In the new Introduction to this book’s predecessor, The Occult, I have described how I became interested in the subject almost by pure chance. It was towards the end of the ’60s, when a book called The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des Magiciens) had become a world bestseller, and other publishers hastened to cash in. When my American agent asked me if I would like to write a book called The Occult, I accepted, because I needed the money. It was not a subject in which I took a deep interest, for I had started out in life intending to become a scientist, and had only abandoned the idea because I decided when I was sixteen that I would prefer to become a writer instead.
I was lucky. After seven years of drifting from job to job, I started to write a non-fiction book called The Outsider, about people who felt themselves to be misfits in society, focusing on such figures as Van Gogh, Nietzsche and Lawrence of Arabia. Published in 1956, when I was still twenty-four, it amazed me by becoming a bestseller and making me famous. But being bracketed with writers like John Osborne and John Braine as an ‘Angry Young Man’ alienated the serious critics who had praised the book, and its sequel, Religion and the Rebel, was received with such hostility that my publisher advised me to give up writing and get myself an office job. I declined the suggestion, bought a house in a remote part of Cornwall, and went on writing and lecturing to support my family.
Which is why, in 1969, I was quite ready to write a book to order, even though I regarded the occult as mostly superstitious nonsense. But as soon as I became absorbed in research, I realised I was wrong.
The change of mind began when my wife, Joy, showed me a passage in a book she was reading. It was a volume of autobiography by Osbert Sitwell, telling how, in the summer of 1914, he and some brother officers visited a famous palmist. As she studied their hands, she became obviously upset and distracted. When Sitwell asked afterwards what had disturbed her, she said: “There was nothing in their hands—they were empty.” These officers were killed in the first months of the World War I in the same year.
I was impressed because I knew Sitwell was a sceptic, and as soon as I began serious research on the book, I realised that such things cannot be dismissed as superstition. The evidence for ‘hidden powers’ like telepathy, second sight, and precognition, was overwhelming, and only a dogmatic materialist could deny them. Precognition—the ability to catch glimpses of the future—struck me as particularly important because my common sense as well as my scientific training told me that it should be simply impossible. Yet there were dozens of well-authenticated examples of its genuineness.
I was so fascinated by all this that the book became huge—a quarter of a million words long—and its English publisher asked me to cut it by half. I refused, and my British agent found me another publisher who was less timid. When The Occult came out in England and America—then a dozen other countries—in 1971, it soon restored health to my finances.
Naturally, the publishers wanted a sequel. I was perfectly willing, but how could I write another book about the occult without repeating myself?
It was Joy who once again handed me the solution. Ten years earlier I had bought a second-hand copy of a book called Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion by T. C. Lethbridge, and so liked his casual, breezy way of writing that I had bought several more of his books since. Busy with other work, I left them unread on my shelf. But Joy began reading them, and one day started to tell me about Lethbridge—how, as an archaeologist, he had taught himself to dowse with a pendulum, and later found that it could not only detect buried artefacts, but many different substances like iron and copper, according to its length. It would even respond to abstract ideas such as evolution, anger and death.
Fascinated, I also began to read Lethbridge, and found him just as extraordinary as Joy had said. Lethbridge was an archaeologist and a Cambridge don, by inclination a sceptic, but his involvement in dowsing had drawn him deeper and deeper into the realm of the paranormal, until his interests extended to ghosts, telepathy, precognitive dreams and the nature of time. I suddenly saw that by tracing Lethbridge’s own story I could cover an enormous range of subjects relating to the paranormal.
Then chance came to my aid again, but this time in a more alarming manner. In July 1973, I was working for a crime magazine publisher helping to plan and launch a ‘part work’—that is, a work that can be bought in weekly instalments then bound up as an encyclopedia. The backers were in a hurry, and I found myself—as a contributing editor—working at a terrifying pace, and forced to churn out thousands of words a week. Finally, sheer overwork induced a series of panic attacks. It was a frightening experience that made me think I was on the brink of a mental breakdown. For months, I felt like someone who has fallen into a swollen river and is clinging to an overhead branch, trying not to be swept away. But learning to master the attacks taught me that our minds are not as unified as we think (all this is described at the beginning of this book). Since I had also become fascinated by the strange subject of multiple personality—people whose bodies can be ‘taken over’ by a series of different ‘selves’—it brought me a glimpse of a new possibility: that we all contain many selves, arranged in the form of a ladder.
This, I realised, implied a vision of the mind that differed fundamentally from that of most psychologists. Abraham Maslow, a psychologist I admired deeply, objected that Freud has ‘sold human nature short’, overlooking the possibility of ‘further reaches of human nature’. My own vision of a ‘ladder of selves’ seemed to me an important step in creating a psychology that could take the occult in its stride.
It was when I was writing the second part of the book that I had another of those strokes of serendipity that opens up a range of new ideas. A friend named Ira Einhorn came to visit me, and had with him a copy of a recently published book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It was from this I first learned of a subject that has been around since the 1950s, but had only become widely known in the past ten years: split-brain physiology. I had been aware of the fact that the left and right halves of the brain have completely different functions, the left being concerned with logic and reason, the right with feeling and intuition—in other words, that the left is a scientist while the right is an artist. But what I had not realised—and what I learned from Jaynes—is that we literally have two different people living in our heads, and that what you call ‘you’ lives in the left, while a few inches away there is a total stranger. As it struck me that this stranger is responsible for the reaction of the dowsing rod, and for most of what are described as ‘psychic powers’, I suddenly realised that I had discovered a new key to this whole realm of the occult.
Once I began to write the book, I had the same experience as with its predecessor. New material flooded in so fast that it seemed to write itself. It ended by being even longer than The Occult.
Once again I encountered the same problem—except that when a self-assertive female editor demanded that I cut it by half, I objected; she refused to give way, and so again I was forced to find another publisher.
The reception of Mysteries was not quite as enthusiastic as that of The Occult, but that would have been too much to ask. As it was, the book was widely reviewed, and I took great satisfaction in watching it going through many editions in subsequent years.
I should mention one central point upon which I have changed my mind. In this book I attempt to account for the whole field of the paranormal in terms of unknown powers of the human mind—what Maeterlinck called ‘the unknown guest’. This included the poltergeist or ‘noisy ghost’, which, like most students of the paranormal, I at the time regarded as ‘recurrent spontaneous psycho kinesis’, or mind over matter, caused by the unconscious energies of a disturbed teenager. But when, in 1980, I went to investigate a case of poltergeist haunting in Pontefract, I came to a quite different conclusion; that poltergeists are mischievous spirits who simply borrow their energy from human beings, mostly teenage.
But to speak about that, and what it implies, would require more space than I have room for in this Introduction.
Colin Wilson