
Most dowsers use a short pendulum; Lethbridge decided it might be more interesting to experiment with a longer piece of thread. He made a ball of hazelwood, with a hole through the middle, and attached it to the end of several feet of string. The other end of the string was wound round a pencil, so its length could be adjusted. Next, he placed a silver dish on the floor, held the pendulum over it, and carefully proceeded to lengthen the string. When it reached twenty-two inches, the pendulum stopped swinging back and forth and went into a circular motion. So it seemed that twenty-two inches was the ‘rate’ for silver. Then, following the neighbour’s instructions, he stood in the courtyard, where he suspected there might be some buried silver coins, with the pendulum in one hand, while holding the other arm straight, with the first finger outstretched. He slowly moved the pointing arm across the courtyard. At a certain point, the pendulum in the other hand began to circle. This suggested he was pointing in the direction of buried silver. Noting the direction of the line, he went to another point in the courtyard and did it again. The place where the two lines crossed should be where the silver was buried. He stood over it and tried it again; the pendulum immediately went into its circular swing.
He cut out a square of turf with the spade and proceeded to dig cautiously. He soon came upon two pieces of old pottery. Tested again, the empty hole gave no reaction. That meant, presumably, that he had already dug out the silver, and that it must be in the pile of earth. He tried the pendulum over this; it went into a circular swing. He sifted carefully through the heap, using a small trowel, but found nothing. At this point, he concluded the pendulum was a fraud, and prepared to refill the hole. But as he shovelled the earth back in, he paused periodically to test it with the pendulum. Finally, with only a tiny pile of earth left, the hole was still giving a negative reaction and the earth a positive one. He broke it up with his fingers—and found a fragment of pottery that his trained eye recognised as seventeenth-century Rhineland stoneware. He tried the pendulum over it, and it went into a circular swing. So this was the ‘silver coin’? What had gone wrong? Some early stoneware was glazed with lead salts, and old lead might well contain silver. Was that the solution? He tried the pendulum over a piece of lead, and it went into a circular swing. So that was the solution: lead was on the same ‘rate’ as silver, twenty-two inches. And German seventeenth-century stoneware, unlike English medieval pottery, was glazed with lead. The pendulum had revealed a useful piece of historical information.
Lethbridge tried again, and located another piece of lead in the courtyard—a bit of an Elizabethan window. He tried the pendulum over a copper pot and discovered that it responded to a rate of thirty and a half inches. Using the same technique of establishing cross-bearings by pointing, he quickly unearthed a small copper tube. It was very tiny, yet the pendulum had located it without any trouble.
Lethbridge was understandably excited. ‘The pendulum was absurdly accurate’, as accurate as the finest voltmeter. And if it could find copper, silver and lead, it could probably find anything. In a burst of scientific enthusiasm, he spent days testing different substances to discover their ‘rates’: sulphur, aluminium, gold, milk, apples, oranges, alcohol, sand, garlic, diamonds … There seemed to be no limit to its uses. He even tried locating truffles. An enthusiastic naturalist, he found a rare beetle that lived on truffles—an underground fungus of great scarcity. How could you find the rate for truffles? He remembered that this culinary delicacy is contained in pâté de foie gras. He opened a small and expensive tin of this, and picked out the tiny shreds of truffle. With considerable labour he extracted enough to make a small pile and tried the pendulum over it. The pendulum gave the rate for truffles as seventeen inches.
Truffles are usually found in woods. Lethbridge stood outside the front gate, the pendulum in one hand, the other arm pointing at the wood. Half an hour later, he and his wife had dug up a small dark object the size of a pea. They sent it to the South Kensington Science Museum for identification. Two weeks later the reply came back: they had found an exceedingly rare type of truffle.
Lethbridge had expected an uneventful retirement; instead it now looked as if he had launched himself on a new career. Of course, the science of radiesthesis—detecting things with pendulums—has been known since ancient times; but most people are inclined to regard it as a crank subject, like newspaper astrology or the reading of tealeaves. Besides which, research into every branch of parapsychology—telepathy, clairvoyance, ghosts and poltergeists—has been going on now for at least half a century and there is still a lack of the kind of solid evidence that would silence every doubter. There have been plenty of exciting results in carefully controlled experiments, but not the kind other scientists could duplicate in their laboratories. Now Lethbridge was convinced that his own experiments with pendulums were not only incredibly accurate; they were also infinitely repeatable. Although he is too modest to say so in his books, there must have been moments in the course of his explorations when he felt like a combination of Columbus and Isaac Newton.
The next step was to ask what was causing the reactions. The obvious explanation would seem to be that each substance—water, gold, garlic—gives off a vibration of definite wavelength, and that the pendulum somehow responds to this. But many eminent dowsers reject this view. Sir William Barrett conducted experiments that seemed to show that dowsers could read messages inside sealed envelopes.1 He concluded that dowsing is basically a form of cryptesthesia—a term invented by Professor Charles Richet, the pioneer psychical researcher, meaning hidden perception or second-sight. That is to say, the pendulum is not responding directly to water or gold, but to the mind of the dowser, which is, in turn, reacting to the substance.
In which case, thought Lethbridge, the pendulum ought to react to thoughts and emotions as well as to things. He set out to test this idea. He had brought a number of sling stones from his last major excavation in the Cambridge area; they came from an Iron Age fort called Wandlebury camp, where Lethbridge had been engaged in uncovering a giant figure cut into the turf. (We shall have more to say of this in the next chapter.) It seemed likely that the stones had been used in a battle. He tested them with the pendulum; they reacted strongly at twenty-four inches, and also at forty. He went to a nearby beach and collected a bucketful of stones—picking them up with a pair of coal tongs to avoid ‘influencing’ them. These stones showed no reaction, either at twenty-four inches or forty. Then he and Mina took them one by one and hurled them against a wall. Then they tested them again. The stones Tom had thrown now reacted to a twenty-four inch pendulum; those Mina had thrown reacted at twenty-nine inches. This seemed to suggest that the rate for maleness was twenty-four inches, and that for femaleness, twenty-nine inches.
But what of the forty-inch rate? This time the stones showed no reaction to forty inches. Could it be something to do with the possibility that the stones had been used in war? Could forty inches be the rate for war or anger? Lethbridge set the pendulum at forty inches, and thought about something that annoyed him. It instantly began to gyrate. So forty inches was the rate for anger. Which also meant that the pendulum could respond not only to substances, but to ideas. He now began a new series of experiments, altering the length of the pendulum inch by inch and thinking about abstract qualities. Provided the thought was clearly formulated, the pendulum would respond at the appropriate rate. When he thought of evolution—envisaging the evolution of fishes into amphibians—the pendulum responded at thirty-six inches. The rate for sex was sixteen inches; for life, twenty inches; for death, forty inches, the same as anger.
Two basic facts had now emerged. The first was that many things had the same rate, but they often seemed to be interconnected. For example, forty is the rate for black, cold, anger, deceit, sleep and death. Twenty-two is the rate for grey, lead, silver, sodium and calcium—all grey or grey-ish. Predictably, life, at twenty, is associated with the colour white, and also with the earth and electricity.
Surely this introduces an element of ambiguity? If thirty inches is the rate for west, water, hydrogen, green, sound, moon and age—and perhaps for a hundred more things—how can you tell which the pendulum is responding to? Lethbridge soon discovered that there is another coordinate—the number of times the bob swings in a circle. For greyness, it gyrates seven times; for lead, sixteen times; for silver, twenty-two. If he had known this when he was trying to find the silver coin, there would have been no confusion when he found lead-glazed pottery.
Although Lethbridge was a man of exceptional persistence, he was by no means of a one-track mind. All the time he was studying the pendulum, he was also thinking about various related problems. One of these was ghosts.
In his early twenties he had seen a ghost. He had been about to leave the rooms of a friend in Trinity when a man dressed as a college porter came in. Lethbridge said good evening to him as he left the room. The next morning, he asked his friend what the porter wanted; his friend flatly denied that anybody had walked into the room as Tom left. It was only then that it struck Lethbridge that the man had not been dressed as a porter, but in some kind of hunting kit—and had probably been a ghost.
Then there was a curious event that had occurred in 1924 at a Choristers’ School. Lethbridge describes it in his book Ghost and Ghoul. He and a friend entered the common room to find a master looking thoroughly depressed. ‘The ghoul is on the stairs again,’ he explained. So Lethbridge and his friend went to see for themselves. Sure enough, there was a strange, icy presence at the bottom of the stairs.
There was more to it than cold. It was actively unpleasant. I have only met such a sudden cold in Melville Bay on the west coast of Greenland, when the motor boat in which I was sitting passed from sunlight into the shadow of an iceberg. At one moment the sun was streaming on to you and you were enjoying the glittering beauty of the bergs; at the next, an icy hand seemed to grip the whole of your body. This feeling at the bottom of the stairs was much like that, but there was a feeling of misery with it too.
With the confidence of youth, Lethbridge and his friend grinned at one another and advanced up the first step. The ‘ghoul’ retreated before them. They went on up the stairs, and it continued to move ahead of them. By the time they had pushed it up two flights of stairs to the top of the house, they were both feeling frightened—what if some horror materialised in front of them? They linked arms and took the last step; the ‘ghoul’ reappeared behind them. They lost their nervousness and pushed it back downstairs, where it again assumed its vigil.
The school was later exorcised, with the exception of a single bathroom. A new master who slept in the bedroom next to this bathroom had an appalling dream of a hairy figure emerging from the bathroom. Worse still, it was friendly. The bathroom was exorcised which apparently had the effect of driving whatever it was into the passageway outside where the servant girls kept their bicycles.
These two experiences led Lethbridge to differentiate roughly between a ghost and a ghoul. A ghost was something you saw—or perhaps heard; a ghoul was a kind of ‘nasty feeling’ that sometimes hangs around old houses. (The traditional ghoul is a demon that feeds on corpses.)
Two years after Tom and Mina moved into Hole House at Branscombe, an odd experience revived his interest in ghosts. On February 22, 1959, a Sunday, he was sitting on the hillside above the home of their neighbour, the ‘witch’. Looking down on the mill, he saw her and waved to her. Then he noticed another woman behind her. She seemed to be in her sixties, dressed in a dark skirt, with a wide-brimmed hat on her head. The style of her clothes reminded Lethbridge of the clothes worn by his aunts before the First World War.
A few minutes later, Tom and Mina strolled down the lane and leaned over their neighbour’s gate. The ‘witch’ walked across the yard to join them, and Lethbridge enquired about her guest. ‘What guest?’ she asked. When he explained, she said, ‘You’re seeing my ghosts now.’ The Lethbridges recalled that she had mentioned seeing the figure of an unknown man at the spot where he had just seen the woman. On another occasion, some invisible person wished her good morning.
This event so intrigued Lethbridge that he decided to see if it would repeat itself on the same day the following year—ghosts are supposed to be fond of anniversaries. Accordingly, one year later, he and his wife waited at the same spot; both noticed an electric tingling in the air, but no ghost appeared.
Still, it led him to begin thinking seriously about the problem. He even decided to write a book about it. He had written nothing since Gogmagog, describing his excavations at Cambridge; this had been so poorly received by academic colleagues that he had abandoned writing for several years. Now, in Ghost and Ghoul, he wrote about his experience with the ‘huntsman’ at Trinity, the ‘ghoul’ at the Choristers’ School, and the lady in Hole Mill, and came up with the theory that they might all have been some kind of television projections. That is to say, someone might have been thinking about the man, and Lethbridge had picked up his thought telepathically. This ‘telepathic’ theory is by no means new. In 1886, Gurney, Myers and Podmore—three founders of the Society for Psychical Research—published a massive two-volume work entitled Phantasms of the Living, dealing with hundreds of cases in which ‘apparitions’ of living people have been seen, often when the person in question had been imagining being there. In a case recorded by Tyrrell, a lady deliberately ‘projected’ her apparition to a house in Kew by sitting and concentrating on it; a lady in the house saw the experimenter walking along the corridor in Kew at the moment she began making the attempt.
But in such cases, the ‘apparation’ seems to be a mental projection of the person who is seen—so presumably this explanation would not cover a ghost—i.e. someone who is dead. And what about the ‘ghoul’ on the stairs? Lethbridge was at first inclined to the theory that this also had been some kind of mental projection. The school had a room that was supposed to be haunted and someone had hung a crucifix in it. Perhaps somebody in the house had been afraid that the ghost would be driven out of the ‘haunted room’, and had somehow projected the fear on to the Queen Anne staircase?
Yet there was something about this ‘projection’ theory that left him rather unsatisfied. He recalled an event that had happened when he was eighteen. He and his mother had been on a walk through the Great Wood near Wokingham when they had both experienced a sudden acute depression. A few days later they heard that the body of a suicide had been found close to the spot where they had felt the atmosphere of gloom. If the man had been lying there dead when they passed the spot, it could hardly have been his ‘thought projection’.
Then, not long after publication of Ghost and Ghoul (in 1961), Lethbridge stumbled on the vital clue he had been looking for. One grey afternoon in January, he and Mina drove down to Ladram Bay to collect seaweed for Mina’s asparagus bed. ‘As I stepped on to the beach,’ writes Lethbridge, ‘I passed into a kind of blanket, or fog, of depression, and, I think, fear.’ Mina went off to look for seaweed at the other end of the beach. A few minutes later she hurried back. ‘I can’t stand this place any longer. There’s something frightful here …’
That evening, Mina spoke to her mother on the phone and mentioned what had happened; her mother commented that she had experienced the same depression on the beach on Christmas day, five years earlier. The following day, Mina’s brother came to the house and remarked that he and his wife had encountered a similar feeling of horror and depression in a field near Avebury. Lethbridge was suddenly struck by an idea. ‘What kind of weather was it?’ ‘Very warm and muggy.’ It had been warm and muggy on the day when he and his mother had encountered the ‘ghoul’ in the wood. And again when he and Mina went to Ladram Bay.
The following Saturday, another warm, drizzly day, Tom and Mina again set out for the Ladram beach, carrying sacks for seaweed. ‘The same bank of depression greeted me at the same place as before.’ And he noted that it was close to a place where a tiny stream ran on to the beach. The depression occurred in a definite place around this streamlet, like a bad smell. Mina pointed out the spot where she had experienced the ‘ghoul’ the previous week. ‘Here the feeling was at its worst. It was so strong as to make me feel almost giddy. The nearest I can get to a description is that it felt not unlike one feels with a high temperature and when full of drugs. There was definitely a sensation of tingling to accompany it.’ They went to the clifftop, and Lethbridge began to make a sketch. Mina wandered off and stood at the clifftop; there she experienced another unpleasant sensation, and a feeling as if someone was urging her to jump.
Thinking it over at home, Lethbridge saw another clue. Their local ‘witch’ had died in the meantime, and the circumstances were rather odd. She had quarrelled with a local farmer and told Tom she intended to put a spell on his cattle. Tom warned her that ‘black magic’ has its own special danger; if it fails to work, it is likely to bounce back on the magician. She ignored him—and died suddenly. No harm came to the cattle of the farmer with whom she had quarrelled, although the cattle on the farms on both sides began to suffer from foot and mouth disease. For some time after her death, there was a definite unpleasant feeling hanging around her house. Lethbridge noted another interesting fact: that it had a quite definite limit. It was possible to step beyond it, as if stepping over an invisible wall.
And now, suddenly, all these ideas coalesced. He and Mina had experienced a tingling sensation as they waited for the old woman’s ghost to appear at Hole Mill in 1960. Dowsers notice a tingling sensation in their hands as they approach water. They had experienced tingling again on Ladram beach. Now Tom took his divining rod to the spot above the mill where he and Mina had waited; a stream ran close by and vanished into the grass. He traced its course, and, just as he had suspected, it curved and passed directly below the spot where he had seen the ‘ghost’.
Water! That, it seemed, was probably the answer. A tingling sensation suggests a force-field—like that around an electric wire. If a stone can somehow ‘record’ the emotions of a man who threw it more than two thousand years ago, is it not equally possible that the ‘field’ of water can somehow record emotions, like a magnetic tape? Or perhaps the field acts like the low current in the head of a tape recorder and somehow causes events or emotions to be imprinted on their surroundings? Or like the flash of a camera that imprints a picture on the photographic plate? As a dowser, Tom was sensitive to the forcefield of water, so he might well ‘pick up’ a recording that was invisible to non-dowsers. In the case of the old woman at Hole Mill, the spot where she had appeared and the spot where Tom was standing had been connected by the force field of the water, like a telephone wire.
The ancients believed that there were supra-normal powers associated with streams; they were called naiads or water nymphs. Then there were wood nymphs or dryads, mountain nymphs or oreads and sea nymphs, the nereids. A classical dictionary defines a nymph as ‘an inferior divinity of nature’. Is it possible that man was personifying real forces of nature—forces that he recognised ‘in his bones’, and assumed to be supernatural in the same way as he assumed the thunder and lightning to be deities? Perhaps, suggests Lethbridge (in Ghost and Divining Rod) there are various kinds of fields connected with water, woods, mountains, open spaces, and he suggests calling these ‘naiad fields’, ‘dryad fields’, ‘oread fields’, and so on. The emotions of the man who committed suicide in the Great Wood were imprinted on a ‘dryad field’, and played back two days later when Tom and his mother passed near the spot. When Mina felt someone urging her to jump over the cliff, she may simply have been picking up the emotions of someone who stood there and contemplated suicide; but, as Lethbridge remarks, this does not mean the suicide actually happened. The man may have gone home, had a large whisky and felt much better.2
The ‘field theory’, of course, contradicts—or at least modifies—Sir William Barrett’s cryptesthesia theory. Barrett was inclined to the ‘second sight’ theory because there are many cases in the history of dowsing when the diviner has been able actually to see the underground water. Barrett cites a Miss Miles, who located a lost underground cistern and was able to describe its exact appearance. Presumably second-sight, like ordinary sight, does not require ‘fields’ for its operation. This room I am sitting in does not need a ‘field’ in order for me to see it; just light bouncing off the walls. But Lethbridge’s experience of being able to walk in and out of ‘ghouls’ led him to test various objects with a pendulum. He concluded that every object has a field that extends around it. Its radius is the ‘rate’ for that object. So, for example, a copper penny would have a field exactly thirty and a half inches wide, extending around it, as well as upward and downward in the form of a cone.
Presumably, then, emotions can impress themselves on any kind of field (or be recorded by it.) Water, however, seems to have a peculiarly active field. Dowsers insist that much illness is caused by sleeping above an underground stream and will often advise people to change the position of their beds. I have known at least one person who benefited considerably from changing the position of her bed, after two dowsers had independently advised her that she was directly above a stream. (Significantly, the first dowser, Bill Lewis of Abergavenny, diagnosed the underground stream from five hundred miles away by dangling his pendulum over a sketch of her bedroom; the second dowser, Leonard Locker, located the same stream on the spot—although he had not seen or been told of the earlier result.) It seems that long-term exposure to the radiation of water can be as harmful as long-term exposure to radioactivity.
My own original reaction to Lethbridge’s theory of ghosts was that it fails to cover the many cases in which ghosts have behaved as if they were intelligent beings. A case I remembered that seemed to support this objection was the one described by Beverley Nichols in his autobiography Twenty-Five.3 This took place at a house called Castel Mare in Middle Warberry Road, Torquay. Beverley Nichols, his brother and an Oxford friend, Lord Peter St Audries, decided to investigate the ‘haunted house’ one Sunday evening in the late 1920s. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of an insane doctor who had murdered his wife and the maidservant there.
The three young men found the place oppressive, but in no way frightening. Nichols was standing alone in the upper hall, waiting for his companions, when he had a sensation as if his thoughts were going in slow motion; a black film seemed to cover the left side of his brain, as if he were being anaesthetised. He managed to stagger outside before fainting. He came round feeling oddly tired and low. The other two went on exploring, then Nichols was joined by his brother, while Lord St Audries continued to investigate alone. Every few seconds he would whistle, to show that all was well. Then the whistles stopped. The brothers had a sensation as if something had rushed past them out of the house. At the same time, Lord St Audries screamed. They rushed to the window and heard thuds, and sounds of a struggle, with more cries. Then Lord St Audries came out, dishevelled and coated with plaster dust. He explained he had gone to the room where Nichols had felt faint and noticed a patch of greyish light. As he was about to return, something had rushed past him, and he was knocked to the ground; he experienced a sense of overwhelming evil and had to struggle with all his strength to crawl down the stairs and into the garden. The oppression seemed to vanish when he reached the foot of the stairs.
When I re-read this story, I realised that, far from contradicting Lethbridge’s theory, it supports it in many ways. Lethbridge said that the ‘ghoul’ on Ladram beach made him feel disconnected and giddy, as one feels ‘with a high temperature and when full of drugs’: precisely what Nichols describes. My original impression of the struggle with the ghost was that Lord St Audries had actually wrestled with it. On re-reading it, I see that what happened is that the ghost drained Lord St Audries of energy as it had drained Beverley Nichols, and that the struggle was against the feeling of fear and oppression.
The fact that St Audries was knocked down seems to contradict the ‘ghoul’ theory—until one asks what happened to the energy that was drained from Beverley Nichols? One explanation could be that the Castel Mare ghost was not a ghoul but something more like a poltergeist. Yet why do so many accounts of apparitions mention a sudden drop in temperature? Could it be that ‘negative emotions’—like fear and misery—record themselves by draining energy from a magnetic field; and when someone ‘tunes in’ to the recording, it has the effect of stealing his energies and blurring his faculties? Dr Arthur Guirdham, chief Psychiatric Consultant to the Bath Medical Area, has stated that he knows several houses in Bath that have a history of mental illness and suicide; that is, where one tenant after another has become ill with depression. Guirdham (of whom I shall speak later) accepts the reality of some ‘evil influence’. When patients were removed from these houses, the depression promptly vanished.
Lethbridge himself was far from convinced that all ‘supernatural’ manifestations are mere recordings. He had encountered something altogether more active on the island of Skellig Michael, off the coast of Kerry in 1924. He had climbed a hill to look at the ruins of an eighth-century monastery when he noticed the remains of a rubbish dump a hundred feet below, on the cliff face. He decided to go down and investigate. Halfway down, he was overtaken by an odd conviction that somebody wanted to push him off the cliff. The unpleasant sensation finally became so strong that he changed his mind and climbed back up. Shortly afterwards, as he walked down the low hill below the monastery, something made him want to turn round. Before he could do so, he was knocked flat on his face. When he sat up, the hillside was deserted.
Back on the mainland, a telegraph operator asked him if he had seen any ghost on the island. The lighthouse there was apparently haunted; since a shipwreck the previous winter, doors had slammed, sea-boots had trampled through the sleeping quarters, and there had been loud screams; two lighthouse keepers had gone insane as a consequence. Lethbridge did not believe that his experience was connected with the shipwreck; he thought that it was, quite simply, some kind of poltergeist activity associated with the ancient religious site. The interesting point to observe about the Skellig Michael experience is that, like Beverley Nichols’ ghost, it seemed to combine the characteristics of the ‘ghoul’ and the poltergeist: the ‘nasty feeling’ followed by some form of attack.
In this connection, it is worth mentioning another of Lethbridge’s speculations concerning these forces. In 1922, he was one of a group from Cambridge who visited the Shiant Islands, in the Hebrides. One man placed his coat and lunch on a deserted hilltop and on returning found that they had vanished. The others laughed and said it must be seagulls—the island was otherwise uninhabited. But Lethbridge points out that a gull would not be interested in a macintosh and that few gulls are courageous enough to investigate a white paper parcel. The victim of the inconvenience believed that some supernatural force was responsible—a view that Lethbridge’s later experience on Skellig Michael inclined him to accept. (The Shiants are probably named after the ‘shee’—a spirit related to the banshee of Irish legend.) ‘Sometimes, we are told, things vanish’, says Lethbridge. ‘At other times, things appear from nowhere. They are technically known as “apports” …’ And, in fact, ‘apports’—objects that fall from the air—are frequently associated with poltergeist activity. (Vanishings are reported less often than ‘apports’ because we are usually convinced that there could be a natural explanation; Lethbridge himself was convinced that supernatural ‘vanishings’ occur more frequently than we think.) His point may be worth bearing in mind later when we discuss poltergeist activity.
Ghost and Divining Rod (1963) represents a crucial point in Lethbridge’s development, with its recognition that ghosts and dowsing may amount to fundamentally the same thing. (It might be more accurate to say ‘ghouls’ and dowsing, since genuine hauntings may involve more complex phenomena: footsteps, bangings, cries, ‘apports’, smells, movements of furniture, and apparently ‘solid’ ghosts.) Lethbridge was not the first to conclude that ghosts may be ‘recordings’. That distinction may belong to Sir Oliver Lodge, who wrote as long ago as 1908: ‘Take, for example, a haunted house … wherein some one room is the scene of a ghostly representation of some long past tragedy. On a psychometric hypothesis, the original tragedy has been literally photographed on its material surroundings, nay, even on the ether itself, by reason of the intensity of emotion felt by those who enacted it.’4
Andrew Green, one of the most active of modern investigators of hauntings, holds the same view. He has described a haunted house in Montpelier Road, Ealing, where at least three people have died by falling or jumping from the tower; Green himself experienced a strange urge to jump when he stood on the tower.5 Again, the American writer on psychical research, Susy Smith, has described the haunting of the house at Oklawaha, Florida, where the notorious gangster Ma Barker and her son Freddie were shot to death in 1935; the haunting consisted mainly of footfalls and sounds of voices in conversation, often quarrelling. Many voices were involved. Yet oddly enough, Ma Barker and her son had been alone when they were surrounded by police; the rest of the gang had fled. Susy Smith concludes: ‘It seems … logical that some kind of memory image has been left there because of the violence they generated.’6
But Lethbridge has the distinction of being the first to speculate on whether hauntings may not be connected with the ‘field’ of water. (He would have been interested to note that the Ma Barker house stands on the edge of Lake Weir.) He was also the first to recognise that, if dowsing is some form of cryptesthesia or second-sight, then the faculty for seeing ghosts and the faculty for divining water—or any other substance—may be identical.
His next step was a logical one. Lethbridge had always been an enthusiastic naturalist—as a young man, he had intended to take it up as a profession, until he discovered that it involved dissecting dead animals. Like most animal lovers, he had often observed that his pets appeared to possess a ‘sixth sense’. Sitting on the terrace at Branscombe, he was intrigued when Mina’s cat woke from sleep and sat bolt upright, staring at the wall. The terrace looked out across the valley. Tom fetched the field-glasses and looked in the same direction as the cat; he saw a black and white cat hunting among the bushes about 450 yards away. Mina’s cat was staring at it through the brick wall that bounded the terrace.
On other occasions, the cat would leap to its feet and stare at the corner of the bedroom, its fur bristling, then rush outdoors and return shortly afterwards with a mouse or vole. Lethbridge worked out that the grassy bank where the cat caught the rodents was on the other side of several walls, as well as the courtyard; yet its sleeping mind had picked up the signal of the animal.
Staring at the cat’s whiskers, Lethbridge was struck by an idea. Could they be divining rods? He tried testing them with the pendulum. The longest and farthest back had a rate of sixteen inches—the rate for sex. The next hairs had a rate of twenty inches, the rate for time, human beings, love and life; the smallest group are farthest forward and react to twenty-four inches—the rate for mice. The eyebrows react to the ten-inch rate—the rate for heat; Tom speculated that this may explain why the cat invariably finds its way to the warmest place in the house. He concluded that the longest whiskers are for sexual detection and the shortest for detecting food; the medium ones are probably connected with the cat’s emotional life. (Cat owners will have noticed that cats always jump in the laps of people who can’t stand them—as if they were a more interesting challenge than cat-lovers; presumably the middle whiskers explain how this unerring selection is made.)
Lethbridge was inclined increasingly to the belief that the forces involved in dowsing, ESP and ghosts are electrical. He was intrigued by the behaviour of a privet hawk-moth, which on two successive evenings flew in through the window and settled on the seventeenth-century plate hanging on the wall. Lethbridge observed that it always stayed in the same spot on the plate. Turning it over the next day, he discovered that it had been riveted at some point, to strengthen it, and one of the rivets had gone right through the plate. It was on this that the moth had settled. The plate was held in a coil of iron wire, and it now struck Lethbridge that he was looking at a primitive electric coil, with the rivet as its core. The answer, then, could be that the rivet produced a tiny electrical signal, equivalent to the signal used by female moths to attract the male, which suggested to him that the nature of sexual attraction may be basically electrical.
This, I should admit, has always been my own theory. I arrived at this conclusion through an incident that happened in my early twenties. My wife and I had been separated for some time, and I had been largely celibate. The first night we came together again, I was particularly tired and fell into a deep sleep as soon as I climbed into bed. In the middle of the night I woke up in a state of intense sexual excitement. It seemed to be emanating from my thigh. After a moment, I realised that my wife’s fingertip was resting against the thigh and that a tingling, electrical sensation was running from her finger and into my skin. I observed with interest that this seemed to be a physical phenomenon—like the faint tingling you experience if you apply the tip of your tongue to a torch battery. Her breathing convinced me that she was fast asleep, that this flow of ‘sexual electricity’ was quite unconscious.
It may also be significant that poltergeist activity is usually associated with teenagers who are passing through a period of sexual disturbance. In The Occult I cited the case of the Austrian medium Frieda Weisl, whose sexual excitement when engaged in lovemaking would cause objects to jump off the mantelpiece. Many mediums have been most brilliant in puberty and lost their powers later. All of which suggests that there could be a close link between sex and paranormal powers and that the energies involved in cases of ghosts, ‘ghouls’ and poltergeists may be some form of electrical energy. Damp conditions would obviously be more propitious than dry ones. (This could explain why England, with its notorious climate, also has more ghosts per square mile than any other country in the world.) That ghosts involve some form of energy seems to be clear from the ‘refrigeration effect’ that so often accompanies manifestations—suggesting that the ghost manifests by ‘borrowing’ energy from the surrounding air. If the nature of these energy fields was understood, there seems to be no reason why ghosts should not finally become as observable and measurable as any other physical phenomenon.
Towards the end of ESP: Beyond Time and Distance, it becomes clear that Lethbridge is increasingly inclined to accept a quasi-electrical theory of the paranormal; he even suggests that the relation between mind and body may be electrical: ‘This mind is apparently linked to our body by an electromagnetic field and its signals can be recognised as minute electric shocks.’ In which case, dowsing would be simply a matter of the interaction of two electric fields. But if that is so, what becomes of the second-sight theory? How can an electric field explain how a map dowser can accurately trace the course of an underground stream in a place that he has never visited? Or, for that matter, how Lethbridge’s pendulum could answer questions like ‘How old is this standing stone?’ The Abbé Mermet, author of a famous book on dowsing, accepts the view that thought waves can travel round the earth at the speed of light—in about one seventh of a second—and that therefore it is as easy to dowse for something on the other side of the world as in your own back garden; but even this would not explain how the pendulum can answer questions about the past or future.
In the Preface to ESP, Lethbridge recalls a time in Greenland when the ice suddenly collapsed under his feet and he found himself floundering in the sea; he remarks that he now has much the same sensation: ‘From living a normal life in a three dimensional world, I seem to have suddenly fallen through into one where there are more dimensions. The three dimensional world goes on as usual, but one has to adjust one’s thinking to the other.’ This can be sensed in the books he wrote in the last ten years of his life. He is intensely aware that there is something false about the ‘real world’ around us, he can see through it, as if it was glass, and catch glimpses of something beyond. Yet there is no sign of the personality change that often accompanies such conversions, no tendency to abandon ‘tough mindedness’ and adopt a softer attitude. He remains cheerful, practical, rather agnostic, a natural doubter. The universe simply appears to be a bigger and stranger place than he had thought.
Clearly, it is the words ‘other dimensions’ that strike him as the key. And this notion became increasingly important in the succeeding books. In ESP he remarked that while the rate for death seems to be forty inches, the pendulum also responded to dead creatures at the rate of twenty inches, which led him to speculate that forty inches ‘may represent life force on a higher plane’. In all probability, he was making a simple error; dead creatures probably respond to the ‘life’ rate because they are still swarming with living organisms. Still, the observation led him to think more closely about the various rates, and it struck him that the rates for ten, twenty, thirty and forty inches all seem to carry special significance. At ten inches, the pendulum responds to light, sun, fire, red, east, graphite and truth. At twenty inches we find life, heat, earth, white, south and electricity. At thirty, sound, moon, water, green, west and hydrogen. At forty, death, cold, air, black, north, sleep and falsehood.
Lethbridge drew a circle, and marked on it all the qualities and substances he had measured by the use of the pendulum. The result was interesting: opposite qualities seemed to occur where you would expect to find them, on opposite points of the compass: danger at twenty-nine, safety at nine, pleasant smells at seven, unpleasant smells at twenty-seven. Curiously enough, male and female are not opposites, lying respectively at twenty-four and twenty-nine, and suggesting—what medical knowledge confirms—that there is only a thin dividing line between the two. (Significantly, the rate for thought—twenty-seven—is exactly between the two; so is art: suggesting that successful intellectual and artistic activities require a balance of male and female qualities.)
He also tried another arrangement of the ‘qualities’; on the twenty diameters he had drawn across the circle, he arranged the various rates at their appropriate distance from the centre: i.e. sulphur at seven inches along line seven, chlorine nine inches along line nine, and so on. He then joined up the dots. Staring at the resultant spiral, it struck him as odd that it should stop abruptly at forty; in theory, a spiral goes on. This led him to see if the pendulum could register rates above forty. What he discovered made him thoughtful. A heap of sulphur not only caused a seven-inch pendulum to rotate; it had the same effect on a forty-seven-inch pendulum. There was one slight difference. The strongest reaction with a forty-seven-inch pendulum was not directly over the heap—as you might expect—but a little to one side. And everything he tested confirmed the result. Silver reacted at twenty-two inches, and at sixty-two inches—forty, plus twenty-two. But when tested with a sixty-two inch pendulum, the reaction was again slightly to one side. In short, everything seemed to react to its ‘normal’ rate, and to its normal rate plus forty.
What Lethbridge deduced from this may be regarded as quite arbitrary; it is certainly highly controversial. Since forty inches is the rate for death, he assumed that the rates beyond forty are the rates beyond death. We have moved into another dimension; the object continues to exist, but apparently in another position. Or the difference may be due to some natural effect—like a pencil appearing to be bent when you put it into water.
Stranger still, if the pendulum is extended yet another forty inches—to eighty plus the normal rate—it once again registers the same rates for objects; sulphur is now eighty-seven, silver, a hundred and two. And once again, there is a false position for the object—the ‘parallax effect’.
In short, Lethbridge came to the astonishing conclusion that when you lengthen it beyond forty, the pendulum registers another ‘dimension’ beyond death—presumably the ‘spirit world’. Lengthened beyond eighty, it seems to indicate yet another world beyond that one, suggesting—Lethbridge thinks—that the ‘next world’ is merely another level. There is no reason why there should not be any number of levels beyond these two: the difficulty of confirming them with a pendulum is that a pendulum with a ten-foot string is difficult to handle, and shows poor response. (The shorter the pendulum, the more easily it responds—hence the popularity of the ‘short pendulum’.)
His pendulum experiments with rates beyond forty also led him to a curious discovery about time. A normal pendulum—shorter than forty inches—will not register the idea of time. Lethbridge assumed that this is because our world is in time, and time is on the move, so to speak. (If you were drifting down a river in a boat, unable to see the banks, you would not be able to test the speed of the river.) Using a pendulum that was more than forty inches, Lethbridge discovered that time appears to exist in this ‘next world’—at sixty inches—but that it seems to be static. He admits that he does not understand this. Time in the ‘next world’ is a perpetual ‘now’, according to the pendulum. In his final book, Lethbridge speculates that this next world is a kind of museum, in which all events in history are somehow preserved, as in the BBC’s Sound Archives. But the world beyond that—beyond the eighty-inch rate—seems to have a ‘flowing time’, like ours. And when Lethbridge succeeded in testing a pendulum with a 120-inch string—by mounting a flight of stairs and leaning over the banister—he discovered that there is another ‘dimension’; but, as in our world, there is no reaction for time.
He concludes in A Step in the Dark:
Our earth life compares with the larval stage [of an insect] and contains time and movement. The next phase is like that of a chrysalis, which remains for a while apparently dead and completely inert. Then comes the stage of the perfect insect, when time and movement not only return again, but are much accelerated. Here we must stop until more work has been done; but at least we can leave this study with a greater conviction of the survival of the individual human mind.
And so Lethbridge’s experiments led him to the conclusion that various worlds—including the state of life-after-death—exist parallel with this one, and will even respond to a pendulum. An object that exists here also, apparently, exists there—an interesting sidelight on the mystical formula: ‘As above, so below.’
To some, this may sound absurd. Yet anyone who reads Lethbridge’s books consecutively can see that he reasons slowly and carefully, step by step. Anyone who performed the same experiments and obtained the same results would probably reach very similar conclusions. Once he had established that the pendulum told him the truth about buried fragments of pottery or copper pipe, everything else followed logically. It became simply a matter of believing the pendulum.
Which brings us back to the basic question: how can a piece of wood and string ‘tell the truth’ about anything? And by what mechanism does a divining rod react to the presence of underground water?
There are three schools of thought. The most pragmatic maintains that water emits some kind of radiation, and that we possess some organ that can detect it. It is no more mysterious than detecting a piece of gorgonzola cheese with your nose. The adherents to this view argue that our prehistoric ancestors needed such a sense in order to survive in the great droughts, and that it has probably lain dormant in us for millions of years.
The second school inclines to the view that the dowser emits a radiation, as bats emit a high-pitched squeak. This radiation—perhaps some form of radio wave—bounces back off objects in the manner of radar. Lethbridge believed that this is how the ‘sixth sense’ of animals operates—for example, how Mina’s cat picked up the presence of a mouse or vole through several thicknesses of wall.
The third view is that dowsing depends on an unknown faculty, a kind of ‘superconscious mind’ that can answer questions whose answers are unknown to the conscious self. This view is widely held among dowsers nowadays. I have elsewhere7 described my own experiments with the dowser Robert Leftwich, in one of which Leftwich used me as a kind of living dowsing rod. He stood with his back to me, holding his divining rod. I walked away from him, towards an underground water pipe, the position of which I knew but he didn’t. After I had gone twenty or thirty yards he called: ‘Stop—you’re on it.’ And, in fact I was.
He also demonstrated fairly convincingly that his ability did not depend on my conscious knowledge. I was told to shuffle a pack of cards—my own, not his—and to place them, one by one, face downward on the table; he said he would stop me when I got to the ace of clubs. He stood on the other side of the room, so that it would have been impossible for him to see the cards. After a while he called: ‘Stop.’ I had just thrown down the ace of clubs. We repeated the experiment several times; he was successful about four out of seven. Leftwich was dissatisfied, feeling that he had failed to ‘tune in’; but I found the result impressive.
Understandably, Leftwich subscribes to the ‘superconscious mind’ explanation of dowsing: that there is some part of the mind that can be ‘elsewhere’—like Prospero’s Ariel. The Abbé Mermet, as we have seen, believed that this was thought itself.
Lethbridge tends to accept all three views. Since individual substances have their own ‘rates’, they must give off some form of radiation. The ‘sixth sense’ that warns us of danger seems more akin to radar. But the ‘message’ of the signal is not picked up by the conscious mind. In The Occult I cited the story of the tiger hunter Jim Corbett, who developed a high degree of ‘jungle sensitiveness’. One morning, absent-mindedly retracing his own footprints (made the night before), he was intrigued to find that they crossed the road at a certain point, then returned to the original side. He had no memory of why he had crossed the road there. Searching nearby, he found the pug marks of a tiger, which had been lying in wait. His subconscious mind had made him cross the road at that point, while his conscious remained unaware.
And so the radar theory itself already implies that some other level of the mind is involved, and that this level can command the body without the knowledge of the conscious mind.
Freud would have had no doubt that it was simply a question of the subconscious mind, meaning a level of the mind related to instinctive or sleeping consciousness. It was Aldous Huxley, in his introduction to Myer’s book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death who pointed out that the subconscious mind hardly seems a satisfactory explanation for the powers of men of unusual genius—a Leonardo, a Mozart, an Einstein. The flash of insight that has enabled men of genius to solve difficult mathematical and scientific problems seems to contradict the notion of the Freudian subconscious, with its sub-human characteristics. Huxley suggested that the notion of a superconscious mind would be a less contradictory hypothesis.
The idea of a superconscious mind has the disadvantage of being unprovable; it may or may not exist. On the other hand, the ladder-of-selves hypothesis, which I outlined in the Introduction, has a foundation in our everyday experience. We all know what it is to feel bored and listless, incapable of facing the world. Consciousness seems to diffuse and spread, like oil poured on the floor. We make an effort to focus an idea, but the mind refuses to grasp it. In this state, any humiliation or disaster makes us worse still. It plunges us into a state in which no effort seems worth making.
By contrast, when something seizes our interest or we suddenly see the chance of getting something we want badly, the ‘oil’ ceases to spread and unexpectedly begins to contract of its own accord. We refer to this ‘contraction effect’ when we speak of a man being ‘galvanised’ by a sense of purpose; the application of an electric current to a frog’s leg causes it to contract. ‘Meaning’ suddenly becomes self-evident; it is all around us for the asking. And if we look back on our moods of defeat, there is a distinct impression of contemplating a lower self. We experience a mixture of condescension and pity, as if thinking about a weaker and less mature personality, a kind of dissipated younger brother.
The psychologist Jung attached considerable importance to this notion of ‘selves’, and the notion seems to have been based on his own youthful experience of being two distinct personalities: an immature, awkward schoolboy, and an old man of great authority and power. At one point, Jung actually believed the latter to have been an eighteenth-century manufacturer. In later life, Jung taught himself a kind of self-hypnosis in which he was able to hold conversations with a ‘higher self’ whom he called Philemon, and who seemed to him to be independent human being rather than a figment of his imagination.
I have elsewhere coined the term ‘promotion’ to refer to this sense of leaving behind a ‘lower’ self, and becoming a more controlled and authoritative personality. It is instructive to observe the actual mechanisms of ‘promotion’. If, for example, I am reading a book that I have been trying to get hold of for a long time, it is easy to observe the ‘contraction effect’. My mind tries to absorb its meanings in the same way that a python kills its prey: by crushing them into a smaller and smaller compass. If there is something I do not quite grasp, I concentrate harder; my brows contract. And if I succeed in understanding, it is because I have succeeded in ‘compressing’ the meaning until I can get it ‘into’ my consciousness. When this happens, I experience the flash of ‘insight’.
The interesting thing is that meaning summons energy and a sense of purpose. A simple example would be a man glancing casually through a doorway and seeing a girl removing her clothes. Or an old warhorse responding to the sound of the trumpet. Conversely, when I am feeling depressed (as opposed to compressed), my lack of a sense of meaning is reflected in my lack of energy and purpose.
And here we come to the heart of the matter. In states of low energy, I fail to activate the ‘compression mechanism’ because I do not believe it will lead to any result—that is, will awaken my ‘appetite for life’ and my sense of meaning. In states of intensity I can see, quite simply, that this is a short-sighted error. The only certain way to a sense of meaning is through the effort of compression. And the meaning seems to be infinite. There is no point at which my effort becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns. On the contrary, the wider the area of meaning I am able to grasp, the less effort it costs me to enlarge it. I glimpse dazzling, immense vistas of meaning.
The basic trouble seems to lie in our inborn passivity, in our tendency to allow ‘the robot’ to do our living for us. And this is partly because meaning is often obliging enough to present itself to us without any effort on our part. ‘A certain odour on the wind’, a smell of burning autumn leaves or of mince pies in the oven, and we are suddenly flooded with a sense of the sheer sweetness of life, and its incredible multiplicity. A few men of genius—like Beethoven, Goethe, Balzac—discover that there is another way to meaning, the way of activity and purpose. But most of us sit around passively, waiting for fate to offer us meaning on a plate. At best, we get used to relying on the predigested meanings of works of art. At worst, we become passive spectators—of television, of football matches, of the quarrels of the next-door neighbours.
Low energy delivers us to the robot, who hastens to take over when he sees we are tired. Then we lose all sense of freedom, and life takes on a curiously dull, muted quality. Keats described it as ‘living a posthumous’ existence’. Because of its sense that ‘nothing is worth doing’, the state can easily become self-perpetuating. Moreover, the over-all state of unreality may deliver you into the hands of your fears, so that consciousness takes on a nightmare quality. The answer, as I discovered during my own panic attacks, is to shake yourself into a state of wakefulness, so the process is taken out of the hands of the robot. Beyond that, any act that causes the mind to focus upon meaning will serve. Any discipline will activate the ‘compression mechanism’. (I stumbled on this discovery as a schoolboy when I found that half and hour in the gymnasium—which I always anticipated with loathing—made me feel more alive.)
The effort of compression leads to ‘promotion’, to a deeper level of perception of meaning. Or, in terms of our previous image, to the next (and slightly shorter) rung of the ladder. But if the whole process can be described in terms of freedom from ‘the robot’, why do we need the ladder image? Because the process seems to take place in definite stages. I may spend weeks in a state of fatigue and depression before I suddenly ‘fall’ to a lower level. Conversely, I may struggle for a long time to achieve a higher state—as Ramakrishna struggled to achieve the vision of the Divine Mother—and then achieve it in a single leap. The inside of the mind seems to be shaped like a ladder or a flight of steps, not like a continuous slope. And each new level seems to be a revelation of an unknown part of ourselves.
Everyone has noticed that in these states of intensity or ‘aliveness’, we seem to achieve a new degree of efficiency. We become less accident-prone. Difficult feats are achieved with less effort. (While playing darts, I have occasionally experienced a state when I found it difficult not to score whatever I aimed for.) Problems are solved with ease. Memory unhesitatingly furnishes us with names or facts that we haven’t thought about for years. Moreover, we experience an intuitive certainty that we are still calling on only a fraction of our latent capacities. This vast computer we call the brain was meant to operate at a far higher level of efficiency.
In states like this, we feel altogether less troubled about the ‘insoluble mysteries’ of the universe and the ‘accursed questions’ of human existence. It is all very well to talk about the limitations of the human mind; but if you can see perfectly well that the mind normally operates at only about one thousandth of its proper capacity, you are more likely to lay the blame on human timidity, laziness and mediocrity.
In short, whether or not there is such a thing as the superconscious mind, there can be no doubt that what we accept as everyday consciousness is thoroughly sub-normal. In which case, it seems a fair guess that such faculties as dowsing, second-sight, precognition and divination may simply be latent in some higher level of the computer.
Lethbridge wrote in The Power of the Pendulum: ‘It [the superconscious] knows far more than we do because … it does not have to use the brain to filter out everything … It lives in a timeless zone …’ All of which may possibly be true—and probably is—but is also incomprehensible to us. But everyone has experienced ‘melting moods’, moods of excitement and heightened vitality, flashes of sudden ecstasy. And, armed with our memories of such moments—as well as our power to re-create them—the power of everyday reason can carry us a considerable distance into these realms of mystery.
As a result of sending a copy of The Occult to Hole House, I learned of Tom’s death and became acquainted with his wife Mina Lethbridge. She believed that too much experimentation with the pendulum had depleted him, and may have been responsible for his final heart attack. His health had never been good, possibly because he was considerably overweight. I was surprised to hear that the use of the pendulum could be exhausting, but Mina assured me that this was so, and that she had given it up herself for the same reason.
She told me another curious story of Tom’s last days. He had been in correspondence with—but never met—a woman of strong psychic powers, another ‘witch’. One night she rang up to speak to Tom; Mina explained that he was ill in bed. ‘Tell him not throw pentagrams at the time of the waning moon’, said the witch. ‘It’s bad for the health.’ Mina said she thought Tom was sufficiently versed in occult tradition not to do such a thing. Nevertheless, she repeated the message to Tom, who looked sheepish. ‘You haven’t been throwing pentagrams, have you?’ Tom admitted that he had.
When I settled down to the systematic study of Lethbridge’s books, it became clear that they fall into four groups. There are the books on archaeology and primitive religion, and the books on pendulums and related matters. Legend of the Sons of God, that remarkable anticipation of the findings of Erich von Däniken and John Michell about ‘visitors from other worlds’ and the magnetic forces of the earth, belongs in a group on its own. The same is true of the final (posthumous) book The Power of the Pendulum, in which he seemed about to embark on a new line of enquiry about dreams and the nature of time.
I must admit that, as I picked my way among his strange theories, I was reminded of some of the weird cults described in Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Yet the shrewdness and humour—and a breezy willingness to admit that he may be quite wrong—remained basically reassuring.
So let us now plunge into the curious mystery of the giant pagan goddess and her consort …