TWO

THE REALM OF SPIRITS

I have mentioned already that the strange and ambiguous history of spiritualism began on March 31, 1848, when Mrs. Fox asked neighbours to come and witness the rapping noises that resounded through her house when her daughters, aged twelve and fifteen, were present. From then on, spiritualism spread like a flood over the world. It seems as if the ‘spirits’ who had remained more or less mute for centuries had suddenly decided that it was time for the human race to take an important step forward. Tales of ghosts are obviously as old as the human race itself, but this was different in that the ghosts suddenly seemed anxious to communicate. Or was it simply that human beings began to try to communicate with the dead? It is certain that effort and desire are important. In 1822 a thirty-year-old Scots minister named Edward Irving began to preach in the Caledonian church in Hatton Garden, London, filling his sermons with thrilling imagery about the second coming of Christ and producing violent transports of religious emotion among his hearers. In 1830, he instituted a series of services in which prayer was offered up for some ‘miracle’ to attest the imminence of the Second Coming, and after eighteen months, members of his congregation suddenly began to ‘speak with tongues’ – in languages other than their own – and to show powers of healing. His colleague Robert Baxter sometimes spoke sentences in French, Latin, Spanish and Italian – none of them languages with which he was familiar – as well as in languages that he could not identify. But it was not long before ‘the spirits’ began to manifest that curious ambiguity that seems to be universally characteristic of spiritualism. That is to say, while the manifestations are often plainly ‘genuine’ in the sense that they have not been deliberately engineered, they always seem to fall short of being finally convincing. They provide ‘phenomena’ for those who want to believe, and raise doubts for those who want to doubt. The voices told Baxter, and Irving’s congregation, that he would go to the Chancellor’s Court and there be inspired to testify, and that for his testimony he would be cast into prison. He went to the court and stood there for three hours, but the spirit failed to descend, so he went home disgruntled. On another occasion the voices informed him that he had been chosen to be a new Isaiah and that at the end of forty days miraculous powers would descend upon him, and that he must then separate from his wife and family. But at the end of forty days, nothing happened. The ‘voices’ periodically announced important new doctrines for the salvation of the Irvingites, and then contradicted themselves later. It is not surprising that Irving and Baxter finally decided that they had become the sport of evil spirits. The scandals created by these extraordinary events finally led to Irving being dismissed, only two years after the ‘voices’ had begun; he died less than a year later in Scotland of tuberculosis.

Dostoevsky once said that God had denied man certainty because it would remove his freedom; there would be no virtue making the right choice if you knew for certain that it was the right one. Anyone who reads a history of spiritualism may well feel that the spirits have adopted the same principle: that too much evidence of ‘another world’ would condition mankind to a lazy mode of thought and behaviour. The philosopher C. D. Broad remarked to me in an interview on this subject: ‘If these facts of psychical research are true, then clearly they are of immense importance – they literally alter everything.’ And the alteration would not necessarily be for the better. In fact, it would certainly be for the worse if we take into account the basic peculiarity of human nature: the need for uncertainty and crisis to keep us on our toes. One day it may be that we shall learn to keep the will alert as automatically as we now breathe, and if that happens, we shall be supermen living on a continual level of ‘peak experience’. But until we achieve this new degree of self-determination, life had better remain as bewildering and paradoxical as possible.

This condition is certainly satisfied by the history of spiritualism. The Fox family – mother, father, son and three daughters – all produced rapping sounds (which Madame Blavatsky said were the easiest phenomena to get). Within a very short time, dozens of people in New York State discovered that they also had mediumistic powers and could produce rappings. A relative of the Fox family later denounced them, asserting that Margaretta Fox had explained to her how she made the rapping sounds by cracking her joints. There may be an element of truth in this; but how does it account for raps coming from other parts of the room? The journalist Horace Greeley observed the Fox family for several weeks, and pointed out that every precaution was taken to avoid trickery: they were taken unexpectedly to strange houses and asked to produce their rappings; they were stripped and searched by committees of ladies; their rooms were searched repeatedly.

When they appeared in Buffalo, New York, two brothers named Davenport – Ira and William – decided to try it. Their results were even more spectacular than the Fox family’s. When they went into a trance, musical instruments were taken up by invisible hands and played. In Ohio a farmer named Jonathan Koons became interested in spiritualism, only four years after the Fox sisters had started the craze. He put himself into a trance in the dark, and spirits began to speak through him. One of them informed him that all his eight children were gifted mediums, and ordered him to build a special séance room next to his house. Koons accordingly built a log room, sixteen feet by twelve, next to his farmhouse, and placed in it assorted musical instruments, bells suspended from the ceiling, plates of copper cut into the shapes of birds and various tables and chairs. Neighbours were often invited to the séances, which began by putting out the lights; after which, Mr. Koons played hymns on his fiddle. Soon the musical instruments would be taken up, and a noisy concert would commence. The sceptical explanation is that the Koons family played the instruments in the dark but the music was just as noisy when there were only two of them present. Paper covered with phosphorus would float around the room over the heads of the audience, and the tambourine would fly around, producing a powerful breeze. Hands were sometimes seen holding the paper, but no arms. The ‘spirits’ identified themselves as 165 ‘pre-Adamite men’, and one of their ‘descendants’, John King, explained that he was actually the pirate Sir Henry Morgan. John King manifested himself to many mediums besides the Koons, and his daughter Katie also became something of a favourite in American spiritualist circles.

By 1860 the Foxes were producing veiled, ghostly figures, and a Dr. Livermore held conversations with the visible spirit of his dead wife that left him totally convinced. The two Eddy brothers, at whose house Colonel Olcott met Madame Blavatsky, also produced ‘materialisations’, The brothers would be tied to chairs in a cabinet, whose curtains were drawn. After a while, spirits would appear and sometimes walk around the room. When the lights were finally switched on, the brothers were found in their former positions, with the seals intact.

But opportunities for fraud were obviously considerable. The Davenport brothers always declined to state whether they were genuine mediums. or whether their ‘performances’, which often took place in theatres, were simply ‘magical’ performances like those of Houdini or the Maskelyne brothers. When a member of the audience at Liverpool used a special ‘Tom Fool’s knot’ to tie them, so that they were unable to free themselves, no ‘manifestations’ took place, and the audience mobbed them. In 1874 two mediums named Showers – a mother and daughter – gave a séance at the house of a ‘believer’ named Sergeant Cox. When a tall spirit appeared in the aperture of the curtains, Sergeant Cox’s daughter tried to open them further, and the ‘spirit’ resisted; the spirit’s headdress fell off and revealed the head of Miss Showers, while the audience was able to see clearly that the couch, on which the medium was supposed to be stretched, was empty. Sergeant Cox chose to take the charitable view that the medium had been impersonating a spirit in her trancelike state.

A young medium named Florence Cook often ‘materialised’ Katie King. One of the great scandals of the early spiritualist movement occurred on December 9, 1873, when a séance was held at her house. A Mr. Volckman, feeling resentful that he had only been admitted to the séance after pleading with the medium for nine months and presenting her with jewellery, decided to make a grab for the spirit that floated around the room. It seemed quite solid, and struggled. Indignant spiritualists forced Volckman to release the spirit; the lights went out completely, and when they came on again, there was no spirit present. Mrs. Cook was found tied up in the cabinet, the seals intact. Presumably, then, the spirit was not Mrs. Cook herself; it could, perhaps, have been an accomplice – like Eliza White, who confessed to being the spirit of Katie King manifested through Nelson and Jennie Holmes.

But no mattew how much deliberate fraud took place, there can be no doubt that many of the manifestations were genuine. Dr. Franz Hartmann, a famous occult student in the last years of the nineteenth century, describes a séance held by Mrs. N. D. Miller, of Denver, when thirty or forty shapes materialised from the cabinet, men, women and children, and walked around the room. Some of them were local people who had died, and were clearly recognised by people present.

It is a pity that so many mediums have resorted to fraud, but not, after all, surprising. Mediumship seems to be like poetic inspiration; it depends on the energy of the medium and on her state of mind. No poet could produce good poetry on demand. It would take an extremely high level of moral conviction for a medium to reject every opportunity to convince her ‘sitters’, especially if she knows that they want to be convinced. And mediums do not necessarily possess this sterling quality. On the contrary, unusual powers of receptivity often seem to be accompanied by weakness of character.

This can be seen clearly in the case of Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced Hume), perhaps the most remarkable and convincing medium who has so far appeared. He was born in the village of Currie, near Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 20, 1833. His mother was a Highlander who came of a long line of ‘seers’ – she always foretold the deaths of friends and relations. Daniel began to have ‘visions’ at the age of four, ‘seeing’ things that were happening in other places. Nothing much seems to be known about his father. and from Home’s reference to Currie as the place ‘where my adored mother suffered so greatly’, we may infer that he was illegitimate. He was brought up by his aunt. He states that his father was a natural son of the Earl of Home, so it seems possible that his mother was seduced by an aristocratic rake, then deserted. This would also explain why, at the age of nine, Daniel travelled to America with his mother’s sister, a Mrs. Cook, and her husband. His mother also moved there at some point, together with a husband and seven children; it is not clear why Home lived with his aunt rather than his own family.

He was a delicate child, subject to fainting spells; he suffered from tuberculosis from an early age. He was definitely ‘artistic’, playing the piano well and singing in a clear soprano voice. His memory was excellent, and he could recite whole poems and sermons.

When he was thirteen he had a vision of a friend named Edwin, who appeared to be standing at the foot of his bed; Edwin made three circles in the air, which Home believed to mean that Edwin had died three days earlier. When this later proved to be correct, the Cooks were impressed, but not entirely happy. Four years later, after the death of his mother, they became definitely unhappy when tables began sliding around the room of their own accord and raps sounded from all parts of the room at breakfast. Mrs. Cook accused her nephew of bringing the Devil to her house, and threw a chair at him. The Baptist minister asked Daniel to kneel beside him and pray, and the knocks accompanied their prayers like a music teacher beating time. After more violent movements of the furniture, his aunt requested him to find another home.

He could hardly have chosen a better moment to go into the world. His own original ‘rappings’ occurred in 1846, two years before the Fox sisters started the fashion; so when he left home in 1851 the world was full of people who were eager to offer him shelter and test his powers.

These soon proved to be staggering. A committee from Harvard, including the poet William Cullen Bryant, testified that the table they had been sitting around, in broad daylight, had not only moved enough to push them backwards, but had actually floated several inches off the ground. The floor vibrated as if cannons were being fired, and the table rose up on two legs like a horse rearing. Meanwhile, Home kept urging those present to hold tightly on to his arms and legs. There could be no doubt whatever that this was genuine.

What is finally convincing about Home is the sheer volume of the evidence. He continued to perform feats like this for the remainder of his life, and hundreds of witnesses – perhaps thousands – vouched for the phenomena. Home’s powers were so strong that he never asked for the lights to be lowered. He would allow himself to be tied if necessary; but often as not, he sat in full view of everyone, in a chair apart from the main table so there could be no doubt that he could not make the table tilt or float.

He never bothered about ‘atmosphere’; the circle was told to chatter away about anything they liked. The manifestations began with a vibration of the table which might extend to the whole room. If his powers were strong, anything might then happen. Bells would be rung, tambourines shaken, hands appear out of the air to wave handkerchiefs, huge articles of furniture moved as if they were weightless. Grand pianos would float across the room, and chairs jump on top of them. Music played; water splashed; birds sang; ducks squawked; spirit voices spoke. The spirits usually ended the display by saying, ‘Good night. God bless you.’ A visiting clergyman, S. B. Brittan, was shocked and startled when Home went suddenly into a trance and began to utter wild and broken sentences in a woman’s voice. Before going into the trance Home had identified the visitor as Hannah Brittan – Brittan was certain that no one knew of her existence; she had been a religious maniac who died insane, pursued by visions of eternal punishment.

Home’s manifestations can only be described as spectacular, as if the ‘spirits’ were determined to convert the world by sheer weight of evidence. On one occasion, as a heavy table shook and vibrated, the crashing sound of waves filled the room, together with the creaking of a ship’s timbers. The ‘spirit’ spelled out its name with the use of an alphabet, and was immediately recognised by someone present as a friend who had drowned in a gale in the Gulf of Mexico. The laws of nature were suspended by the spirits. When a table tilted, the objects on it seemed to be glued to its surface; a burning candle not only continued to burn, but the flame burnt at an angle, as if still upright.

There were always plenty of people to test Home, for he had great charm, and impressed people with his culture and sensitivity. From the beginning his success was enormous. The highest in society took him up, and rich families offered to adopt him. He was naïve, adaptable and talkative; he enjoyed playing with the children because he obviously identified more closely with them than with the adults. People who did not like him called him weak, boastful, vulgar and unreliable; and he was certainly all these things. His photographs reveal his character: the pale face that bears a distinct resemblance to Poe, the ‘arty’ hair-do, the expensive and vulgar dressing gowns, the mournful or soulful expression. In fairness to Home, it should also be said that as he grew older, his character became stronger, he became more self-sufficient. But he was always gentle, rather effeminate (although not, apparently, homosexual), easily pleased or upset and highly dependent on other people. There was nothing of the lone ‘outsider’ about him. He was a snob; he liked to wear expensive jewellery and to stay in rich houses. At the same time, he was completely ‘uncommercial’. He wanted to be accepted as an equal by the aristocrats and celebrities among whom he moved, so he became mortally offended if anyone tried to offer him money.

As to the manifestations themselves, he insisted that he knew no more about them than any of his audience. There was no ‘secret’. Things simply happened when he was in the room; all he had to do was to relax and put himself into the mood. While still in America, he also began to give exhibitions of his most convincing manifestation: levitation. On August 8, 1852, sitting in a circle and holding the hands of his neighbours, Home floated up until his head touched the high ceiling – the neighbours had naturally let go. Home said it felt as if someone had put a belt around him under the arms and drawn him up. But on other occasions he seemed unaware of what had happened; one of his hosts pointed out one evening that he was hovering two inches above the cushion of the armchair, and Home seemed surprised.

As a spirit medium – that is, in communication with the dead – he was neither better nor worse than other mediums. He was often surprisingly accurate, but then, this is one of the normal characteristics of all mediums. The Fox sisters were seldom wrong when it came to giving the precise age of a member of the audience by means of raps. On other occasions, Home’s messages were obscure or so personal that they could not be verified by a third person.

In 1855, when he was twenty-two, he decided to visit Europe. Although he had no immediate prospects outside America, some instinct seems to have told him that interesting things awaited him. He was not mistaken. In London he went to stay at Cox’s Hotel, in Jermyn Street, and the owner, William Cox, took Home under his wing. London hostesses were soon queueing up to invite him to their homes. There were plenty of sceptics. Lord Lytton, an ardent student of magic and occultism, agreed that Home’s powers were astonishing, but believed that the phenomena were somehow due to Home himself rather than to spirits. Sir David Brewster and Lord Brougham, a Voltairean rationalist, saw a bell flying about the room when Home was sitting at the table; Brewster agreed that he could not explain how it was done, but he declined to believe that spirits had anything to do with it. The table itself hovered several inches off the floor, and Brewster crawled under it to verify that no one was touching it; but his Scots common sense was revolted at the idea of admitting the existence of spirits.

The movement of tables was often so spectacular that people could sit on them, or hang on to the edge as they tilted, suspended in the air. This form of sport became popular at Home’s séances.

It is also necessary to record that many so-called rationalists behaved in a thoroughly irrational manner when it came to finding out whether Home was genuine or not. Charles Dickens referred to him as ‘that scoundrel Home’, but declined to attend any of his séances. Browning became almost hysterical if Home’s name was even mentioned, and once threatened to throw him out of the house. (He referred to him as ‘that dungball’.) Dingwall’s opinion is that Browning had heard gossip that Home was a homosexual, and that this struck the sturdily normal and moral Victorian as nauseating. Dickens apparently hinted at Home’s influence over young men in an article. There is no evidence whatever that Home was a practising homosexual, although his mannerisms certainly struck many as effeminate. Browning himself had been ardently attached to his own mother, to such an extent that his poetic identity was permanently eroded;* his reaction to homosexuality may have been based on a recognition of it in himself. At all events, Browning continued to be flagrantly unfair to Home. Although he knew that most of Home’s manifestations were genuine, he portrayed him as Mr. Sludge, the fake medium, thereby spreading the impression that Home had been exposed. In fact, Home is one of the few mediums who were never seriously accused of fraud. He passed all ‘tests’ triumphantly.

Mrs. Browning, on the other hand, was totally convinced of Home’s powers, and would certainly have cultivated his acquaintance if it had not been for her husband’s violent opposition. It seems just conceivable that Browning’s dislike was based on ordinary sexual jealousy. He was certainly enraged by an episode that took place at a séance in Ealing, at the home of John Snaith Rymer, when, at Home’s request, a perfectly visible and detached spirit hand took up a garland of flowers that lay on the table and placed it on the poetess’s brow. Beautiful music came from the air. Mrs. Browning spoke to the medium with tenderness mingled with respect, and her husband sat there fuming and damning all spirits. Home, with his usual lack of tact, later remarked that Browning had deliberately placed himself in the path of the garland so that it would settle on his brow.

Home travelled on to Italy, where the English community awaited his coming with intense expectation. In Florence his powers were stimulated by the scenery and adoration; a grand piano rose into the air while the Countess Orsini was playing on it, and remained floating throughout the piece. Tables danced, chandeliers gyrated, spirit hands serenaded the visitors on concertinas or shook hands with the sitters, who observed that they felt warm and human. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded that all these ‘soberly attested incredibilities’ were so numerous that he forgot most of them, and was amused that his reaction to real-life ghosts was boredom: ‘they are absolutely proved to be sober facts … yet I cannot force my mind to take any interest in them’. Hawthorne expressed with great clarity what most balanced minds feel about ghosts. There certainly were quite genuine apparitions in Florence; in a convent rented by the famous sculptor Hiram Powers, the ghosts of twenty-seven monks disturbed a séance, behaving with a rowdiness reminiscent of poltergeists and tearing Mrs. Powers’s skirt. In a haunted bedroom in another villa, Home conversed with a ghost that spoke Italian (which had to be translated), which identified itself as a murderer who had been haunting the house for several hundreds of years, and materialised a hand with skinny yellow fingers. While the spirit was present the room became so icy cold that they had to huddle round the fire. It was apparently impossible to do anything for the rest of the murderer’s soul, but he promised to stop disturbing the present tenants.

It was in Florence that a few dark clouds appeared on the horizon of his unbroken success. Home had travelled to Florence with the son of Rymer, his Ealing host; but success and lionisation swept Home off his feet, and he was ‘kidnapped by a strong-minded society lady of title, an Englishwoman living apart from her husband’, according to Conan Doyle in Wanderings of a Spiritualist. ‘For weeks he lived at her villa, though the state of his health would suggest that it was rather as a patient than as a lover.’ English and American society was scandalised. Doyle said that he saw letters written by Home to Rymer at this time that revealed a certain callousness and lack of gratitude. Elizabeth Barrett Browning remarked in a letter that part of the trouble was that Home ‘gave sign of a vulgar yankee nature, weak in the wrong ways’, and that he ‘succeeded in making himself universally disagreeable’. But Home also failed to realise that he was now in the land of Popery, and that what was now called a ‘spirit medium’ had been called a witch only a century earlier and tortured by the Inquisition. It was less than sixty years before that Cagliostro had died in the dungeons of San Leo. The Italian Minister of the Interior took him aside and warned him that he had better keep away from lighted windows at night in case someone tried the effect of a silver bullet on the sorcerer. Not long after this, he was attacked on his way home to the hotel and slightly wounded. Gossip about him exaggerated his weaknesses to the rank of calculated outrages. When he was invited to travel to Naples and Rome with a Count Branicki and his mother, he seized the opportunity to leave the unfriendly city of Michelangelo. And then, the final blow: on February 10, 1856, the spirits told him that he was about to lose his powers for the space of a year, because his recent conduct made him an unworthy vessel.

Chastised and humiliated, he accompanied the Branickis to Naples. But the gods had not deserted him entirely; people still came to see him, even though he made no secret of his loss of power. The brother of the King of Naples presented him with a ruby ring. But a confidential letter from an old friend warned him that he had better not venture to Rome, because the authorities had decided that he was an undesirable. Home reacted in a manner that was consistent with his highly conciliatory nature; he went to Rome, and became a Roman Catholic.

He was immediately given an audience by the Pope, who showed himself friendly, and recommended a confessor in Paris, which was the next capital on Home’s itinerary.

His confessor there, a Father Ravignan, assured Home that he need have no fear of a return visit from the spirits, provided he remained a good son of the Church. But he was, of course, missing the point. Why should Home want to banish his spirits? They were the source of his celebrity and income. Everyone knew the date when his powers were due to return, and on the morning of February 11, the Emperor sent a marquis as emissary to find out whether Home’s powers had returned. Home assured him they had – on the stroke of midnight. Immediately after the marquis came Father Ravignan, who was greeted by loud rapping noises from the spirits. He told Home that even if he couldn’t prevent the manifestations he could at least ‘close his mind to them’. Home said he would try. But as the priest raised his hand in a parting benediction, the raps started up again with the equivalent of a ghostly raspberry.

Home’s career now entered a new phase of celebrity. He was summoned to the Tuileries by Napoleon III. He was dismayed to find the room crowded, and explained that a séance was not a theatrical performance and that the spirits would not allow more than eight people to be present. The Empress Eugénie was not used to being thwarted, and she stalked out. However, Napoleon III decided the request was reasonable; he was a magical amateur himself, and was curious. He asked for the room to be cleared. Then Home gave of his best. The table floated, and the raps proved their supernormal origin by answering a question he put mentally. He sent for the Empress Eugénie; she marched in coldly. But within minutes, a hand gripped hers under the table, and she recognised it by a characteristic defect as her father’s hand. Her coldness vanished; Home had made perhaps his most important conquest. At the next séance, the spirits went through most of their repertoire: a child’s hand formed in space and held the Empress’s hand; a concertina, held at one end by Napoleon, played melodies; handkerchiefs floated around; bells chimed; the table floated on command. At the next séance, Napoleon Bonaparte himself deigned to appear – at least, his hand did, and signed his name. The Empress was allowed to kiss the spirit hand, which then vanished.

Home was the social discovery of the season; aristocrats queued up to call on him and take him out for drives. His relationship with the Emperor and his wife became considerably more intimate than that of Rasputin with the Russian royal family half a century later; Home dined at the Tuileries as often as he felt inclined. His success must have inspired wild hopes in the breasts of other contemporary magicians, such as Eliphaz Levi and the Abbé Boullan; but none of them possessed Home’s incredible luck.

There were plenty of enemies, and Home was constantly aware of their hostility, and of preposterous stories of his own sinister powers. He returned to America for a few months to allow things to cool down, and to collect his sister Christine, whom the Empress had agreed to take under her wing. Back in Paris, he continued to dine with princes and even kings. But the social round was beginning to tell on his powers, and when he gave a séance for the imperial family at Biarritz, all he could do was make a table float in the air and armchairs canter around the room like circus elephants.

In January 1858, one year after the return of his powers, Home went to give séances for Queen Sophia at the Hague, and after a cold and rainy itinerary around the northern parts of Europe, decided that he would return to Italy to throw off the series of colds and coughs he had picked up. In Rome he was invited to spend an evening with a Russian count, Gregory Koucheleff-Besborodka, and was introduced to his beautiful seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Alexandrina de Kroll, known as Sacha. The moment Home set eyes on her, his second sight operated and he recognised her as his future wife. She also told him jokingly that he would be married before the end of the year, because it was a Russian superstition that any man who sat between two sisters was destined for matrimony. It was a pity that the spirits did not also warn Home that his tuberculosis was catching (this was not recognised in those days); she was dead after three years of marriage.

But the three years were a delightful time for Home. He travelled with Dumas to St. Petersburg, where Sacha’s relatives organised a spectacular wedding feast; Dumas was best man, and wrote an account of the Russian trip. Home was kindly received by the Tsar himself, Alexander II, who was to liberate the serfs three years later and be assassinated in 1881. After their marriage in August 1858, the Homes became frequent guests of the Tsar at Tsarskoe Selo. Home’s wife was an heiress, so his financial troubles were now over – at least, for a long time. A pleasant winter, during which Home became the darling of St. Petersburg society, was followed by an equally pleasant spring and summer, during which Home’s son was born. He was christened Gregory, and called Grisha. In August the Homes set out for England, stopping in Paris and Switzerland. In London they established themselves at Cox’s Hotel, and London society, which flocked to meet them, agreed that the ‘Yankee’ was in every way improved by his alliance with the gentle and charming Russian girl.

Home attended a lecture on Cagliostro, and was startled when the spirit of the Grand Copt strolled into the lecture hall and sat beside him. Later, when he and Sacha got into bed, Cagliostro put in another appearance, sat down on the bed and chattered amiably to the young couple. Sacha must have found it all very odd.

In 1862 Home’s luck took a turn for the worse again. Sacha died in July. Although it must have been some consolation for Home to be able to keep in touch with her, her death was a blow; he had been devoted to her. It also meant that his income ceased, for her relatives contested her will, and the legal wrangling was to continue for some years. He wrote an autobiography, Incidents in My Life, to make money, but its royalties could scarcely keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed. He stayed with various friends, then decided to return to Rome. But after a few days there, he was summoned to the police station, informed that he was a sorcerer (an accusation which the spirits helpfully confirmed with loud raps) and told he had to leave Rome within three days. He went to Naples, then on to Nice. His supporters hoped to turn his ejection into an international scandal, but his royal patrons seemed bored by the whole affair; Napoleon III was noncommittal, and the King of Bavaria, who had shown Home much cordiality, feigned deafness. Londoners proved altogether more interested; there were questions asked in Parliament and articles in newspapers, and Home had the satisfaction of seeing the Protestant press firmly behind him. Another visit to St. Petersburg, where he was again warmly received, did much to soothe his wounded feelings. But the run of bad luck was not yet over. In 1866 he made the acquaintance of a rich widow, Mrs. Jane Lyon. She was an effusive and vulgar old lady of seventy-five, who was immensely impressed by the photographs of royalty that adorned the walls of Home’s modest lodging. When he told her that the rooms were provided by a society calling itself the Spiritual Athenaeum, of which he was the resident secretary, she gave him a generous cheque for the society. This surprised him, for ‘[he] thought she might be a kind-hearted housekeeper, but it never crossed [his] mind that she could be rich’. Soon she talked of adopting him, and presented him with a cheque for £24,000. Home settled annuities on various relatives and bought a cottage for the aunt who had brought him up in America – apparently having forgiven her for throwing him out on the world. He changed his name to Home-Lyon, and Mrs. Lyon continued to present him with large cheques. She later claimed that Home himself had relayed instructions through her late husband concerning the various sums and items of property she made over to him.

The whole Lyon episode seems to illustrate that Home lacked the common sense of self-preservation. He should have asked himself at a very early stage whether he could actually stand being the ‘son’ of the vulgar old lady with the northern accent. As it was, he had to learn the hard way. Her manners began to distress him; she was either being effusively affectionate – in front of his aristocratic friends – or working herself up into a state of resentment about his coolness towards her. He had a nervous breakdown, and went to get himself cured at Malvern, where his friend Dr. Manby Gully – famous for his part in the Charles Bravo murder case (which still lay in the future) – had set up a clinic for hydropathic cures. When he returned to London, he found that Mrs. Lyon had found herself another medium – a woman this time. In June 1867, Mrs. Lyon set out to recover her ‘presents’ legally. And although Home was in the right, it was inevitable that he should get the worst of it. He was hissed as he entered the courtroom; the public had already decided he was a charlatan who had conned a silly old lady out of £60,000. Home’s case was that the old lady had tried to seduce him after he became her adopted son; she alleged that he had obtained the money under false pretences. If Home had been anything but a spirit medium, Mrs. Lyon’s frequently exposed lies would have won him the case. As it was, the judge remarked in his summing up that if everyone who gave money to a religious body was allowed to change his mind, chaos would result. He ordered Mrs. Lyon to pay her own costs and Home’s. But, because he held spiritualism to be a delusion, he ordered that Home should give Mrs. Lyon her money back. It was an appallingly unfair verdict, for it was not the judge’s business to decide the case upon his own opinion of spiritualism. It was also a blow for the spiritualist movement, since Home never managed to shake off the imputation that he had faked the spirit messages from Mr. Lyon. Worst of all, from Home’s point of view, it left him financially worse off than ever, since he had spent so much of the money which he now had to repay. He decided to follow Dickens’s example and do a reading tour of England. The result was an enormous success; Home proved to be a natural actor. And also a natural comedian. His readings of dialect stories had the audience convulsed.

In 1870 a young acquaintance of his Malvern days, Lord Adare, published a book describing his experiences with Home, and it is still one of the best portraits of Home that exist. Adare was not a spiritualist – just a normal, healthy young man whose chief interests were hunting, shooting and fishing. He had no previous interest in spiritualism, and later on, came to look back on it as an adolescent phase. It is this lack of partisanship that makes his account so impressive. With three aristocratic cousins, and various other friends who occasionally lent a hand, he observed Home’s powers closely over several months. In Adare’s rooms, in the presence of Dr. Gully and a Captain Smith, Sacha materialised beside Home as he stood illuminated by the dim light from the window. She seemed quite solid. On another occasion, the American actress Ada Mencken, recently deceased, appeared in the rooms, and then took over Home’s body and had a long and friendly conversation with Adare. It is interesting to observe that there were occasions when Home could see her and Adare could not, and others when Adare could see her and Home could not. Probably this has something to do with the position of the spirit in the room; other writers on ghosts have recorded that the ghost vanishes if it comes too close, and reappears when it has reached a certain distance from the observer.

Adare and his three friends witnessed so many wonders that the sheer quantity overwhelms the imagination. Fireballs wandered over the room and through solid objects; spirits appeared as dim shapes, and sometimes as walking clouds; draughts howled through the room when all doors and windows were closed; doors opened and closed; flowers fell from the ceiling; spirit hands appeared; furniture moved around as though it was weightless. Home himself floated around like a balloon. He floated out of one window head first – it was only open a foot – and returned through another window. He also added two more astounding effects to his repertoire. He would elongate, standing against a wall, while one man held his feet, another his waist, and another watched his face. Home’s height would then increase from five feet ten to six feet six inches, both heights being marked on the wall. And he began to handle fire. He would cross to the firegrate, and stir the red-hot coal with his fingers, then kneel down and bathe his face in the coals as though they were water. His hair was not even singed. He would carry a burning coal to the circle – it was so hot that no one else could endure it closer than six inches, unless Home deliberately transferred his immunity to them. Lady Gomm took a red-hot coal and felt it to be slightly warm. She put it down on a sheet of paper and it instantly burst into flames. Home sometimes declined to allow people to hold the coal, on the grounds that their faith was not strong enough.

When Home went to stay at Adare Manor, the home of Adare’s father, Lord Dunraven, he quickly spotted a ghost in the abbey, and strolled over to have a conversation with it, after which he and the ghost, quite visible to his companions, walked back through the moonlight. Then the ghost vanished, and Home floated through the air and over a low wall.

Adare’s book was privately printed, but caused so much commotion that it was withdrawn. (It was reprinted by the Society for Psychical Research in 1914.) Adare remained a friend of Home’s, but lost interest in spiritualism on the grounds that although the phenomena were obviously genuine, they didn’t get anywhere or prove anything.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, during which Home’s former patron Napoleon III was made a prisoner, Home became a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle and covered the war from the Prussian headquarters at Versailles. He then paid another visit to Russia, where he met his second wife, Julie de Gloumeline; she heard a voice above her head telling her that this was to be her husband, so made no objection when Home proposed marriage.

Back in London in March 1871, he agreed to be ‘investigated’ by a brilliant young physicist, William (later Sir William) Crookes. British scientists who heard of the investigation smiled; they had no doubt that Crookes would finally demolish Home’s reputation. To everyone’s astonishment and dismay, Crookes’s report, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science in July 1871, was entirely favourable. Crookes admitted that his rational mind told him that the things he had seen were impossible. In spite of that, he had to admit that he was totally convinced by Home’s amazing repertoire of levitation, fire handling, elongating, causing to float and so on.

Scientists were furious at the report; they assumed that Crookes had been deceived or gone mad. Charles Darwin voiced the general feeling when he said that he could not disbelieve in Crookes’s statements, or believe in his results. (Crookes also reported favourably on Florence Cook, the medium who materialised ‘Katie King’; a recent critic has conjectured that she and Crookes were lovers.) For a while, it looked as though Crookes had simply ruined his own career as a scientist; but he was slowly taken back into favour, particularly when pressure of work forced him to stop taking an active part in spiritualist affairs.

In the following year, 1872, Home decided to retire. He had another fourteen years to live, and they were pleasant and peaceful years, spent partly in Russia, partly on the Riviera. The lawsuit over his first wife’s estate was decided in Home’s favour. His retirement, like his debut, was perfectly timed. It will be remembered that this was the period when Madame Blavatsky was finding that interest in spiritualism had declined severely. Home had always taken care not to associate himself with the spiritualist movement. He was a loner – naturally, since his success placed him on a different plane from all other mediums – and his comments on other mediums were not calculated to make him popular. Now he became simply a ‘private gentleman’ who occasionally gave séances for the amusement of his friends or hosts. His powers continued undiminished. The reason, one might speculate, is that he was slowly wasting away with consumption, and he was always at his best when the ‘material’ side of his nature was suppressed. The publisher Vizetelly describes an afternoon spent in a café during the Franco-Prussian War. Home was sipping sugared water, and explained that he was fasting because ‘the spirits will not move me unless I do this. To bring them to me, I have to contend with the material part of my nature’. It will be remembered that Home was consumptive from birth. His mother possessed mediumistic powers, and Home’s son, Gregory, also inherited some of his father’s gift. It seems possible that the unique level of mediumship in Home’s case may be due to this combination of inherited ‘faculties’ and extreme physical delicacy.

He died in 1886, at the age of fifty-three, and has remained a subject of controversy ever since. It is difficult to see why. He was one of the most uncontroversial mediums who ever lived. If the vast number of reports of his ‘manifestations’ does not constitute unshakable scientific evidence, then that term is completely meaningless.

Powers so well attested and so extraordinary again raise the question: What does it all mean?

It must be frankly admitted that the chief difficulty in answering that question is that we lack a starting point. When Benjamin Franklin made a kite conduct lightning, he already had some idea of the nature of electricity. When scientists learned to split the atom, they had a fair idea of its structure. It is this kind of ‘minimum working hypothesis’ that we lack in considering ‘occult phenomena’. My own grandmother was a convinced spiritualist, and she felt that it solved all the basic problems. Spirits live in heaven, then they enter bodies, and when they die, they finally go back to heaven. But this is simply another version of the infinite regression that arises when we ask, ‘Where does space end?’ or ‘Who created God?’ The Hindus believed that the world is supported on the back of an elephant, which is supported on the back of a tortoise … and so on.

What is left out of account by the spiritualist view is the mystery of the internal universe of the mind. Dreams often reveal to us that we are multi-layered beings. Ninety-nine per cent of my dreams may be straightforward enough, as unproblematic as daydreams. But there are always the few dreams that strike me as utterly strange, as though I have accidentally tuned in to a foreign radio station. Jung records this feeling in the chapter called ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious’ in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Various dreams seemed so strange and symbolic in content that they seemed to be trying to tell him something. After describing a dream in which the corpses in a row of tombs kept on stirring as he looked at them, he remarks, ‘Of course, I had originally held to Freud’s view that vestiges of old experiences exist in the unconscious. But dreams like this, and my actual experiences of the unconscious, taught me that such contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being.’ The distinction is important, for Freud’s ‘archaic vestiges’ are like dead leaves at the bottom of a pond.

What Jung then goes on to describe is so startling that only his serious reputation keeps the reader from doubting the whole thing. In the autumn of 1913 he began to experience a sense of oppression, and finally, on a journey: ‘I was suddenly seized with an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. The vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.’ The vision recurred two weeks later, with a voice that said: ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real …’ In the spring and summer of 1914 he had dreams of an arctic cold wave freezing the world. On the third occasion when the dream recurred, it ended on a note of optimism: he saw a tree with grapes, which he plucked and handed out to the crowd.

He suspected that he was slipping into neurosis until the outbreak of war revealed that the dreams had been prophetic.

A mental upheaval now began. He remarks, ‘One thunderstorm followed another. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them – Nietzsche and Hölderlin … But there was a demonic strength in me.’ As the mental disturbances became more violent he tried to turn the emotions into images that could be grasped by the conscious mind. Then occurred a ‘dream’ that came while he was sitting, fully conscious, at his desk:

I was … thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths … But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mess. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave, in which stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified. I squeezed past him through the narrow entrance and waded knee deep through icy water to the other end of the cave where, on a projecting rock, I saw a glowing red crystal. I grasped the stone, lifted it, and discovered a hollow underneath. At first I could make out nothing, but then I saw that there was running water. In it a corpse floated by, a youth with blond hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. Dazzled by the light, I wanted to replace the stone upon the opening, but then a fluid welled out. It was blood …

This might be called ‘controlled hallucination’; it seems, from the context, that what Jung did was to allow his subconscious mind to well up, and allow himself to be carried along, still conscious, by its images. He recognised the dream as a hero and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, but was puzzled by the ending – the blood – unaware that it foretold the war which started the following year (this took place in December 1913).

Other dreams and visions followed; he acknowledges that they were fantasies of extraordinary clarity. In a dream he shot the hero Siegfried with a rifle – an indication that he knew who the enemy would be. And then, ‘in order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom. The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand feet; the next time I found myself on the edge of a cosmic abyss. It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space. First came the image of a crater, and I had a feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard, and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people, and listened attentively to what they told me. The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. But the girl staggered me even more, for she called herself Salome! She was blind … But Elijah assured me that he and Salome had belonged together from all eternity …’

I cite this at length, not because of Jung’s interpretation of the symbolism of these figures (Elijah – intelligence! Salome – the erotic element; a black snake – the hero) but to point out the startling extent to which Jung had learned to make a daylight descent into the subconscious. What is surprising is the extent to which he could converse with these figures of his imagination. He underlines this point in speaking of another symbol of intelligence, whom he came to call Philemon: ‘Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life [my italics]. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in a forest …’ Aldous Huxley put forward a similar view about the ‘antipodes of the mind’ in Heaven and Hell. A Hindu later told Jung that his own guru had been Shankaracharya, a commentator on the Vedas who died centuries ago.

Later still, Jung came to recognise a kind of separate feminine entity in his subconscious – the ‘anima’ that we have already encountered in Part Two, Chapter 2. (In a woman, the corresponding figure is male.) He remarks, ‘For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt my emotional behaviour was disturbed, and that something had been constellated in the unconscious. I would then ask the anima: “Now, what are you up to? What do you see? …” After some resistance, she regularly produced an image. As soon as the image was there, the sense of unrest or oppression vanished. The whole energy of these emotions was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image.’

There were also external manifestations. Philemon first appeared in a dream about a blue sky covered with clods of earth; he appeared as an old man with a bull’s horns and the wings of a kingfisher. Jung painted this image, and while he was engaged in painting, was startled to find a dead kingfisher in his garden – startled because the birds are rare in the Zurich area. In 1916, when he felt full of inner tensions, his eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. The blanket was snatched twice from the bed of his second daughter. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, when the front door stood wide open upon an empty square, the front doorbell began to ring violently, although there was no one there. ‘The whole house was filled as if there was a crowd present, crammed full of spirits.’ And Jung thought he heard them crying out: ‘We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.’ Jung made this the first sentence of a book, Seven Sermons to the Dead. He records that as soon as he began to write, the atmosphere quietened down.

It is interesting to note that Jung had experience of certain ‘phenomena’ even in the presence of the arch-sceptic Freud, and that they presaged the break in his relation with Freud. He describes how, in 1909, he and Freud argued about psychical phenomena, and Freud’s shallow positivism annoyed Jung. He writes:

While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot, a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing that the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: ‘There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon.’

‘Oh come,’ he exclaimed, ‘that is sheer bosh.’

‘It is not.’ I replied. ‘You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point, I now predict that in a moment there will be another loud report!’ Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.

To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again …

He adds: ‘I never afterwards discussed the incident with him.’ A fascinating example of the scientist’s ability to close his mind to anything that will not fit into his pattern of generalisations. Or perhaps Freud suspected, rightly, that Jung’s subconscious hostility lay behind the explosions.

These considerations begin to shed a new light on the whole question of the occult. A ‘spiritualist’ who accepts that there is an after-life, a spirit world, a realm in which everything will be explained, is only scratching the surface. He still accepts himself as a kind of unity, a Leibnitzian monad, an ultimate unit. Jung emphasises that our sense of ‘individuality’ (meaning literally something which is indivisible) may be an illusion. We have to grasp that one of the basic principles of our psychic life is a kind of ‘as if …’ I am working for an exam and I concentrate on my book as if it were the most important thing in the world. It isn’t and I know it isn’t. The more I can concentrate, while still knowing it isn’t, the healthier I am. If I begin to forget that I am only playing an ‘as if’ game, if I begin to believe that this is really a matter of life and death, I become overtense and neurotic and my whole psychic balance is disturbed. But then, what I call my personality, my individuality, is actually a series of ‘as if’ acts of concentration. If I am suffering from a fever, my personality feels diffused, disintegrated, and I am also unpleasantly aware of the independence of my mental imagines, for they run around wildly like a crowd of people, ignoring me as I stand in the corner. If I am in an intensely healthy and happy state, I experience this sense of ‘otherness’ welling up from my subconscious in an altogether delightful sense, as a kind of coolness and strength.

But this has an even more general importance. Supposing I am standing on a cliff top, watching the sea wash around rocks. If I am in a low, depressed state, the sight produces a kind of tension and foreboding, perhaps accompanied by some image of danger, like the octopus in the cave of Toilers of the Sea. It all seems alien, indifferent to me, and that is why it frightens me. If I am in a state of happiness and optimism, it no longer seems alien. The forces of ‘otherness’ bubbling up from my subconscious, and the ‘otherness’ out there, are somehow related. I have a feeling that even if I was down there, swimming among them, I would be in no danger.

These ideas do not ‘explain’ the powers of a medium like Home; but they begin to shed a kind of light. Observe that when Jung’s mind was in a turmoil, the subconscious manifested itself in visions, and even in ‘poltergeist’ activities like the ringing of the doorbell and pulling the sheets off a bed. As soon as he began to write creatively, the manifestations ceased. Home was an ‘artistic’ personality, but not, in the ordinary sense, creative. Unlike Jung, he was a superficial man; he never questioned the ‘spirits’; he never did any serious thinking. He remained a socialite, rushing around Europe, dining with royalty. What would he have discovered if he had been a ‘mental traveller’ like Jung? Jung’s anima rang the doorbell; Home’s moved pianos.

This is not to suggest that all the manifestations were simply Home’s subconscious forces, acting in the manner of the ‘monster’ in Forbidden Planet. The question of the reality of ‘spirits’, of life after death, must be considered further. But these considerations certainly suggest that Lytton was right when he spoke to Home of ‘your powers’. Home never completed the alchemical process of reconciling the conscious and the subconscious; in fact, he hardly even began it. Was it Home’s spirits who told him that he was about to lose his powers for a year? Or was it the anima, the weight of his own self-disgust? Geologists understand that there are certain terrains where rainfall sinks deep underground and joins subterranean rivers, and others where it almost immediately bubbles out in the form of a spring. Psychologically speaking, Home resembled this latter terrain. The subconscious forces bubbled out easily.

Once this is understood, the question of life after death is also seen in a different light. We have an image of the body dying, and of the ‘spirit’ rising out of it like a cloud and flying off to some ‘other place’. If Jung is correct, then it seems altogether likely that what occurs is more like a descent into the inner world of the collective mind.

This view would certainly explain one of the most disturbing things about spirit communications – their frequent triviality. In the world of the ‘noösphere’ – of human intelligence – triviality is something that has to be avoided by a deliberate effort, like beating off flies. If the ‘spirit world’ is not ‘another place’ but only ‘another part of the mind’, then the same law would presumably apply.

Let us consider a recent and fairly well-authenticated case of communication with the dead, the one recounted by Bishop James Pike in his book The Other Side.

The story Bishop Pike tells is briefly this. In the mid-sixties, his son Jim (aged twenty) had been experimenting with psychedelic drugs in San Francisco. These produced some ‘bad trips’. In February 1966 Jim Pike locked himself in a New York hotel room and shot himself with a rifle. Various friends had a powerful sense of ‘something wrong’ at about the time he killed himself. After his son’s death, poltergeist phenomena began to occur in Bishop Pike’s apartment, which he was sharing with his chaplain, David Baar, and his secretary, Maren Bergrud. First of all, books and letters would be arranged at an angle to one another in places where they would be seen. Then part of the bangs on Mrs. Bergrud’s forehead was burnt off during the night. (The son, Jim, had never liked her bangs.) The missing hair had vanished. The next day, still more of the bangs had disappeared. The following day, she woke up in pain, with two of her fingernails injured, as if a needle had been driven under them. (One of them later came off.) Mrs. Bergrud entered Bishop Pike’s bedroom late one night for a book, and he sat up in bed, asleep, and delivered a discourse on the importance of selfishness, of only caring about ‘Number One’. Gradually, it dawned on them that Jim might be trying to ‘communicate’. They finally visited a medium, Mrs. Ena Twigg, in Acton, London, and there discovered that it was, in fact, Jim Pike who had been doing his best to communicate. There were so many personal references, and references to matters that could not be known to the medium, that it seems reasonable to infer either that she was reading Bishop Pike’s mind, or that Jim Pike was really present. Halfway through the séance, the theologian Paul Tillich, a friend of Pike’s, interrupted to thank him for a dedication to a book. Tillich commented on Jim Pike: ‘The boy was a visionary born out of due time. He found a society distressing in which sensitivity is classed as weakness.’ It seems that Jim Pike was not, at this stage, much changed from the person he had been when alive. His first words were: ‘I failed the test, I can’t face you, can’t face life. I’m confused. Very sudden passing … God, I didn’t know what I was doing. But when I got here I found I wasn’t such a failure as I thought [my italics]. My nervous system failed.’ That is to say, the suicide arose from the premature defeat we have been discussing, the conscious mind ‘opting out’. Later on he remarked, ‘I thought there was a way out; I wanted out. I’ve found there is no way out. I wish I’d stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings.’

There were later séances with other mediums in America, but little of importance was added. The spirit of Jim Pike apparently had precognition, as all spirits have, according to those who know; he was able to tell his father that he would be meeting a certain old friend soon, and that he would shortly be in Virginia. (Bishop Pike was convinced this was a mistake, until his plane landed at Dulles airfield and he remembered that this is on the Virginia side of Washington.) But it must be admitted that the rest of the book is anticlimactic; the reader comes up against the usual frustration: that the spirits so seldom say anything important. Perhaps this is because they recognise the human inability to learn from them. Mrs. Bergrud later committed suicide.

Bishop Pike’s story does not end there. In August 1969 he and his newly married wife, Diane, went on a trip to the Middle East, and became lost in the Israeli wilderness. When he was too exhausted to walk further, his wife went off to try to find help. She found her way back to civilisation, but was unable to lead the rescuers back to the cave where she had left her husband; he was later found dead. On September 4, three days before his body was located, he ‘communicated’ with Ena Twigg, the London medium through whom he had first contacted his son. He gave details of what had happened and described where the body was to be found. Diane Pike later wrote, in an article: ‘In that session there were sufficient references that corresponded to the circumstances of our ordeal and that expressed concerns that I knew to be uppermost in Jim’s mind at the time of the mishap to enable me to affirm that Jim communicated through Mrs. Twigg.’*

The same article contains the interesting comment: ‘Because she believes everyone is potentially mediumistic, she favours aiming at direct communication through meditation.’

It was Professor G. Wilson Knight who revived my own interest in the subject of spiritualism; consequently it was natural that I should ask him to explain how he came to be convinced of human survival of death. The accounts he has sent me of communications from his mother, his brother, W. F. Jackson Knight, and John Cowper Powys are circumstantial and impressive. I found his descriptions of communications from Jackson Knight particularly convincing. I had met JK (as he was generally known) several times between 1960 and his death in 1964. He was the sort of person it would be hard to forget – very much a ‘personality’, bubbling with a genial nervous energy. Wilson Knight describes his manner accurately: ‘… in excited talk and repetition, in fun, in exaggerated protestations of gratitude and praise; and still more in subtle turns of half-comic thought impossible to define.’ This brings back to me my first meeting with JK: the warm, nervous, jerky handclasp, the rather high, precise voice saying enthusiastically, ‘Oh my! How very kind of you to come! How very flattering for me too! Well! I really didn’t imagine …’ and so on, until I thought he was pulling my leg. But he wasn’t; it was his natural manner. So that when I read in Wilson Knight’s manuscript the following transcription – taken down for him by Miss K. Neal in shorthand (at an Exeter circle in March 1965, four months after JK’s death)* – I could instantly hear JK’s voice saying the words:

How wonderful, here I am talking to you and supposed to be dead, how very exciting! I have been once or twice but wasn’t able to get through.

Fifi [a spirit guide] has been so good in helping me, telling me what to do, but I’m not very good at it, never mind, I shall learn. But it is all so true, so very true, I hardly believed it would be so, but it is so. Lovely!

First going off I was so excited to make myself felt just to let you know I was there. Sorry I cannot make Dick [ Wilson Knight] feel me more, but there, never mind, I shall in time. I shall learn. How wonderful, how exciting!

I have been and tried, it is rather difficult, more difficult than what I anticipated, but nevertheless under Fifi’s directions I shall be able to get on better ...

Give Dick my love, tell him I like the arrangements.

Sorry I was not able to finish several things that I had in mind, but he is a good chap, he will get them done I know. He is wonderful – much better than I was at organising. I had rather an untidy mind, he has a very tidy mind …

A very very wonderful experience for me to be able to come and talk in this room! – where I used to come and talk to others. Now I am talking to you.

For anyone who knew him, this could be no one else than JK – the self-deprecating humour, the tendency to expostulation.

Wilson Knight was himself present at a séance a month later when JK was the first to speak through the medium, Dorothy Perkins. He writes:

He started talking to me volubly. ‘Thank you so much!’ was repeated emphatically. Then breaking off suddenly and most characteristically: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I should be greeting everybody …’ Then to me: ‘Fifi has given me permission to speak first. How very kind of her. It really is a wonderful experience.’

Asked what his life was like now he replied with words recalling those of T. S. Eliot’s spirit seer in Little Gidding, ‘between two worlds become much like each other’. ‘Not a lot different except that things are more beautiful than perhaps they were. Flowers, trees, animal life. Very lovely. And there’s no pain, no ugliness.’ He added: ‘If I wish, I can see the dark places. I’m not quite ready yet. I would be interested. The “hell” of people’s own making.’ [Swedenborg had also described this aspect of the spirit world in some detail.] And later: ‘All that we were told is absolutely true … It’s so important that everybody should know. It would make people so much happier – and more careful.’ He said that it was not easy to influence people. ‘When you see what has to be done to get through to earth, all the mechanism …’

I must admit that I find the flavour of JK’s remarks more convincing than any purely ‘factual’ evidence, which Wilson Knight is also able to offer in abundance. In 1965 a message from JK was relayed through Vera Broom of Dawlish at the Exeter church; he wanted Wilson Knight to give something he greatly valued to his godson, Peter Fletcher, but had difficulty getting his meaning across. Wilson Knight goes on: ‘Picture language was used. The medium saw a top drawer with a key, and was told that there was in it a small object in a leather case. Thinking of medals, I asked if it was military. “In a way” came the answer. There was no such drawer in our house, but there was, on the top of a narrow cupboard, a small case with a key, about the width of the cupboard. This might have looked like a top drawer. It contained a few unimportant objects, but with them was a small leather case, and in it a longish pin with thistle decorations, made to imitate a dirk or dagger.’ Wilson Knight occasionally engages in spirit-writing which purports to come from either his mother or his brother. On November 14, 1965, he used it to enquire about the pin, and was told: ‘It was a military symbol meaning the regiment’s persisting life, and it was given to me by the Colonel of my regiment in 1918.’ Wilson Knight adds: ‘I do not regard my spirit-writing as authoritative on matters of factual detail, though in other things I have found it valuable. But I regard the main message as wholly convincing. JK’s friends and godsons meant very much to him – he loved giving them presents – and his army and O.T.C. experiences were probably the greatest passion of his life. Whatever the story of this pin may have been, my brother’s anxious injunction bore every sign of his personality.’ It was forwarded as requested.

‘I now offer an example that does not concern myself,’ Wilson Knight writes.

For this I rely on a detailed report made for me by Professor Bonamy Dobrée of Leeds University. On 7 June 1952 I invited some of the university staff to accompany me to a demonstration by a famous visiting medium, Mr. Gordon Higginson. There was a large audience, perhaps a thousand. One, whom I shall call ‘Mr. A.’, was told, correctly, his Leeds house-number and road-name, and was asked if the name of his neighbour was ‘B’. ‘B’, being new to the neighbourhood, ‘A’ was not sure. Two Christian names were given, ‘C’ for the Mr. B, and ‘D-E’, two female names, presumably for his wife. Of these names ‘A’ knew nothing. ‘D-E’ was said to have had a conversation that morning, and there was a message for her.

After the meeting ‘A’ made enquiries next door. The surname and both Christian names were correct. A number that had been given turned out to be the number of a house which ‘B’ had recently left, and where he still kept his car. Both Mr. and Mrs. B however at first denied any ‘conversation’ by ‘D-E’, as she had been alone all the morning; but soon after they returned to say that there had indeed been a conversation over the telephone, and ‘B’ said: ‘Please tell us what the message was, because the conversation was about something important; indeed, about the most important thing we have ever done in our lives.’ Unfortunately ‘A’ had been so shattered by the identifications that he could not recall the message.

‘A’ was, as it happened, a laboratory assistant at the University, though not of our party. He must have seen Professor Dobrée there, because he visited him in a state of considerable disturbance to tell him what had happened. I then asked Professor Dobrée to make out for me an exact transcript, from which I have drawn in this account, of all that he remembered of Gordon Higginson’s rapid-fire questions and the subsequent ratifications …

Such accounts as these may not be spectacular – concerning, as they do, mainly small details – but when taken together they constitute an overwhelming argument for human survival of bodily death. Wilson Knight remarks: ‘No theories of the “unconscious mind” can explain such messages,’ and this is surely true. In the above case, the Society for Psychical Research would have obtained signed statements from everybody involved, and regarded the case as proven; and it is hard to see how the most hostile sceptic could fault this procedure, short of suggesting mass collusion between the medium, the laboratory assistant, the next-door neighbours and Professors Dobrée and Wilson Knight. But then, cases like this one turn up with such frequency in the records of the S.P.R. that it is surely more logical to accept the phenomena as genuine. Whether or not we are prepared to attach any great importance to it, the case for ‘survival’ must be regarded as conclusively proven. I shall leave a discussion of its ultimate importance to the final pages of this book.

On this topic, Wilson Knight himself concedes: ‘Having had enough evidence to convince me that helping powers are near, I am not nowadays over-anxious for “messages”. My main interest is probably in trance addresses by a Spirit personality speaking through a medium in trance. The best of these bear external impress of their authority: in use and harmonisation of vocal tone, physical poise, gesture and syntax, they rival and perhaps surpass our leading exponents of church or stage.’

After the death of his mother, Caroline, in 1950, JK received messages from her via a South African medium, Margaret Lloyd. (JK was in London when Caroline Knight ‘came through’; he reports: ‘I had nursed her during her last weeks, and now she was transmitting messages in detailed and intimate terms about her death and much else that concerned her family.’ One of the African messages had mentioned a silver cup with a history, which JK thought he could identify. Before he was executed, Charles I took his last communion from the hands of Archbishop Juxon, and two gold or silver cups were used. There was a tradition in Wilson Knight’s family that these cups had passed to certain ancestors in Jamaica, and Caroline Knight was said to have been christened from one of them. Wilson Knight engaged a researcher, R. S. Forman, to see if he could find any reference to the cups in family documents. But no mention of them could be found in various wills; it began to look as if the cups were a myth. But Caroline Knight continued to insist, through mediums, that they really existed. In April 1951, Wilson Knight attended a service at which Mrs. Nella Taylor was the medium; she singled him out, and told him that she could see a figure with a red hood, an Oxford hood, holding out a roll of parchment towards him. He assumed this to be a will. A few days later he received an excited letter from his researcher. A will had been found that proved the existence of the cups ‘which formerly belonged to Archbishop Juxon’; they had been left to an ancestor of the Knights, Samuel Jackson – who, oddly enough, had been at Oxford. The figure with the red hood had appeared when news of the will was leaving Jamaica for London.

‘Perhaps the most striking of all my experiences,’ writes Wilson Knight, ‘came when I thought I was being advised, through Mrs. Gwen Jones at the Exeter church, not to go to Cape Town in 1952 for a visiting lectureship. This I could not understand. But the confusion was my own fault. The message only referred to “going abroad” and I had forgotten that I was also dallying with the offer to take up a permanent appointment in Drama at the University of California. Still anxious, I attended a circle in Exeter. With some difficulty and a sense of great strain and urgency, my mother herself “controlled” the medium, Dorothy Perkins – she had only once done this before – saying very slowly: “I want you to go to South Africa. Not to America. Get the house settled first.” All was then clear. My brother and I were buying a house, and it would have been most unwise to take up the California appointment. What was so convincing was the sense of urgency on an important family issue, causing my mother to labour hard to put things right.’

Wilson Knight knew John Cowper Powys well. In a preface to the 1960 edition of Wolf Solent, Powys wrote: ‘Whatever death may mean, and none of us really know, I have come to the conclusion for myself that when I die it is the complete and absolute end of me …’ He died on June 17, 1963, aged ninety. One month later, Miss Frances Horsfield, a medium of Bideford, Devon, addressed Wilson Knight during a demonstration in the Exeter church. A man was standing by him: ‘He has rather gaunt features, with high cheek bones and unruly hair. He is a personality. I find it difficult to get close to him. He is nearly controlling me [i.e. speaking through her] but I do not want that. He was himself an occultist, and knew as much as anyone about the continuity of life … He wrote, didn’t he?’ Wilson Knight said yes. Miss Horsfield then asked, ‘Can I go to Wales?’ confirming his suspicion that it was Powys. The medium went on: ‘He is so close to you. It’s a wonder you can’t sense him yourself … His power is so strong that you may well see him yourself some time … He has a lovely smile, and a wide, gleaming mouth. He is thanking you for what you did for him, and in return he wants to help you …’ Afterwards, the medium added that Powys had a ‘beaklike nose’. She had not herself read any of Powys’s books, but she repeated that his power was greater than any she had experienced.

When Wilson Knight told her that Powys had often discussed life after death in his books, but had become sceptical towards the end, she commented, ‘Anyway, he knows all about it now.’

Later Jackson Knight received a message from Powys via the same medium, which he sent to Wilson Knight on a postcard. ‘Powys wants to give you some evidential cross-reference. Miss Horsfield gets the word “sensualism” for you to explain.’ Readers of Powys will know that sensuality is a key word in all his work (one of his best philosophical books is called In Defense of Sensuality). The word carries mystical overtones. Wilson Knight adds: ‘In some letters to me of January or February 1957 Powys had emphasised the importance of masturbation as a way to the mastery of dangerous impulse; and he had urged me to act as “a kind of missionary” in this cause. When I last saw him in 1963, he was weak and hardly spoke at all, but instead used an emphatic sign language of knotted hands, which I took to hold a sexual reference; perhaps it was a final injunction to me to hand on the masturbatory doctrine. It is probable that Powys’s second message through Miss Horsfield had a more than “evidential” purpose, and was intended to remind me about the doctrine.’*

It must be frankly acknowledged that the objection that many intelligent people feel towards spiritualism is less a doubt about the validity of its evidence than about the way it seems to simplify the universe. The worst thing about human life is the way that human beings remain stuck in the ‘triviality of everydayness’, the way they accept the limitations of their narrow consciousness. Plato points out that the philosopher and the poet spend their lives trying to escape the limitations of the body, aware that consciousness can take in wider vistas – William James’s ‘distant horizons of fact’ – but not sure how to wriggle out of the trap in which we all seem to be caught. Poets, philosophers and saints are centrally concerned with escaping this trap (which Christians call original sin). Perhaps the sceptic’s central objection to spiritualism could be expressed like this: that after Dante’s Comedy, the visions of St. John of the Cross and William Blake, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the paintings of Van Gogh, there is something anticlimactic about the ‘messages’ that come through at spiritualist meetings. But it would be a mistake to make too much of this point. After all, messages from the dead to the living are bound to be concerned mainly with everyday affairs. (We might also bear in mind that the young couple in Bonamy Dobrée’s script said that the message concerned ‘the most important’ action of their lives.) And ‘spirit teachings’, whether in Swedenborg, Stainton Moses or a modern exponent like Maurice Barbanell, bear a stamp of healthy-minded authenticity. If the evidence was unassailable, a universal acceptance of life after death could only have a beneficial effect on our civilisation.

We might, at this point, take note of an odd fact recorded by Wilson Knight in an article written in 1960: ‘Physical mediums are now more scarce than in the past; the great ones of the last century are looked back on as classics; and it may well be that other kinds of phenomena will grow rare,’* It is a matter for regret that now when we have elaborate apparatus for testing the claims of mediums like Home and Eusapia Palladino, such powers should be dying out. This is a matter to which I must return in the concluding pages of this book.

Wilson Knight ends his article on spiritualism: ‘It is not to be supposed that Spiritualism can replace our set disciplines, but rather that it is, in different ways, basic to all … Sources must be tapped from deeper levels which owe nothing to our own minds.’ And this suggests at least a partial answer to the question raised in the last paragraph. In a case like Home, the ‘hidden powers’ lay at the red end of the spectrum, and this is no doubt why many intelligent men – like Hawthorne – thought them interesting but irrelevant. The powers Gurdjieff was striving to develop lay at the violet end. Home was like an iceberg; most of his being lay in the realm of the subconscious; Gurdjieff aimed at an extension of consciousness, an attempt to develop a strength of the mind equivalent to an athlete’s strength of body. Inevitably, he acquired ‘infra-red powers’ at the same time, for if the tree is to grow higher, its roots must also go deeper. Could it be that mediums are becoming scarcer because, at this point in human evolution, ultra-violet powers are more important than infra-red?

This raises another central point. Christian Science is in agreement with occult tradition in regarding the subconscious powers as a source of health. The simplest, and perhaps crudest, statement of this notion is expressed in the work of D. H. Lawrence. If man becomes too intellectual, says Lawrence, he destroys his deeper powers, breaks his contact with the realm of instinct, which is also the realm of enriched vitality. All that Lady Chatterley needs to rescue her from her devitalised existence is to return to the deep, dark realm of sex. But Lawrence’s own work reveals the fallacy behind this notion. At the end of his novels the reader wants to ask: What do the characters do now? Gurdjieff would have had no trouble in pinpointing the fallacy. He is concerned with people whose centres are out of harmony – whose sexual centre tries to work with emotional energy, and so on. Lawrence would advise such ‘dislocated people’ to go back to nature, to their primitive origins. They do, and the instinctive and sexual centres begin to work with their own energy. What now? Now, Gurdjieff would say, the serious work can begin. But this is precisely the point where Lawrence stops.

The subconscious powers are not the source of health – not on their own. Otherwise Lawrence would not have died of tuberculosis at forty-five. And Sri Ramakrishna, who could plunge into samadhi a dozen times a day, would not have died of a cancer of the throat. Paracelsus knew better: that the source of health is the evolutionary drive, whose major instrument is imagination – Faculty X. Life that marks time, whether on the highest intellectual or the lowest instinctive level, is in danger of stagnation. Occult powers on their own are no more desirable than the power to do enormous sums in mental arithmetic. Aldous Huxley remarks, in a letter to J. B. Rhine (December 30, 1942): ‘… the mystics … have been unanimous in warning aspirants to the knowledge of God to have nothing to do with the psychic powers which they are likely to develop while pursuing the path of contemplation; for such powers, and the “miracles” which they allow their owners to perform, have no more to do with divine Reality than the more familiar kinds of psycho-physical phenomena …’ And in the same letter, Huxley makes the vitally important point that all occult powers stem from the human mind itself, not from gods or demons or spirits. ‘This means that any religion, if intensely enough believed in, creates the objects of its worship – gods, defunct saints, and the like. These objectifications or projections may become centres of energy reinforcing the energies of individual prayers, desires and imaginations, and thus may assist the worshipper in getting the result he desires. Thus, in … The Tibetan Book of the Dead … are to be found the most categorical statements to the effect that the tutelary deities of the worshipper and even the High Buddhas themselves are objectifications projected by human minds and ultimately unreal. The finally independent reality is the Clear Light of the Void …’ According to this view, even the Christian Scientist notion that God is the source of health is a misunderstanding; the source lies in the worshipper’s own mind.

And so we reach the paradoxical conclusion that the apparitions of the dead that speak through mediums are already in the mind of the medium, and yet are objective realities. It would be a mistake to draw a distinction between Home’s ‘own’ powers and the power of spirits operating through him; they are one and the same.

In 1882, ten years after Home’s retirement, W. F. Barrett, F. W. H. Myers and Henry Sidgwick founded the Society for Psychical Research, and a brilliant young intellectual, Edmund Gurney, became one of its leading lights. The date should have marked a turning point in the history of occultism, since it meant that solid, sceptical Englishmen with a scientific turn of mind would now investigate a subject whose advocates had so far been cranks, or at least romantics.

The results were disappointing. Gurney committed suicide in a Brighton hotel in 1888 when he discovered that certain trusted mediums were tricksters.* And although the S.P.R. has had many eminent adherents – from Sir William Crookes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge down to Professors C. D. Broad and Wilson Knight – it has failed to make any general impact. The Reverend Stainton Moses, a remarkable psychic who developed his powers by conscious effort, left the Society in 1886 because he felt it was too cold and scientific; for him, spiritualism was a religion. But the general public was not interested in spiritualism as a science or religion. This is as true today as it was in 1882. And the reason, almost certainly, is the one we have already discussed: that there is something oddly uninspiring about these accounts of messages from the dead, apparitions of the living and so on – like a cold Methodist Sunday School on a wet afternoon.

There is a failure, for example, to note the sexual origin of some of the phenomena. One of the most notable of the mediums after Home, Eusapia Palladino, never made any secret about her strong erotic tendencies. When W. F. Monck was exposed as a fraudulent medium in 1876, obscene letters were found in his luggage; they were from women with whom he had been carrying on intrigues in the darkness of the séance room. Myers himself had a reputation as a would-be Don Juan, and it was undoubtedly some odd sexual obsession that made him insist on accompanying Gurney on his honeymoon to Switzerland, in spite of Mrs. Gurney’s protests. Houdini, who investigated many mediums for fraud, disclosed that they often offered ‘payment in kind’ for his collusion; the late Negley Farson told me of an interview with Houdini during which Houdini claimed to have spent one séance with his hand inside the knickers of the medium. Trevor Hall has pointed out that Myers was a ‘queer character’ in other ways; there was a scandal at Cambridge about Myers’s theft of twenty-five lines from someone else’s poem in an effort he claimed to be his own, and a fellow student described returning unexpectedly to his room and finding Myers reading his letters.

I am not asserting that all this proves anything against spiritualism; it doesn’t. Eusapia Palladino was undoubtedly a genuine medium; yet she was exposed for fraud several times; a kind of genial dishonesty seemed to be part of her character, as of Madame Blavatsky’s. At her early séances, spectators were enraged when the spirits relieved them of their wallets and watches. Eusapia was often firmly tied to a chair when this happened; but her subconscious desires clearly affected the spirits. Myers’s dubious character in matters of sex or other people’s correspondence does not prove that he would be capable of faking the results of a séance; but it should be taken into account that his motives in forming the S.P.R. may have been highly charged and emotional rather than purely scientific. No one would suspect this in reading the carefully objective publications of these early members of the S.P.R.: Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Phantasms of the Living (by Myers, Gurney and Podmore), Apparitions (by G. N. M. Tyrrell) or even C. D. Broad’s Lectures on Psychical Research (1962). All this has tended to present a picture of spiritualism as a harmless branch of Christianity, when, in fact, it is more closely related to the witchcraft of the Reformation or the Dionysian religion of ancient Greece. Perhaps if this was more generally recognised – by spiritualists themselves as well as by the general public – the result might be a more widespread interest in the movement, as well as a deeper understanding of the forces involved. In the case of the S.P.R., the sober public image may be explained by the following comment from Harry Price: ‘The late Sir William Barrett [the founder] once wrote me that he was “treated like a child” at the Council meetings, and that “Mrs. Sidgwick always gets her own way” – which I could quite believe. The feminine element was always a factor at the S.P.R., as in most psychic societies.’

Price, who made his name as a highly sceptical investigator of psychic matters, was himself the subject of a vigorous debunking by the S.P.R. after his death. The case is worth citing as an example of the virtues and limitations of the sceptical approach to the occult.

In June 1929 a London newspaper carried an article about alleged hauntings at a rectory near Sudbury, in Essex. Harry Price, an eminent member of the S.P.R., decided to investigate. In 1940 Price published a book about Borley Rectory called The Most Haunted House in England, calling it ‘the best-authenticated case of haunting in the annals of psychical research’. The book caused a sensation. In 1956, not long after Price’s death, the S.P.R. published a book called The Haunting of Borley Rectory, by E. J. Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall, whose main purpose was to discredit Price. Price, amusingly enough, had made a name for himself by his investigation into fraudulent mediums. The strange legends about Borley date from long before Price heard of the place. It had been built in 1863 by a clergyman named Bull, and his son had lived there after his death; Bull junior was interested in psychical research.

When Price investigated the house in 1929, the tenant was the Rev. G. E. Smith and his wife, who left not long after. A couple named Foyster moved in; the wife, Marianne, was much younger than her husband. (She was thirty-one.) Poltergeist phenomena now began to occur in earnest. Mrs. Foyster was struck and thrown out of bed; objects flew around; a child’s footsteps were heard; messages addressed to ‘MF’ were found scrawled on walls; bells rang; raps sounded; doors were locked, furniture overturned. Price was inclined to suspect Marianne’s honesty in connection with some of these occurrences. At all events, the Foysters moved out in 1935. In 1937 Price rented the rectory and moved back with a team of investigators; but very little occurred. It was burned down in 1939. Price died in 1948.

In The Most Haunted House in England, Price states that on his first day there he saw a shadowy shape like the phantom nun in the garden, and his colleague (a journalist) actually saw her clearly. The window of a sealed room was smashed from the inside, and a tile and a candlestick thrown out. The various legends and stories seemed to be fairly unambiguous; the Rev. Harry Bull (the spiritualist) claimed that he had often seen ghosts, induding the nun, a phantom coach and an unidentified man. His daughter, Miss Ethel Bull, confirmed in a letter to Trevor Hall in 1953 that she had been wakened to find a strange man standing beside her bed, and had felt someone sitting down on the bed on one or two occasions. She also saw the nun several years after her father’s death.

Perhaps the most weighty piece of evidence against Price is a letter written by Mrs. Smith, the wife of the rector in 1929, flatly denying that they ever believed the house to be haunted; this appeared in the Church Times. In a longer statement in 1949, Mrs. Smith suggested that Price himself probably produced some of the phenomena – a pebble that whizzed across the room, a glass of water that turned to ink. But she admitted that even when Price was not present, odd things happened: she heard the gate open and saw the headlamps of some vehicle in the darkness outside, but there was no vehicle; her husband heard voices; doors and windows were found open. But when the authors of the later ‘investigation’ looked through the files of letters written by the Smiths to Price in 1929, they discovered that both the Smiths seemed to be convinced that there were ghosts. ‘Borley is undoubtedly haunted,’ said the Reverend Smith.

The technique of the S.P.R. book is to attempt to discredit as many of the ‘hauntings’ as can be discredited, to advance natural explanations as often as possible, including the dishonesty of Price and Marianne Foyster. But all their ‘natural explanations’ cannot obscure the basic facts. The house had a reputation of being haunted before Price heard of it. The Smiths believed it was haunted at the time Price investigated it in 1929. All kinds of poltergeist phenomena occurred when the Foysters were there. And Price took the trouble to rent the house and investigate it again in 1937. If he produced the phenomena in his earlier investigation, what prevented him from doing it again now, since none of his ‘team’ had any suspicion of him? Price devoted his life to psychical research, and witnessed many genuine phenomena – for example, those of Willy Schneider, also described by Thomas Mann in An Experience in the Occult. Why should he take so much trouble to build up a ‘worthless legend’ on a slender foundation? While a sense of drama and desire to convince often led him to exaggerate, it is a long way from this to believing that he actually fabricated phenomena. In fact, another lengthy report on the case prepared for the S.P.R. by R. J. Hastings ends by admitting that there is no evidence of fraud.

The same rather uncharitable attitude to Price is shown in another book by Dingwall and Hall, Four Modern Ghosts, which examines Price’s account of a séance at which a little girl named Rosalie materialised. Price’s story (in Fifty Years of Psychical Research) is that after a broadcast about Borley Rectory in 1937, a lady rang him up and invited him to a séance where Rosalie was expected to materialise. The lady’s one condition was that Price should not publish the address of the house or anything by which the people could be identified. He attended the séance at a house in south London, met the mother of the dead Rosalie and various other people. Not long after the séance began, Rosalie appeared, and Price was allowed to touch her, a naked child of about six; he could also see her by means of a luminous plaque. When the séance was over, Price investigated and found that the seals on the room were all intact.

The next morning, Mrs. Kathleen Goldney (one of the authors of the ‘exposure’ of Borley Rectory) saw Price, and found him haggard and distraught; he told her about his experience, stuttering badly. (Price normally had a slight stutter.) Subsequently Price told the story at a gathering of the Ghost Club (which he had formed) and wrote the account in his book. Dingwall wrote Price a jeering letter about the story, suggesting that if they could have materialised a white horse, too, Rosalie could have played Lady Godiva. He was surprised, apparently, when Price failed to reply. In the article in Four Modern Ghosts, the authors admit that Mrs. Goldney really saw Price looking badly shaken the morning after the Rosalie experience, but go on to explain why they disbelieve the story. Price described the house in some detail while not revealing which part of London it was to be found in. In a letter he had apparently mentioned it as being in Brockley. The authors thereupon got hold of an ordnance survey map of Brockley, and ascertained that no house there fitted Price’s description; at least, there was one, but the tenants had only been there for a year in 1937, and Price claimed that the Rosalie séances had been going on since 1929. However, Price himself had lived in Brockley as a child, and even attended a séance in the road in which the authors found their house. They inferred that Price had seen the house a number of times when he lived in Brockley and had used its description in his invented tale of Rosalie.

It is significant that Mrs. Goldney, who worked closely with Price for many years, remarked during the Borley investigation: ‘… though I credited Price with intellectual dishonesty, I had not imagined he would ever himself stoop to fraudulent actions.’ Mr. Dingwall, who had also known Price since 1922, was equally convinced that Price would do anything for publicity. He said something of the sort in an essay that he was invited to contribute to Dr. P. Tabori’s biography of Price; this scathing little pen portrait was so harsh that it was not printed in the book, but Dingwall prints an extract from it in Four Modern Ghosts which makes it quite clear that he disliked Price. So the ‘unbiased’ examination of the two books is based on personal dislike. This is not to say that Dingwall is deliberately unfair; but it does suggest that he sets out to play the prosecutor rather than the detached judge. He concludes his remarks on Price: ‘… he never, in my opinion, advanced our real knowledge of the supernormal in any way whatsoever’. Precisely the same thing can be said of Mr. Dingwall. His attacks on Price did not even advance our knowledge of the normal. For what can we conclude, having read them, and read Price’s own accounts of the same events? Borley could have been a series of coincidences and fakes. But if we are willing to admit the existence of ‘supernormal’ phenomena, there is nothing very extraordinary here. The rectory was built in 1863 – whether on the site of an old monastery or not is beside the point. The Rev. Harry Bull was a medium, and he even stated his intention of returning to the rectory after his death. He contacted various ‘spirits’ there, and his daughter, who inherited his sensitivity, also saw spirits. The Smiths were not particularly sensitive, but they observed a few poltergeist phenomena. But Marianne Foyster provoked a whole crop of poltergeist phenomena; whether these were entirely due to her own ‘psyche’ or to ‘spirits’ is not known. When she left, the phenomena stopped, although Man, Myth and Magic prints a photograph allegedly showing a brick floating in the air at the time when the rectory was being demolished. There is nothing very hard to accept in all this: from the records of the S.P.R. or Sir Ernest Bennett’s carefully documented Apparitions and Haunted Houses (1939) a hundred other similar cases could be extracted. And the same applies to the account of the materialisation of Rosalie. If it was the only case of its kind, it might be worth a great deal of sceptical investigation. But there have been many more materialisations, and there is nothing inherently improbable in the story. Unless someone can produce a book proving that Price was a pathological liar with a craving for publicity, it is necessary to suspend judgement. And this leaves us back where we started.

It should be noted that Dingwall himself is not a sceptic about psychical phenomena; on a number of occasions in Very Peculiar People and Some Human Oddities he is willing to admit that he cannot suggest any natural explanation for certain phenomena (e.g. the flying monk of Copertino), and presumably he would not have bothered to write books about such things unless they interested him.

This problem – of the ambiguity of psychic phenomena – was raised again in the year 1970 by appearance of an extraordinary record entitled ‘Rosemary Brown’s Music’. Rosemary Brown is a London housewife, now in her forties; she is also a medium. Sometime in the mid-sixties, she began to hold spirit-conversations with an elderly gentleman who introduced himself as a musician. In 1965 she became aware that he was the composer Liszt. Mrs. Brown could play the piano, although not particularly well, and knew a little about music. At Liszt’s dictation she wrote down a few pieces in his style. Then Liszt brought other composers, including Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Brahms and Debussy. Mrs Brown was soon taking down music as fast as she could write. Influential people became interested, and a fund was started to allow her to devote full time to her musical activities. The BBC did a programme about her, and it was impressive. For it seemed reasonably clear that Mrs. Brown must be receiving the music from somewhere – it was not purely her own invention. Other ‘musical mediums’ who were played on the programme could have been frauds, consciously or unconsciously; improvisations ‘in the manner’ of Chopin or Liszt were no better than, say, Victor Borge’s imitations of various composers. Mrs. Brown’s work was usually more complex, and one got the impression that she found some of it quite bewildering.

The record can allow listeners to judge for themselves. On one side, Mrs. Brown plays Liszt, Grieg, Chopin and Schumann; on the other, the concert pianist Peter Katin plays pieces by Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, Chopin and Brahms – all of them too difficult for Mrs. Brown’s modest abilities as a pianist. The spirit of Sir Donald Tovey, the musicologist, dictated a typical introduction to Mrs. Brown on January 1, 1970:

Humanity is now moving into an age of increasing emancipation from many of its past limitations. Technical achievements and medical advances confer growing freedom from various oppressions and ills. Man’s greatest problem is still himself and his orientation to his fellow beings. To understand himself fully he should become aware of the fact that he does not consist merely of a temporary form which is doomed to age and die. He has an immortal soul which is housed in an immortal body and endowed with a mind that is independent of the physical brain. In communication through music and conversation, an organised group of musicians who have departed from your world are attempting to establish a precept for humanity: i.e. that physical death is a transition from one state of consciousness to another wherein one retains one’s individuality. The realisation of this fact should assist man to a greater insight into his own nature and potential super-terrestrial activities. The knowledge that incarnation in your world is but one stage of man’s eternal life should foster policies which are more far-seeing than those frequently adopted at present, and encourage a more balanced outlook regarding all matters …

This is clear enough: the musicians wish to convince humanity that death is not the end. But does the music achieve this effect? That is hard to say. Enos Shupp, Jr., a reviewer in The New Records (a magazine issued in Philadelphia) says of the Peter Katin side: ‘Some of them could be considered practically first quality by the particular composer; none could be considered other than very fine.’ But if we try to imagine Beethoven or Brahms agreeing to compose music in order to convince us that they are still alive, we immediately anticipate something totally convincing, something that startles the listener with its power and audacity, as the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony startled Beethoven’s contemporaries. And there is nothing of the sort on this record. In fact, all of it could have been composed by any skilled musician – for example, by Peter Katin himself. But Mrs. Brown is not a skilled musician; she does not even have a gramophone in her house. And so the balance of probability is on her side. The question remains: If the great composers wish to convince us of life after death, why do they not do it by composing a masterpiece? That would be the most overpowering evidence. If the spirits could add one poem or symphony of genius to our present stock, it would make more converts for spiritualism than all the publications of the S.P.R.

Mrs. Brown is apparently taking down Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony at this moment, so perhaps the spirits have already reached the same conclusion. In the meantime, Mrs. Brown’s recorded music will convince those who want to believe, and leave the sceptics as incredulous as ever.

In his excellent book Apparitions, G. N. M. Tyrrell makes a useful distinction between ghosts and ‘crisis apparitions’. He cites a typical crisis case. A woman bending over her baby turned around and saw her brother, an airman; he looked perfectly solid and normal; she assumed he had been given leave from France, where he was in the air force (this was 1917), and spent a moment putting the baby in a safe position before turning to speak to him. But he had vanished. She was still not convinced that she had seen an apparition; she called out to him, thinking he was hiding for a joke. But he was nowhere to be seen; she then began to feel sick and afraid. It was another two weeks before she learned that her brother was missing.

A ghost may also look perfectly lifelike – most real-life ghost stories concern quite solid-looking ghosts – but they usually behave in a way that indicates that they are hardly aware of the human beings present; Tyrrell speaks of their ‘somnambulistic or automatic behaviour’. The theatre critic W. Macqueen Pope, in his book Pillars of Drury Lane, describes actually seeing one of the theatre’s most famous ghosts, ‘the man in grey’, who, on one occasion, walked out of a wall in the upper circle, walked through the bar and disappeared through the opposite wall, completely ignoring the people present. He could be seen at a distance of several feet, but vanished at close quarters, reappearing again when he was several feet away from the onlooker. While it would not be entirely true to say that ghosts of this type always ignore people, it does seem that they are not fully conscious of their surroundings. In this sense, they bear an odd resemblance to spectres of the living. I have already pointed out that Powys did not know that he had appeared to Theodore Dreiser until Dreiser rang him up and told him. Tyrrell cites the curious and quite inconclusive case of Canon Bourne, who was out hunting with his two daughters and a coachman; the daughters decided to return home, and the father went on. As they turned to go home, both daughters and the coachman saw Canon Bourne waving to them from the other side of the valley, signalling them to follow; he looked dirty and shaken. They hurried to the place where he had been, but found no one there. This story should end with the daughters arriving home and learning that their father had been thrown from his horse and was seriously injured. In fact, he returned home not long after they did, perfectly unharmed, and verified that he had not waved to them, and had not met with an accident. What seems to have happened is that, in some unconscious way, he had projected a figure of himself waving to them.

Tyrrell cites a similar case in which someone deliberately tried to ‘appear’ to two sisters who lived in a house at Kew; the experimenter (presumably a woman) sat by the fire in her room and made an intense effort of concentration, which resulted in a kind of trance, during which she was conscious but could not move. Half an hour later, she threw off the trance with an effort of will. The following day, she visited Kew and discovered that the experiment had been remarkably successful; a lady in the house (but not one of those to whom she was trying to ‘appear’) said that she had seen her walking along the passage at 9.30 the previous evening – the time she had started making the attempt. She had reappeared in the front bedroom at midnight, when she had taken the hand of the lady in the bed (who was awake) and stared into her eyes. The odd feature of this second appearance is that the experimenter was asleep in her own bed at the time, although she had determined to ‘appear’ in the front bedroom of the Kew house at midnight.

We are here quite clearly dealing with some form of telepathy, and it is tempting to assume that all crisis apparitions are the result of telepathy between people who are close together. But there are too many well-attested cases of the apparitions appearing to several people for this to be wholly acceptable. Tyrrell cites a case in which a housewife saw an unknown naval officer bending over the end of the bed; she drew her husband’s attention to the man, and the husband shouted irritably, ‘What on earth are you doing here, sir?’ and leapt out of bed. The naval officer then walked off through the wall. The housewife wondered if the apparition portended some danger to her brother, who was in the navy, but her husband said impatiently, ‘No, it was my father’ – who had been dead for fourteen years. The husband was in financial difficulties, and the apparition was there to warn him not to take a certain step he was contemplating.

In his book The Vital Message, Conan Doyle states: ‘The physical basis of all psychic belief is that the soul is a complete duplicate of the body, resembling it in the smallest particular, although constructed of some far more tenuous material. In ordinary conditions these two bodies are intermingled so that the identity of the finer one is entirely obscured. At death, however, and under certain conditions in the course of life, the two can divide and be seen separately.’ This view certainly sounds naïve, and most intelligent people would no doubt dismiss it as wishful thinking. But it must be admitted that the more one reads on these matters, the more common-sensible it sounds. Naïve or not, evidence supports the view that physical death is not total extinction (as materialists believe) or even a transition to some higher mystical plane that is completely incomprehensible to human beings – a view that is tempting to the mystically inclined – but for the time being at any rate, some kind of continuation of the physical personality. The view expressed satirically by Noël Coward in Blithe Spirit, where the ghosts behave exactly as though they were human beings, is well supported by the evidence. Sir Ernest Bennett’s Apparitions and Haunted Houses, one of the best-documented books on the subject, cites a case in which an old chimney sweep, Samuel Bull, died of ‘sooty cancer’, leaving behind a bed-ridden widow in the charge of his daughter and son-in-law. There were five children in the house, as well as a twenty-one-year-old grandson. The family were living in overcrowded and unhappy conditions in a condemned cottage, and no doubt the widow experienced considerable distress. About nine months later, the children became nervous and restless; they were unable to sleep because they said someone was outside the door. Then one evening, the ghost of the chimney sweep walked up the stairs and through the door of the room in which he had died, and in which his widow now lay. On the first occasion this happened, the grandchildren were terrified; but as it continued over two months, they began to get used to it, and took it calmly. The apparition would stand by Mrs. Bull’s bed, with his hand on her forehead – she said it felt firm but cold. These visits were not brief – one lasted more than an hour – and everyone in the family saw them. The S.P.R. was notified only a short time before the family was re-housed in April 1932, when the appearances had ceased, but the signed statements and long interviews with members of the family make it unlikely that this was a plot to gain publicity. The ghost seems to have appeared because he was worried about his wife and the generally unhappy condition of the family; he usually looked sad, but on his last two appearances, seemed much more cheerful – by this time, the family expected to move to a better house.

Under the circumstances, it would obviously be of interest if ‘the spirits’ would take the trouble to explain exactly what does happen after death, and how long they are kept hanging around in an earth-bound condition. Bishop Pike’s son Jim began by explaining, ‘I am not in purgatory – but something like hell here,’ and added that nobody blamed him. It might seem that only confused ‘spirits’ find themselves in Jim Pike’s ‘limbo’, but since Bishop Pike alleges that Paul Tillich also communicated, this cannot be maintained. Swedenborg explains that in the ‘after-life’, spirits progress and evolve just as they do on earth, and that ‘hell’ must be understood as a mental condition of confused and self-tormenting spirits. This sounds immediately plausible; but Swedenborg’s extraordinary comments on the inhabitants of the moon lead one to suspect his reliability as a witness of the other world. Conan Doyle’s descriptions of ‘the other side’ makes it sound like an idealised version of this one: ‘They are very busy on all forms of congenial work. The world in which they find themselves is very much like that which they have quitted, but everything keyed to a higher octave. [The word ‘octave’ is interesting in this connection – Gurdjieff asserts that the universe is based on a principle of octaves.] As in a higher octave the rhythm is the same, and the relation of notes to each other the same, but the total effect different, so it is here.’ Children grow up, but there is no ageing apart from this, and there is ‘close union between the sexes’ but no physical side to love. (Jim Pike explained, ‘Yes, there is sex, but it is not like it is there. It is not physical, of course, but actually there is less limitation … Here you can actually enter the whole person.’)

We may consider all this absurd, but then, the whole subject of the occult is full of ‘absurdities’ that offend the logical mind and yet cannot be dismissed as fantasies. Our position in the world is absurd; life seems solid and real enough; but the moment we try to pursue any problem beyond a certain limit, it vanishes into a misty realm of ambiguities. We are enmeshed in dreams and illusions, and the strongest characteristic of the human race is stupidity and short-sightedness. And when we study some of these messages from the spirit world, there seems to be good reason for scepticism. G. K. Chesterton devotes several excellent pages of his Autobiography to spiritualism, and they have a ring of cheerful sanity that carries conviction. He agrees that in séances ‘something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power is that it tells lies’ (p. 82). He then tells some hilarious stories of his own experiments with a planchette (an apparatus for ‘automatic writing’). Asked what advice it would give to a very solid, dull member of Parliament of the group’s acquaintance, the planchette replied promptly ‘Get a divorce’. Since the wife was equally dull and respectable they asked it to elaborate, whereupon the planchette wrote at great speed and in one word. ‘’Orrible revelations in ’igh life.’ Chesterton senior tried testing the ‘spirits’ by asking the name of a distant relative. and the board answered ‘Manning.’ The father pointed out that this was untrue. The board replied. ‘Married before.’ To whom? they asked, and the board replied promptly, ‘Cardinal Manning.’

But when we have reached the point of agreeing with Chesterton that belief in ‘mediums and moonshine’ is probably a sign of feeblemindedness, we then have to recognise that the standpoint from which he is criticising them is that of orthodox Catholicism, which insists on the infallibility of the pope and the reality of the Devil, and that Chesterton’s air of strong-minded sanity is not to be trusted. The only thing that emerges with any certainty from the study of spiritualism and occultism is that our normal, sane, balanced standpoint is built upon quicksand, since it is based upon a commonsense view of human consciousness that does not correspond to the facts. Perhaps the only valid criticism of spiritualism is that it would be better to learn to grasp the facts of human consciousness before we concern ourselves with the facts about the ‘other world’.

And this brings us back again to the baffling subject of poltergeists, for a large number, if not all, of these are undoubtedly human in origin. The ‘phantom drummer of Tedworth’, one of the most celebrated of all poltergiests, was not a phantom but a living man. The ‘drummer’ was a vagabond named William Drury, who in March 1661 was making a nuisance of himself at the small town of Ludgershall in Wiltshire. A magistrate from nearby Tedworth, a Mr. John Mompesson, was told that the drummer was trying to blackmail local people into giving him money to stop his racket; and he had Drury arrested. Drury’s ‘pass’, authorising him to beg in that part of the world, proved to be counterfeit, Mr. Mompesson had the drum confiscated and the beggar sent to jail. The drum was sent to Mr. Mompesson’s house, and thereupon, an incredible series of poltergeist phenomena commenced. There were tremendous bangs and thumps on doors and walls. The disturbances would conclude with a tattoo beat on the drum. After a lull, the poltergeist began to terrorise the young children, beating tattoos on their bed, lifting them up into the air, shaking them and making sinister scratching noises under the bed. Mr. Mompesson had them removed to a neighbour’s house for peace. The ‘spirit’ attacked the blacksmith with a pair of pincers, snatched a sword from a guest and wrestled for it when he tried to take it back, and grabbed a large stick from a servant woman who was trying to bar its path. The Rev. Joseph Glanvil, who investigated the case and wrote about it, heard the scratching noises around the children’s bed, and was puzzled to find his horse sweating with terror when he went down to it the next morning. (The horse died shoftly after.)

Mompesson attempted communication with the spirit, asking it to knock three times if Drury lay behind the disturbances; three clear knocks sounded. Although the drummer was acquitted on the charge of forging a false warrant – for lack of evidence – he was transported for stealing a pig, whereupon the disturbances ceased.

It would be pointless to ask how Drury caused the disturbances (as he admitted he did). Probably he didn’t know himself. The power had something in common with Home’s strange knack of making furniture float, and something in common with Powys’s ‘astral projection’; that much is apparent. It is also safe to say that we all possess the power – at least, potentially. It seems to be stronger, or at least, closer to the surface, in children than in adults, but it is not true, as some writers have stated, that children are always involved in poltergeist disturbances. It is impossible to doubt that they are caused by ‘monsters from the subconscious’; case after case makes this clear. In The Personality of Man, Tyrrell describes the case of a neurotic child, a girl of fourteen, who was going through the usual tensions of puberty when odd phenomena began to occur; they were not very spectacular, but unexplainable; when she was asleep, the bed made clicking sounds, and noises occurred in other parts of the room that had no obvious cause. In Poltergeists, Sacheverell Sitwell describes a female child who became flushed and breathed more heavily when poltergeist disturbances occurred; but no matter how loud the bangs and raps became, she slept on. Dingwall describes a case that he personally investigated. A mother and daughter lived alone in a house in southern England while the father was absent; both were bored. The mother often went out in the evening, leaving the child alone. Then the disturbances began – plates flying about, doors banging, raps and crashes all over the house. The mother stopped going out, and the disturbances ceased. The child was not counterfeiting the disturbances – they were genuine enough – but her subconscious mind was making sure that her mother stayed home.* But beyond this, it is difficult to generalise about poltergeist phenomena. There have been cases in which a house has remained ‘haunted’ by a poltergeist throughout a number of tenancies, and others where the poltergeist has been active for many years. (The Willington Mill poltergeist, cited by Sitwell, displayed enormous inventiveness over twelve years, showing itself as an apparition of a monkey, a cat, a veiled woman or a heavy-footed man, and produced every conceivable kind of noise from whistles and bangs to guttural remarks and the sound of machinery.) In most cases, the disturbances are not of long duration – perhaps a month or so. An article ‘Four Months in a Haunted House’ in Harper’s Magazine (1962) describes a typical case of poltergeist activity in a house in Cape Cod: thumps, bangs, rappings on walls. Its one unusual feature is a noise that the author (who uses the pen name Harlan Jacobs) describes as ‘the Grand Piano Smash’, which sounded as if a grand piano had been dropped on the floor; it shook the house. They were in the garage, from which the sound had come, three seconds after the crash, and found everything undisturbed. They heard the crash on two more occasions. The fourth time it happened, it was heard only by three visitors sleeping in the bedroom normally occupied by the author’s wife; they heard it, and described it as shaking the house; but the author and his wife, sleeping in another part of the small house, didn’t hear a thing. It is this aspect of ghost phenomena that leads Tyrrell, in common with Myers and Gurney, to theorise that some of the sights and sounds may be purely mental, a kind of telepathy, and that when they are heard or seen by a number of people, it is a case of telepathic intercommunication between the witnesses.

The energies that produce these disturbances may or may not be those known to physics. In The Night-Side of Nature (1849), Mrs. Catherine Crowe describes the case of Angélique Cottin, a fourteen-year-old French girl, who was weaving silk at an oak frame in January 1846 when the frame began to plunge about. The other girls all retreated to the other side of the room, then returned, one by one; the frame remained still until Angélique returned, then began to jerk violently again. Her family assumed it to be a devil and tried to have her exorcised, but the priest was inclined to believe it to be a physical phenomenon. He was probably right. The disturbances became less violent if she was standing on a carpet or waxed cloth and her ‘field of force’ did not affect metal. But ‘organic’ objects – even a heavy stone trough – would rear like a frightened horse if her apron touched them.

When she was tired, the effects diminished. Wilhelm Reich, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter, would undoubtedly attribute the phenomena to ‘orgone energy’, a form of universal energy not known to physics, and it must be admitted that it is hard to explain the forces produced by Angélique Cottin on any other hypothesis. The disturbances went on from mid-January until April, and then gradually died away. They were widely investigated at the time. Mrs. Crowe mentions a number of other similar instances, and adds the curious statement: ‘Many somnambulistic persons are capable of giving an electric shock; and I have met with one person, not somnambulistic, who informs me that he has frequently been able to do it by an effort of will.’ She goes on to describe the case of Mlle. Emmerich, sister of a professor at Strasbourg, who became ‘electrified’ as the result of a bad shock, which made her a sleep-walker, and whose body ‘became so surcharged with electricity that it was necessary for her relief to discharge it; and she sometimes imparted a complete battery of shocks to her brother and her physician, and whoever was near.’ She had apparently developed some degree of the power of the electric eel, which is still a mystery to science. (The electric eel can produce as much as 600 volts; its ‘bursts’ of electricity are extremely rapid, like machine-gun fire, and can be sprayed out at the rate of 3,000 a second.)

It seems probable that the ‘spontaneous combustion’ that fascinated the Victorians so much was related to this same curious energy. Since the nature of static electricity has been understood, it has ceased to provoke the same interest. But cases continue to occur, and they cannot always be explained by static electricity – at least, not the kind normally produced by dry hair or silk clothes. Several cases are cited in a chapter of Strange Unsolved Mysteries by Emile Schurmacher. A nineteen-year-old girl named Maybelle Andrews was dancing in a Soho nightclub with her boyfriend, Billy Clifford, when flames suddenly burst from her back, chest and shoulders, igniting her hair. She died on the way to hospital. Her boyfriend, who was badly burned trying to put her out, explained that there were no open flames in the room – the flames seemed to come from the girl herself. The Sheffield Independent reports a case of a building contractor, G. A. Shepherdson, who waved a hand at some workmen as he drove past, and then turned into a human torch. The London Daily Telegraph reports that A. F. Smith of Birkenhead burst into flames in the cab of his lorry; but the fire was confined to the cab, and did not originate in the cushions of his seat; a coroner’s jury was unable to determine the cause of the accident.

Professor Robin Beach, formerly of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, has made a study of human beings who are capable of building up enormous static charges. An Ohio manufacturer asked him to investigate inexplicable outbreaks of fire in his plant. He tested all the employees with a static electricity voltmeter, and discovered that one young woman carried a charge of 30,000 volts. Apparently this was due to a combination of circumstances: her dry skin, silky clothes, the dryness of the air in the plant and the carpets on the floors. Beach described a case of a man who was seriously injured when he unscrewed the cap of his car battery; an electrical discharge from his dry fingers exploded the hydrogen escaping from the battery and blew acid in his face. Most people, says Professor Beach, can, under certain circumstances, build up a charge of 15,000 volts, which is released when they touch any metal that is earthed. But this fails to explain how Maybelle Andrews burst into flames. If she was dancing – Schurmacher specifies the watusi – she was probably covered with a thin film of perspiration, which is not conducive to a build-up of static. Even supposing that she built up some immense charge, and brushed against an object that was earthed, there should only have been a brief flash, not an explosion of flames. And how could a man burst into flames in the cab of his lorry, when the rubber tyres insulate it from the earth?

Where do we draw the line between mental and physical powers, between the ‘normal’ and the psychic? When I bend my fingers, my nerves carry a message from my brain to the hand, but I have no idea of what happens in physical terms. I do not ‘make’ my fingers bend; there seems to be no intermediate process between wanting them to bend and bending them. Is this any less mysterious than the power of the electric eel to discharge 600 volts, or Angélique Cottin’s knack of making heavy objects jump when she approached them?

Jule Eisenbud, M.D., a member of the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, has devoted a whole book to his amazing researches into the powers of an alcoholic bellhop, Ted Serios, who can cause photographs to appear on a film by merely concentrating on the camera. Dr. Eisenbud’s book also illustrates the phenomenon I spoke of in the introduction to this book: the firm desire of ordinary people to ignore anything they cannot explain, and pretend it has never happened. Dr. Eisenbud was bothered by the problem of the non-repeatableness of most ‘psychic phenomena’, and wrote an article in which he said he looked forward to a more satisfactory phase in the history of psychical research. Someone thereupon sent him a paper that had been printed in Fate describing how Serios could produce photographs by staring into the camera lens with great concentration. The report stated that tests had been carried out over a number of months by scientists and photographers. Dr. Eisenbud’s first response was to wonder why the hell, in that case, this wasn’t a subject of general knowledge; then he decided that the answer must be that the people involved had not conducted their experiments with the necessary care and rigour. However, he eventually agreed to see a demonstration in Chicago. Ted Serios, a small, thin man, turned up in the hotel lobby – rather to Eisenbud’s surprise, since he had been warned about the psychic’s alcoholism. In the hotel room, Serios took a Polaroid camera loaded with film, stared into the lens with an intense concentration that made the veins stand out on his forehead, then relaxed after twenty seconds or so. The print, when taken out of the camera, was black. He tried seven more times before a plate came out with a dim, blurry picture of a tower-like building on it, which a lady present identified as the Chicago water tower, Serios complained of headache; he had drunk a certain amount of whisky. After a rest, there were more tries, and one of these produced another blurry but unmistakable picture of a hotel front with the words ‘Stevens’ across it; it was a hotel that had burned down some years before.

Eisenbud was understandably excited. He writes: ‘… I had also tried to show [that] it was necessary to postulate that we all had latent capacities to do unconsciously essentially what Ted was doing … in order to close in on what to my mind was the number-one problem in science, the phenomenon [of] precognition.’ He adds: ‘Now here it was, just as predicted, like the planet Pluto.’ He proceeded to ring up people who ought to be interested, and some professors who had seen the phenomenon agreed it was probably genuine. The result was a blank; they agreed it was genuine but couldn’t be bothered to investigate further. ‘So a guy takes pictures with his mind. So what?’ said one magazine editor. One professor explained that he had lost interest because in one of the photographs Serios had got the wrong building. (Eisenbud says that it reminds him of the joke about the talking horse that ends, ‘Don’t believe a word that horse says – he’s a pathological liar.’)

Serios’s claim to be included in this chapter lies in the way he developed his thought-photography. In 1955 he was working as a bellhop in a Chicago hotel, when a fellow employee discovered that he was an exceptionally good hypnotic subject. And under hypnosis, Serios became a ‘travelling clairvoyant’ – a subject already discussed in an earlier chapter – and journeyed mentally to distant places. On these mental expeditions, he made the acquaintance of a spirit who claimed to be Jean Laffite, a pirate and smuggler who died in the early nineteenth century, and Laffite took Serios to spots where he claimed buried treasure was hidden. An expedition to Florida to uncover some of this treasure was a failure, and Laffite seems to have got bored with his new acquaintance, for he became more difficult to summon up, until he vanished altogether. In spite of this, Ted’s powers of scrying turned up a few minor finds, and at one point a syndicate was formed to exploit it. Several hundred dollars were unearthed at one spot, but a rival syndicate had got there first. One of the problems was pinpointing the spots where the treasure was hidden, and at this point Serios’s fellow employee, George Johannes, handed him an ordinary camera and told him to try that. The resulting photographs astounded Serios, who thought at first that Johannes was pulling his leg. He bought his own camera, and got the same results. Finally, ill-health forced him to give up scrying, and one psychiatrist even convinced him that the whole thing had been some sort of an illusion. Eisenbud arrived on the scene after many years of ups and downs.

Eisenbud got Serios to Denver, and began a series of tests. In the first one, Serios managed to get a recognisable shot of the clock tower of Westminster Abbey – he had seen a photograph of it in a magazine the day before. A group of professors present were sufficiently impressed to sign testimonials about what they had witnessed. Eisenbud’s account of Serios does not reveal a strong personality – endless talk about himself, jejune talk about his attitude to the opposite sex, a large daily consumption of whisky. He failed to arrive for his second big demonstration, fleeing back to Chicago and making various excuses; returning later, he irritated the committee of professors prepared to bear witness by getting incoherently drunk.

Then, sensing that everybody’s patience had reached a limit, he grabbed the camera, concentrated hard and produced an excellent photograph of a double-decker bus, with the remark, ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

Eisenbud’s book The World of Ted Serios (1967) contains over a hundred of these ‘mental pictures’, and reproductions of various pictures that he had in mind when trying. There is immense variety. Buildings (sometimes in colour), cars, people, rockets and many weird and unidentifiable shapes. The usual method of taking them was as follows: Serios would take a small plastic tube, which he called a ‘gismo’, and hold it over the lens of the camera, then concentrate very hard and press the trigger of the camera. Anyone who has used a Polaroid will know that such a procedure would normally produce a blur. The camera and film were produced by Dr. Eisenbud or anyone else present. Serios could produce a ‘photograph’ whether or not there was a lens in the camera, and whether or not he was blindfolded. He usually had a fairly clear idea of what the picture would be, and on occasion, was quite certain that it had been successful. When trying to ‘get’ the Chicago Hilton, he muttered, ‘Missed, damn it,’ and produced the Denver Hilton instead (in colour).

Almost as remarkable as Ted Serios’s photography was the reaction of people approached by Eisenbud for co-operation. At a meeting where he was describing his results, one friend and colleague grunted, ‘Don’t believe it,’ and walked out; another became insulting; a third suggested that Serios should be stripped. If Eisenbud had been asking them to attend a séance, this kind of reaction might be understandable; but he was only asking for help in a controlled scientific experiment. Why should people react in this way? The answer, surely, is that there is still a gulf between science and ‘paranormal phenomena’, like the gulf between science and religion; and ‘normal, rational’ people react to tales of the paranormal as they might react to a religious crank trying to force his way in through the front door. Besides, there is some justification for the remark of the editor: ‘So a guy takes pictures with his mind. So what?’ If we consider Serios’s photographs, or Daniel Dunglas Home’s levitation, in isolation, they are strange, but they have no connection with everyday life. And if they have no connection, then they are certainly interesting but irrelevant, and busy people are right to ignore them. Eisenbud agrees that, at present, there is no connection, but he cites the story of Faraday, who was asked by three tax inspectors why His Majesty’s Government should continue to support experiments with electrical jars; Faraday replied, ‘I’m not quite sure myself where all this is going … But maybe someday it will be taxable.’ If Serios can produce pictures with his mind, what is to stop anybody doing it? There are powers involved here that we probably all possess, but are unaware of. What if Serios’s manifestations are the equivalent of Faraday’s Leyden jars? – the beginning of the discovery of a far bigger phenomenon? After all, the Leyden jar must have struck businessmen of the nineteenth century as an odd but limited phenomenon. You could produce sparks with it, and electrocute chickens; but so what? Who could guess that the Leyden jar would lead to the electric generator?

Whether Eisenbud is correct to believe that precognition and ‘mind photography’ are somehow connected is a question that must be considered in the final chapter. The ‘active’ powers of Serios, and the ‘passive’ powers of mediums, seem to be diametrically opposed. It is true that Serios can sometimes ‘see’ photographs in a sealed envelope and reproduce them on a Polaroid plate; but according to Eisenbud’s account he is wrong more often than not. On the other hand, most ‘psychics’ simply have the power to ‘see’ things that other people cannot see. And even in this field, the powers vary widely. Peter Hurkos and Gerard Croiset can sense an object’s history by touching it. Tom Corbett, of whom Diana Vernon has written at length in The Stately Ghosts of England (1963), can sense the presence and nature of ghosts in haunted houses, but may or may not ‘sense something’ about the person to whom he is speaking. Corbett explained to Mrs. Vernon: ‘I haven’t got any power over [the ghosts], like exorcising them or telling them to go away. But if there’s a ghost around I can tell you where, and sometimes what it looks like. Other people have this gift in varying degrees. Some, like me, see them, some hear them, others just sense them. Most people, of course, aren’t psychic at all, so they won’t ever see a ghost – even if it’s standing right beside them.’

Corbett’s observations about ghosts throw some interesting light on the basic problem raised in this chapter. At Longleat, the home of the Marquis of Bath, Corbett was asked to give his opinion on two alleged ghosts, one in a corridor known as Green Lady’s Walk, the other – supposedly of a bishop – in the library. To begin with, Corbett was deliberately shown the wrong corridor, by way of testing him. He immediately recognised that it was the wrong corridor, and led the way to another one, which led off the first. ‘Something dreadful happened here. This is your corridor, not the other one.’ As it happened, the nature of the ‘something dreadful’ was known. The Marquis of Bath in the time of Queen Anne caught his wife in flagrante delicto with her young lover; a sword fight ensued that ended with the lover being run through. The lover was (according to legend) buried in the cellars, and the marquis moved out, and lived for the rest of his life at a nearby village. When the present Marquis of Bath was a young man, the story was verified when workmen installing central heating found the skeleton under the cellar flags. But the ghost, according to Corbett, is not that of the lover or the avenging marquis, but of a woman – almost certainly Lady Louisa Carteret, the lady in question. Corbett acknowledged that he could not state definitely that the ghost was Lady Louisa, but added: ‘A spirit retains the identity and sex it had when it was alive. The men [the lover and the marquis] can’t haunt, presumably, because they had what it takes to progress, while Louisa’s grief kept her shackled here.’ He also explained that ghosts have no sense of time, and that they are therefore unaware of the passing of the centuries.

When shown the library in which the ghost of Bishop Ken was supposed to appear on the anniversary of his death, Corbett asserted that it was not haunted, and that, in any case, ghosts are not observers of anniversaries. (If time stands still for them, this is logical.) However, he was able to verify the presence of a friendlier spirit in another library in the house, pointing out the exact spot where the librarian had frequently sensed its presence; he was able to add that the ghost was almost certainly the builder of Longleat, a Sir John Thynne – a wealthy Elizabethan – which explains his attachment to it.

In another corridor of the house, Corbett stopped, and rapped with his knuckles on a door. He could not explain why he did it, but the librarian explained that when she had slept in that room, there had been a knock on the door every night, at about the same time; it happened so often that she ended by ignoring it.

Corbett’s verdict on the house was: ‘Certainly two very strong ghosts, the one in the corridor and the one in the Red Library. Then there’s another, very faint, which causes the knock on Miss Coates’s door. There’s a heavy malevolence in the linen cupboard caused, I think, by someone who was probably once a housekeeper – a most unpleasant woman. All the hauntings are done independently, and each ghost is unaware of the others’ existence. But our intrusion wasn’t welcome, I’m afraid. The Bishop of Ken doesn’t haunt, by the way.’

The comment about being unwelcome seemed to be verified when Corbett, Mrs. Vernon and the photographer who had accompanied them all fell ill after the visit to Longleat.

This chapter would be incomplete without some discussion of the evidence for reincarnation, the doctrine of the rebirth of the spirit in different bodies. The Greeks called it metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. The belief is so widespread as to be almost universal. It can be found among the ancient Egyptians, the Hindus, the American Indians and in the folk-lore of Europe and Africa. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna:

You and I, Arjuna, have lived many lives.

I remember them all; you do not remember.

The doctrine of reincarnation, as found among the Hindus and Buddhists, is in some ways a flat contradiction of the Christian notion that eternal bliss or eternal punishment may be the outcome of a man’s activities during a single lifetime. The Hindus assert that the soul returns to earth again and again, moving higher or lower, according to the degree of perfection it achieved in its previous incarnation. A ‘great chain of being’ descends from the ultimate Godhead to the lowest forms of dead matter, and everything has, its place on it. Man stands midway between matter and spirit, and his problem is to move upward. Reincarnation also plays an important part in the Kabbalah.

The Society for Psychical Research has paid less attention to cases of reincarnation than to various forms of psychical phenomena; Myers devotes only one page to it in his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death; and although he accepts the doctrine, he also points out the objections to it. In the long run, all spirits are bound to ‘progress’; so the generality of men today ought to be altogether more moral and idealistic than the men of five thousand years ago. This hardly seems to be true. In the same way, if the ‘reward’ for success in a previous existence is to be born at a more comfortable level, then the aristocracy ought to be on a spiritually higher level than the polloi – an arguable assertion.

In 1956, the subject of reincarnation became the most popular topic of the day when a businessman from Pueblo, Colorado called Morey Bernstein published his accounts of hypnotising a local housewife named Virginia Tighe. Under hypnosis, Mrs. Tighe clearly recalled her previous existence as an Irish girl named Bridey Murphy. The Search for Bridey Murphy topped the national bestseller list for weeks, and was almost as popular in England. Edgar Cayce had asserted the reality of reincarnation since 1923, but the Bridey Murphy case seemed more conclusive and more spectacular than any of Cayce’s examples. Then the bubble burst: the house in which Mrs. Tighe had been brought up was found to resemble the one in which Bridey Murphy had lived in Cork; it was discovered that one of her childhood neighbours had actually been called Bridie Murphy, and that Mrs. Tighe had once been in love with her son. It was finally established, beyond all reasonable doubt, that most of the things that had happened to Bridey Murphy had also happened to Mrs. Tighe. The Chicago American published a shattering exposé of Bridey Murphy, and the craze ended as suddenly as it had begun. Professor C. J. Ducasse of Brown University published a book on the belief in life after death in which he completely exonerated Mrs. Tighe from all suspicion of fraud and defended Bernstein as a serious and dedicated student of hypnosis and reincarnation; but for most Americans, the case was closed.

This was a pity, for the serious evidence for reincarnation is as convincing, if not quite so voluminous, as that for life after death. Volume 26 of the Proceedings of the American S.P.R. is devoted to Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, by Ian Stevenson, M.D. These cases, selected from more than two hundred investigated by the Society, have the usual thorough documentation. Most of them seem to follow a certain pattern. A child of between two and four years old begins describing events and people in a previous existence. The parents decide to look into it, and the details are found to be accurate. Such stories are not unfamiliar; for example, the case of Shanti Devi can be found in Frank Edwards’s Stranger than Science. She was born in Delhi in 1926. When she was seven, she informed her parents that she had been born before, in a town called Muttra (Mathura). She described her life in some detail – how she had been married and had three children; she died when giving birth to the third. Her name, she said, had been Ludgi. Her parents assumed this was pure imagination. But in 1935, a man called at the house on business, and Shanti Devi stared with amazement, declaring that he was her husband’s cousin. The man confirmed that he was from Muttra, and that he had a cousin who had lost his wife, named Ludgi, in childbirth ten years earlier. Ludgi’s husband was brought to the house – without telling the girl he was expected; she recognised him instantly and threw herself into his arms. Taken to Muttra, she was able to point out various people and places correctly, and converse with relatives of the dead Ludgi in local dialect, although Shanti Devi had been taught in Hindustani. A scientific commission which investigated the case found that she was able to direct a carriage through the town even when she was blindfolded, and recognise various landmarks. She recognised her two eldest children, but not the one whose birth had cost her her life. Ian Stevenson mentions the Shanti Devi case in his book, and adds that he has discovered that Ludgi’s husband often came to Delhi, and frequented a sweetmeat shop not far from Shanti Devi’s home. There is no suggestion that Shanti Devi met her former husband there; Stevenson only mentions it to raise the hypothesis of some kind of telepathy – which he then rejects.

One of the most interesting points that emerge from Stevenson’s book is that a large number of subjects who could recall previous lives had died a violent death in this earlier existence; this may explain the continuation of memory. A boy named Ravi Shankar, born in July 1951, later gave details of his murder in his previous existence; as a child of six, he was killed and beheaded by a relative (aided by an accomplice) who hoped to inherit the property of the child’s father. Ravi Shankar actually had a scar on his neck resembling a long knife wound. A child named Jasbir claimed to be a man who had been given poisoned sweets, and had died as a result of a fall from a cart in which he had sustained a head injury. Imad Elawar, a Lebanese child born in 1958, had died of tuberculosis in his previous existence, but he had been unpleasantly shocked when a cousin had been run over by a truck, driven by an enemy, and died soon afterwards; Imad’s earliest statements about his previous existence concerned this violent death. H. A. Wijeratne, born in Ceylon in 1947, had memories of the life of his paternal uncle, who had been hanged for the murder of his wife. Jimmy Svenson, a Tlingit Indian of Southeastern Alaska, began to claim (at the age of two) that he was his maternal uncle, a man named Jimmy Cisko, who had died under mysterious circumstances, probably murdered; the child had marks on his abdomen resembling gunshot wounds.

On the other hand, Swarnlata Mishra, the daughter of an inspector of schools in Madhya Pradesh, only recognised the scene of her previous life when she happened to be passing through the city of Katni on a journey with her father; she was three and a half at the time. Norman Despers, a Tlingit Indian, was taken to visit a cove thirty-five miles away, and suddenly asserted that he had once owned a smokehouse (for smoking fish) on the strait, and had later gone blind; the description fitted his grandfather. The child was three at the time of the ‘recognition’ scene.

Some of the cases have extremely unusual features. Jasbir Lal Jat was three and a half years old when he suddenly ‘became’ Sobha Ram, the man who had fallen from the cart after eating poisoned sweets. But Sobha Ram did not die until Jasbir was three and a half. One day in the spring of 1954, Jasbir apparently died of smallpox. His father went to get help to bury him, but neighbours advised him to wait until the next day. Before morning, the child began to stir. When he eventually recovered, his personality had changed completely, and he began speaking about his previous existence. Unfortunately, he had been of the Brahmin caste in this existence, and his new family were Jats; the child declined to eat with them, and his food had to be cooked by a nearby Brahmin lady. It was only when he began to suspect that his family occasionally cheated him by cooking his food themselves that he decided to abandon himself to his new caste. When the child was taken to the village of Vehedi, some twenty miles away, he showed accurate and detailed knowledge of relatives, places and events.

The closeness of the villages might give rise to the suspicion that Jasbir had visited Vehedi often enough to learn about Sobha Ram; but Stevenson points out that the two villages are accessible only by means of dirt roads, and that since they are on either side of the local market town, one to the north, one to the south, inhabitants of one would have little or no reason to visit the other. (Stevenson always goes into the question of the relative locations of the places where his subjects lived – before and after reincarnation; there are few cases where there could be the remotest possibility of the subject having visited the scene of his ‘previous existence’.)

Jasbir eventually came to spend as much time with his ‘previous family’ as with his new one, showing great affection for his son, or rather, Sobha Ram’s son. This also occurs in a number of the cases cited by Stevenson, although in others, the ‘new family’ may show violent jealousy about the child’s previous existence; there are several cases in which the child was beaten into silence about his ‘other life’. It is also interesting to note that memories of a previous existence often fade as the child grows older.

Another noteworthy feature of many of the cases in Stevenson’s book is that the subject seems to be able to choose where he will be reborn. Maria de Oliveiro, of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, deliberately contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of twenty-eight. (She had had two unhappy love affairs.) She promised her friend Ida Lorenz that she would be reborn as her daughter. Ten months later, Ida gave birth to a daughter. At two and a half years of age, this child began to speak of events in the life of the dead Maria, and gave detailed evidence of her knowledge of Maria’s life. (There were no fewer than 120 occasions on which she recognised previous acquaintances or made remarks that were later verified.) Emilia Lorenz, also a Brazilian, committed suicide at nineteen by swallowing cyanide; she hated being a girl and often said she would return to earth as a man. After her death, her spirit made communication at séances and declared that she intended to rejoin her family, this time as a boy. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Lorenz produced a boy, Paulo, who soon declared himself to be Emilia, and exhibited markedly feminine traits. (Again, Stevenson offers a four-page table itemising the evidence for identifying Paulo with Emilia.) William George was a Tlingit fisherman, who told his favourite son that he intended to return to earth as his son, and that the evidence would be certain birthmarks, identical with his own. He died mysteriously, vanishing from his fishing boat at sea, in 1949. In May 1950, his daughter-in-law gave birth to a boy who had the predicted birthmarks. (During her labour she dreamed of her father-in law, who told her he was anxious to see his son again.) At four years of age, the boy, named after his grandfather, began to exhibit a knowledge of people and places in his grandfather’s life, and to develop some of his characteristic mannerisms, including his walk. When he came in one day, and found his mother going through a box of jewellery, he stated, ‘That’s my watch,’ and grabbed a gold watch that had, indeed, been presented to his mother by William George senior. His parents both asserted that he had never seen this watch before, or heard of it.

Altogether, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation is a convincing, if bewildering, volume, carrying the stamp of authenticity throughout. The conclusions it seems to suggest may be tabulated as follows: (a) reincarnation occurs all the time, but memory of previous existences is rare; it happens most frequently when the death was violent; (b) ‘spirits’ seem to have a certain amount of choice about reincarnation; (c) cases in which there is memory of a previous existence occur most often among people who already accept the idea of reincarnation; (d) more than one spirit may occupy the same body, as in the case of Jasbir. This last conclusion recalls the remark of the psychologist McDougal about Sally Beauchamp,* that her other personalities seemed to be separate psychic entities rather than aspects of the same person.

The case of the Singhalese ‘murderer’ Wijeratne deserves further mention. Wijeratne was born in 1947 with a deformity of the right breast and arm. Because of his resemblance to the paternal uncle, Ratran Hami, his father remarked, ‘This is my brother come back.’ The family assumed that the deformities were due to some bad ‘karma’ from a previous existence. When the child was two and a half, his mother overheard him remarking that his arm was deformed because he had killed his wife. The child later related details of the crime, and of the arrest and execution of Ratran Hami, in a way that convinced his parents that this was not imagination. (Stevenson gives a full account of the boy’s descriptions of the murder.) The crime had been due to a violent fit of temper (Wijeratne admitted that he had had an ungovernable temper in his previous existence, but that it was now improved). The girl had been married to Ratran Hami, but had continued to live with her parents until the second half of a two-part ceremony should take place. When he called for her, she suddenly decided not to go with him, whereupon he drew a knife and stabbed her. At the trial, Ratran Hami defended himself by saying that he had not intended to kill his wife. Her family had set upon him, and were beating him, while she held his arms; he stabbed her in freeing himself. The family claimed that he attacked her with a kris (Malayan dagger), and that only then had they attacked him. Wijeratne acknowledged that the family account was the true one and that his execution was justified, adding, nevertheless, that if he was faced with a similar situation again, he would do the same thing. Stevenson mentions that he has many cases in which light has been thrown on a murder in this manner.

The year 1956, the date of publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy, produced a number of other interesting cases of alleged reincarnation in England. Henry Blythe, a professional hypnotist of Torquay, Devon, hypnotised a thirty-two-year-old Exeter housewife named Naomi Henry, whom he had earlier cured of smoking. A tape recorder was used at some of the sessions, and a long-playing record was subsequently issued on the Oriole label. First, a number of witnesses identify themselves, and a Dr. William Minifie describes what is about to take place; Mrs. Henry is already asleep. The hypnotist takes her back in time to her childhood, then asks her about previous existences. She speaks of being an Irish girl, Mary Cohen, and gives the year as 1790. The hypnotist takes her to her wedding day, four years later, and she explains that she doesn’t want to get married, that her mother has forced it upon her because she doesn’t want to keep an unmarried daughter. Later she dies as a result of a broken leg, inflicted by her husband in the course of a beating. The hypnotist then takes her on, four years beyond her death, and her breath ceases. (The record sleeve asserts that her heart also stopped beating for five seconds.) Then she describes an incarnation as Clarice Hellier, a nurse born in 1880, and ends by describing her death, from a goitre, and even the number of her grave.

At the same time, the record sleeve makes it clear that the record is not intended to be a proof of incarnation – only an unusual experiment. This is perhaps as well. While the listener entertains no doubt of the sincerity of everyone involved, he is likely to find himself wondering whether the hypnotic subject is giving the answers that she knows are required, out of a desire to please the hyponotist. One can see how easily the same thing may have occurred in the case of Bridey Murphy. Unless researchers can find definite proof of the existence of Mary Cohen in Cork in 1890, or Clarice Hellier in Downham (and there are no fewer than six places of that name in England), this kind of thing must be regarded simply as an interesting experiment.

But this is not to say that deep hypnosis might not become a valuable instrument for investigating past incarnations. Arnall Bloxham, an expert on old furniture, was also, apparently, stimulated by the Bridey Murphy case to use his hypnotic powers to investigate reincarnation. The result of his first experiments was a book, Who Was Ann Ockenden?, written by his wife Dulcie, in which a young girl under hypnosis describes her previous existence in prehistoric times. Mr. Bloxham has gone on to make many more similar experiments, recording all on tape, and has accumulated an impressive library of recordings. A woman who claimed to be Henriette, exiled sister of Charles II, showed detailed knowledge of the Stuart period, and was able to describe in detail the court of Louis XVI and of his brother, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, to whom she was married. A man who recalled a previous existence as a naval gunner in the time of Napoleon gave so many authentic details about naval life at that time that Earl Mountbatten borrowed the tape to play to experts on naval history.* One can only say that if experiments like this are carried on for long enough, and on a sufficiently widespread scale, there are bound to be cases whose authenticity cannot be challenged. Robert Heinlein predicted, in Amazing Stories for April 1956, that by the year 2001, reincarnation would have been demonstrated with scientific rigour, and there seems a fair possibility that he will be proved right.

Arthur Guirdham is a well-known English psychiatrist who was, until his recent retirement, senior consultant in psychiatry to the Bath clinical area. He is also a believer in reincarnation. His pamphlet Religious Aspects of Extra-Sensory Perception opens with the challenging sentence: ‘The study of parapsychology will be the next major development in psychiatry’; he goes on to argue that certain psychological illnesses may be quite literally ‘psychic’ in origin, due to powers of extrasensory perception, or to dream-memories of previous incarnations. He adds, ‘I have a patient whose capacity to add to the knowledge of European medieval history has been recognised by two professors of that subject.’ This patient, a woman, was an exponent of Catharism, the sect we have already encountered in connection with the origins of witchcraft. ‘Without ever studying it she has a detailed knowledge of its ritual and practices. She acquired some of this knowledge from dreams, others from her recurrent nightmare, and from what she calls visions, but most of it was provided by stories and notes she felt impelled to write as a schoolgirl in her early teens. It is utterly impossible that she could have had access to the detailed literature of Catharism at that age.’ He cites one of the proofs that the patient’s ‘visions’ were authentic: ‘[She] insisted to me that the priest with whom she was associated wore dark blue robes, and [it] is more than twenty years since she was first aware of this fact … It is only in the last two or three years that it has been established that they sometimes wore dark blue or dark green.’ He adds that it would take a full-length book to detail all the other evidence of his patient’s knowledge of Catharism.

In 1970, Guirdham published this book – The Cathars and Reincarnation – and it is certainly one of the most remarkable and controversial documents ever printed on this subject. The author has deliberately avoided the kind of dramatic treatment that made Bridey Murphy a best seller, and many readers may feel he has moved too far in the opposite direction, allowing the story to become too overburdened with the details of his historical researches. But the result is one of the most convincing accounts of reincarnation that exist in English.

The story begins with a series of odd coincidences. In March 1962, Dr. Guirdham saw the patient, whom he calls Mrs. Smith, who was suffering from nightmares accompanied by screams. The dreams were always of a man who entered a room as she lay on the floor; his approach filled her with terror. Oddly enough, Dr. Guirdham had himself suffered from an almost identical nightmare until shortly before meeting Mrs. Smith.

From the beginning, the subject of the Cathars was involved in this odd chain of coincidence. Since before the war, Dr. Guirdham had been fascinated by the Pyrenees, and particularly by Montségur, where – he discovered later – a great massacre of Cathars had taken place in 1244. Eighteen months after he met Mrs. Smith, the subject of Catharism began to recur with increasing frequency. ‘To this day, only a few people in England know anything about the Cathars, but it seems that it is preordained that, sooner or later, I meet all of them.’ In December 1963, he spoke to Mrs. Smith about the Pyrenees, where she had spent a holiday, and mentioned the Cathars. She was startled, for she had come across the name for the first time earlier that afternoon. She had casually opened a book in the library, found a chapter on Catharism and become fascinated by the subject. (It was later the same day that Dr. Guirdham came across the name of Little Gaddesden in a book on the Pyrenees, and encountered the name of the inn he had been trying to remember all day.*) On another occasion, Dr. Guirdham’s wife read a magazine article in the hairdresser’s in which the writer speculated that the order of Bonshommes at Edington in Wiltshire derived from the Cathars. (Bonshommes is the name by which the Cathars of Languedoc were known.) Dr. Guirdham wrote to the author, and discovered that it was one of his own patients, with whom he had never discussed Catharism. When he and his wife attended a cocktail party, he met an RAF officer who had climbed Montségur, and had been oppressed by a feeling of horror, the sense that the whole place was saturated in blood.

Mrs. Smith was definitely psychic. (Dr. Guirdham gives an example. She had been reading about water divining and wanted to know more about it. On impulse, she decided to go out to play cards that evening, feeling that something interesting would develop. Her partner proved to be a wart-charmer, whose uncle was a water diviner – and presumably able to satisfy her curiosity.) On her first visit to the Pyrenees, she had experienced the sense of ‘I have been here before’. On a later visit, at St. Jean Pied de Port, she was able to walk around the old medieval town as if she knew it well, and knew in advance that there would be many steps to climb before she reached the old fortress. She also had a feeling of horror about Toulouse, although she had never been there, and once had a dream in which someone was trying to force her to enter a cathedral called St. Etienne. She later discovered by chance that the cathedral in Toulouse was called St. Etienne.

Some form of unconscious telepathy began to develop between doctor and patient (although, it should be added, Mrs. Smith’s nightmares had ceased after her first meeting with Dr. Guirdham). ‘On one occasion she received from me a letter containing the identical longish sentence which she herself had written to me …’ And on another, the two of them, quite independently, had written on the same day to the author of an article about Catharism – both having stumbled on the article, again quite independently, in the back number of a specialist journal.

It was more than two years after their first meeting that Mrs. Smith began to speak openly about her dreams, and the part Dr. Guirdham had played in them. And this is certainly the most remarkable and incredible part of the whole story – the part that will prove the major stumbling block to many people who cannot accept the evidence for Mrs. Smith’s previous incarnation. She wrote to Dr. Guirdham:

I think I was living just outside Toulouse, or maybe in Toulouse itself, when you first came to my house years ago in that snowstorm. We were a very poor family but you were of noble birth. I fell in love with you then, and my father said I must never meet you again – you were not of our class and, what was more important to him, you were not of our faith. We were Roman Catholics. I refused to be parted from you, and was eventually excommunicated. I went to live with you. We weren’t married. You told me that if anything should happen to you, I must go to Fabrissa …

One’s first thought, on reading this, is that Mrs. Smith had developed the usual patient’s fixation on the doctor, and somehow convinced Dr. Guirdham that they had been lovers in the thirteenth century. In fact, this view cannot be maintained. For Dr. Guirdham threw himself into historical research to find just how much of Mrs. Smith’s story would stand up to analysis. And the answer is: All of it. It must be remembered that although Mrs. Smith had been having circumstantial dreams and ‘visions’ since her teens, she did not connect them with the Cathars. Her first meeting with Dr. Guirdham and immediate recognition of him as ‘Roger’, the lover of her ‘visions’, was almost her first intimation that it was not all some odd trick of her subconscious (she had experienced a sense of déjà vu in the Pyrenees, as already recorded). When he called upon her subsequently in a snowstorm, to arrange a hospital appointment, the memory of her first meeting with Roger – also in a snowstorm – returned. The persecution of the Cathars of Toulouse had been a fairly small and localised event, and the Inquisition records still existed. Various names had recurred in Mrs. Smith’s dreams – Fabrissa, Roger, Alaïs, Pierre de Mazerolles – and Professor René Nelli (one of the world’s greatest authorities on the period) suggested that something might be discovered about them in the records. Mrs. Smith’s dreams were full of other details about the period: the poems that Roger had recited, the layout of the hall of the castle, the ceremonies and rituals of the Cathar religion, what they ate and drank, and what kind of utensils were used at table. Dr. Guirdham’s task, with the help of Professor Nelli and Jean Duvernoy (another eminent authority), was to check as much of this as possible. And as the investigation proceeded, he became more and more impressed with what he calls the ‘uncanny accuracy’ of Mrs. Smith’s memories. She stated that when Roger was ill they gave him loaf sugar, and Dr. Guirdham found this hard to accept. But Professor’s Nelli’s researches revealed that sugar did exist at that time, although it was a scarce commodity (Mrs. Smith mentioned that it was kept locked up). Guirdham discovered that it was regarded as a medicine. Again, Mrs. Smith mentioned the cathedral of St. Etienne in Toulouse; Guirdham, who had been there, was convinced that this was a slip, that it was actually called St. Sernin (which is the name of a church in Toulouse). It was only when he came to revise the script of his book, and checked with a guide book, that he realised she was right again.

The story that slowly emerged was as follows. Roger-Isarn was a Cathar priest or preacher, who travelled around a great deal in the area of Toulouse. He had taken refuge in a snowstorm in the house of a Catholic family, which included the young girl whom Guirdham calls Puerilia. (Oddly enough, Mrs. Smith’s dreams did not include her real name.) She fell in love with Roger, and later attended Cathar meetings at which he was present. They became lovers. When her father found out, he beat her and threw her out of the house. She went to Roger’s house, and lived with him. But he travelled a great deal, and often became ill. (Dr. Guirdham feels that his symptoms point to tuberculosis.) In 1242, two inquisitors came to the area, searching out heretics. Pierre de Mazerolles, a distant relative of Roger, plotted to kill them. The inquisitors, with their entourage, stayed with one Raymond D’Alfar, who sent word to Mazerolles. The inquisitors were murdered in D’Alfar’s house; the motive of the crime was to seize lists of heretics, members of respected local families, in possession of the inquisitors. Mrs. Smith dreamed of Pierre de Mazerolles coming into the room where she was asleep, gloating about the murder, and remembered Roger’s horror. Catholic reaction to the crime was violent. Roger was among those arrested and interrogated. Prison wrecked his already delicate health, and he died. Puerilia was so shattered by the news that she tried to commit suicide by starvation (one of the methods favoured by Cathars, apparently). Bitter fighting between Cathars and Catholics followed – all of it, like the murder of the inquisitors by Pierre de Mazerolles, a matter of history. Cathars, including Puerilia, were held for interrogation in the cathedral of St. Etienne. Puerilia eventually died at the stake. Mrs. Smith’s description of her dream is particularly harrowing: ‘I didn’t know when you were burnt to death you’d bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes … I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn’t. They must have been burnt off …’

It is not surprising that the trauma of these experiences echoed down seven centuries. As to the ‘coincidence’ that Dr. Guirdham should have been Roger-Isarn d’Arborens, we can only accept it, like the other strange coincidences recorded in the book, as a concomitant of intense psychic activity. Guirdham mentions that ‘in a letter … she had mentioned a quotation by some medieval scholar and asked me if I could help her locate it. I could not do so. Just previous to writing a further letter she had been to the library, picked up a book, and was confronted immediately by the quotation. This kind of thing is a commonplace with people of this type.’ That is to say, it is not coincidence, in the ordinary sense of the word, but some kind of psychic radar, about whose nature we know nothing whatever.

To further complicate an extremely complex issue, it should be added that reincarnation is one of the few matters upon which there is basic disagreement among spiritualists. J. J. Morse, an editor of Two Worlds, wrote down ‘spirit teachings’ at the dictation of a spirit named Tien Sein Tie, a sixteenth-century Chinese; and Tien Sein Tie stated flatly that reincarnation is nonsense. He pointed out that if men are brought back to the world to work out a ‘bad Karma’, then we would have no right to alleviate misery. On the other hand, an eminent spiritualist I consulted told me that some mediums – or rather, the spirits that speak through them – accept reincarnation, while others deny it. The Continentals seem more prone to accept it than Anglo-Saxons. All ‘spirit teaching’ accepts that there are ‘ascending levels’ in the ‘other world’, not unlike Dante’s spheres in the Paradiso, and that one’s life on earth determines which of these levels becomes one’s habitation immediately after death. (There is no hell, no punishment – although there are ‘dark places’.) But spirit teaching generally has little to say on reincarnation. The medium Dorothy Perkins was kind enough to put a question on the subject to a spirit known to her circle as ‘the Philosopher’; the Philosopher replied that while he does not deny reincarnation, he has never met anyone on ‘the other side’ who goes in for it. From which we might infer that the ‘bad Karma’ doctrine is untrue, and that reincarnation is a matter of choice for the individual spirit.

Let us try to summarise some of the conclusions that have been reached so far.

It is certain that human beings possess latent powers of which they are only dimly aware, and that these latent powers produce a variety of phenomena, from poltergeist activity to ‘thought photography’ and spontaneous combustion. These ‘positive’ powers are connected to, but not identical with, the power of precognition and of ‘sensing’ ghosts.

Apart from man’s own ‘latent powers’, there seems to be strong evidence that ‘ghosts’ have an independent existence. Their chief characteristic appears to be a certain stupidity, since a tendency to hang around places they knew in life would appear to be the spirit-world’s equivalent of feeble-mindedness. I have suggested elsewhere* that the state of mind of ghosts may be similar to that of someone in delirium or high fever: a disconnection of the will and inability to distinguish between reality and dreams. It must also be admitted – although for me personally, it goes against the grain to do it – that it is not improbable that the dead may be around us a great deal of the time, and that premonitions of danger, precognitions and so on, may be due to them rather than to our own psychic alarm system. This view seems so unsophisticated, so typical of primitive tribes, that I hasten to qualify it by saying that most of the ‘phenomena’ are explainable on either hypothesis. Tyrrell cites the case of a woman who unwrapped a packet of pound notes and went into the kitchen to throw the wrappers into the fire, her mind on other things. As she was about to throw them, she felt a hand laid on her own, pushing it down, and realised she was holding the pound notes instead of the wrapping paper. She was so convinced that someone had touched her that she shouted, ‘Is anyone there?’ No doubt some departed spirit could have been responsible; so could her own subconscious. The notion that the dead are voyeurs is certainly not a pleasing one: besides, one feels they ought to have something better to do.

It should also be borne in mind that the mysteries of the split personality are still unexplored territory for psychology. Was Yeats’s A Vision dictated by spirits, or by some dark side of his personality, operating through his wife’s mediumship? Eisenbud has a whole chapter on this question entitled ‘Who’s in the Back of the Store?’; and he explains elsewhere in the book that he often asked Serios, under hypnosis, ‘Who are you?’ in the hope of finding some alien alter-ego (he suspected a rebellious small boy). But there are cases where the ordinary alter-ego theory seems to break down. For example, that of José Pedro de Freitas, reported by Frank Smyth in Man, Myth and Magic (No. 8), a Brazilian peasant who, at the age of thirty-two (in 1950), was ‘taken over’ by the spirit of a German surgeon who had been killed in the First World War. De Freitas operated with a kitchen knife, scissors, a scalpel and a pair of tweezers. Dr. Ladeira Marques of Rio de Janeiro described an operation as follows:

The patient lay on an old door, and scissors, scalpel, a kitchen knife and tweezers stood nearby in an old empty can. Without the help of a speculum – an instrument for dilating the cavities of the human body for inspection – he introduced three scissors and two scalpels into the vagina – brusquely, one can even say with violence. He was holding one handle of the scissors when all of us saw the other handle start moving along, opening and closing the scissors. Although we could not see whether this was also the case with the other instruments we could all clearly hear the noise of metals rattling and the characteristic sounds of tissue being cut. After a few minutes, ‘Dr. Fritz’ removed the scissors, and at the sight of the blood, stopped and said: ‘Let there be no blood, Lord.’ And the operation continued with no further haemorrhage at all.

The other witnesses were Dr. Ary Lex, lecturer at São Paulo University and member of the State Medical Academy; Dr. Oswaldo Conrado, director of the State Hospital in São Paulo; and Dr. Leite de Castro of Rio de Janeiro. De Freitas went on to remove the tumour from the womb of the young woman, who remained conscious, and sealed the cut by pressing the edges together. The whole operation took only a few minutes. De Freitas seemed to be able to produce a state of total relaxation in the patients, and they felt no pain. He seems to have been in some kind of trance himself during the operations, for when shown a photograph of one of them afterwards, he was sick.

Between 1950 and 1964, De Freitas performed hundreds of similar operations, always at lightning speed, always with a kind of casual carelessness and always successfully. He also showed an uncanny skill in diagnosis. In 1964, however, he was charged under Article 284 of the Brazilian code which states spirit healing to be a crime – Brazil is, of course, a rigidly Catholic country – and sentenced to sixteen months in prison. He has apparently given up his operations since then.*

Accounts like this make all attempts at speculation seem a waste of time. If it is true, then we had better acknowledge that we are little better than children, and adopt some of the observant open-mindedness that is characteristic of children.

Before leaving this subject of ‘other worlds’, we should consider briefly a hypothesis that has steadily gained support in the past two decades: that we are under observation by intelligences from outer space. ‘Flying saucers’ have become something of a joke, understandably. Among my own small library on the subject are titles like The Flying Saucer Menace, Why Are They Watching Us?, The Invasion from Outer Space, and the general air of sensationalism repels serious enquiries. On the other hand, David Foster’s ‘intelligent universe’ hypothesis suggests that wherever there is already life, it is likely to evolve to higher levels of intelligence. You do not have to be a science-fiction writer to imagine that if there are highly intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they would exercise caution in making themselves known to us. We know what happens when the civilised white man goes among primitive tribes, whether in Australia, Africa or America. Even when the colonisers are well-meaning, the result is always the same: the destruction of the primitive culture. If the white races were more advanced, they would make laws to prevent this kind of brutal incursion into primitive cultures. And if extra-terrestrial intelligences exist, they have no doubt already done just that.

Scientists have now begun systematic investigation into life on other planets or stars. In April 1960, the 85-foot radio telescope at Deer Creek Valley in West Virginia was directed towards various stars that may have planets, hoping to pick up radio signals that would indicate intelligent life. Although the project was abandoned after a few months, a conference of scientists was held at Green Bank, West Virginia, the following year, to discuss the topic of extraterrestrial life. Although it was not kept secret, it was not advertised either; nobody wanted sensational reports in newspapers. (The whole project, it may be noted, was government-sponsored.) In late 1962 the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a book by an eminent astronomer, Joseph Shklovsky, discussing these problems seriously, and in 1965, not long after a Soviet conference on extra-terrestrial civilisations, a colleague of Shklovsky’s reported that the star CTA 102 was emitting radio signals that suggested intelligence.

On June 17, 1908,* there occurred in central Siberia an event that must be regarded as one of the oddest unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. What appeared to be an enormous meteor streaked northward across the sky; it could be seen for thousands of square miles. It struck close to a river called the Podkamennaya (‘Stony’) Tunguska (the adjective being used to distinguish it from two brothers, the Lower and Upper Tunguskas). A pillar of fire rose into the air, turning into a mushroom-shaped black cloud. The explosion was heard more than six hundred miles away. Two villages were wiped out, but the ‘meteor’ had fortunately crashed in a relatively uninhabited area, and most of the damage – with a twenty-mile radius – was to trees. The next day there were high, silvery clouds.

In 1908 the government had more to worry about than earthquakes (which is what they probably assumed it was). It was not until 1927 that an expedition succeeded in penetrating the almost roadless area near the source of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, where there was evidence of an immense explosion: trees blown down with their tops pointing outward from the explosion, all of them burned. The Space Encyclopaedia lists the explosion under meteorites, along with the Arizona meteorite, the Sikhote Alin meteorite of 1947 and various others. But the Tunguska meteor had certain very peculiar features. The evidence revealed that it exploded in midair – like a hydrogen bomb, as Willy Ley remarks in his history of astronomy, Watchers of the Skies. And there were no meteor fragments, such as were found in abundance at the Sikhote Alin site (30 tons of it). Willy Ley, unhappy about the idea of a nuclear explosion, suggests that the ‘meteor’ may have been made of antimatter, which seems to be even more far-fetched.

The late Frank Edwards, after mentioning that a subsequent expedition under a Dr. Kazantsev found radioactivity in the soil, draws the conclusion that this was probably the explosion of a flying saucer. And there would seem to be at least a 50 per cent probability that he is right.

Much of the ‘evidence’ for Unidentified Flying Objects must be regarded as untrustworthy – due to a vivid imagination, self-hypnotism or the desire for publicity. As to the assertion of various writers that references to flying objects can be found in ancient manuscripts, that might also be regarded as unproven. It is true that Ezekiel’s ‘cloud with a brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming bronze’ sounds as if it could be a flying saucer, but it could also be just a prophetic vision. The same applies to a ‘circle of fire that was coming in the sky’ mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus of the time of Thutmose III (about 1500 B.C.) and the ‘two large shields, reddish in colour, in motion above the church’ described in the Saxon Annales Laurissenses for the year A.D. 776. The American Air Force, which has been closely involved in U.F.O. investigations since 1947 (when Kenneth Arnold, an American businessman, saw six ‘saucers’ flying in the area of Mount Rainier, near Seattle) affirms that between 70 and 90 per cent of the ‘sightings’ can be explained by ‘conventional effects’, and responsible investigators are inclined to accept this estimate. But there remains an undismissable residue of 10 per cent or so that demands to be taken seriously. The most famous of these is the Mantell case of January 7, 1948, when the military police notified the Goodman Base of the U.S. Air Force at Fort Knox, Kentucky, of the presence of a flying object over the town. Three P.51 pursuit planes took off. They followed the disc and saw that it had a top shaped like a cone, with a red light blinking on it. Captain Thomas F. Mantell got closest to it, and reported back that it was increasing in speed and gaining height. Then his plane disintegrated in mid-air. The flying object was seen before and after the disaster by hundreds of people in Madison, Indiana, and Fort Knox and Columbus, Ohio.

But what have flying saucers to do with the occult? Carl Jung establishes one link when he speculates (in a short book on flying saucers) that the world-wide sightings of U.F.O.s may be the expression of ‘a wave of hope in a reappearance of Christ’, a universal longing for some apocalyptic second coming. Jung’s theory, wild enough for science fiction, is that the flying objects have an objective existence, but as projections from the racial unconscious mind, like the monsters of Forbidden Planet. In that case, flying saucers might be regarded as being related to ‘spectres of the living’. But this view is contradicted by some of the phenomena. For example, when I was living in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1966–1967, a motorist reported discovering a flying saucer in the middle of the road late at night. The police investigated, and the report was confirmed to the extent that a large patch of the road, at the point where the saucer had been, showed melted tar. Jung’s theory cannot explain this, and many other pieces of commonplace factual evidence in the reports.

The possibility of more direct links between flying objects and the occult was drawn to my attention in 1967 by the San Francisco poet Richard Roberts. He had already spoken to me about a remarkable Dutch ‘yogi’ named Jack Schwarz, born in 1924 in Dordrecht, near Rotterdam – also the birthplace of Peter Hurkos – and it was after this first mention of Schwarz that he told me that the ‘yogi’ was worried about some very odd events that had been taking place. A woman under hypnosis had begun to speak in a metallic voice, and had informed him that he was actually from Pluto and that It, his metallic informant, was a Venusian. And this, apparently, was not the first time he had received similar messages.

It all sounded very odd, very cranky, almost certainly some kind of self-delusion. However, I asked Dick Roberts if he would be kind enough to write down for me the story of Jack Schwarz, as circumstantially as possible, and he obliged with a nine-page typescript, which I shall summarise here.

Schwarz was introduced to Dick Roberts as a ‘sufi’, but he denied this, saying that he was only a sufi in the sense of possessing a spiritual force that worked through him. They got along so well that Schwarz invited Roberts to stay with him for a few days in Upland, California. ‘On this visit, I discovered that he slept only two hours each night and ate approximately four meals a week. At seven each morning, his day began with persons arriving every half hour until noon for massages, ostensibly to satisfy the State of California’s medical licensing laws. In addition to the massage, however, what these people were receiving was psychic and spiritual counselling, and often hypnotic and healing treatments. Afternoons were given to his family and to preparations for evening lectures which he gave around the greater Los Angeles area. Returning from these, during the week that I visited him, we would talk together until 3 a.m., when he would go into meditation for an hour, and then to bed at four. At seven the front doorbell would ring for the first counselling. To quote Roberts:

His friends impressed me with their eyes-open approach to psychical research, and with their basically good mental health, a rare thing in the era of gurus preying upon the emotionally dependent. I was also impressed with Jack’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of the occult, and convinced that he was a force for the good.

Nearly a year later I witnessed his bed of nails demonstration, which he formerly used in introducing his lectures. The nails, a dozen or so in number, protruded from a thin wooden frame. Unlike the familiar yogi’s bed, they are sharp, long (4 to 6 in.) and widely separated so that the weight of the body is supported by only a few nails. Except for trunks, he is naked for the demonstration. The heaviest man in the audience is selected and asked to stand upon his body as he reclines on the nails. On this particular evening I assisted a man who weighed nearly 250 lb. onto Jack’s chest. I then saw one of the nails pierce his calf and come out some three inches on the other side. But there was no bleeding from the wound. Subsequently he got up and walked through the audience, allowing any and all to examine the deep holes in his back. A doctor was present and examined one hole with a probe, stating that the depth was about one half of an inch. At no time was there any bleeding from these punctures.

The import of his following lecture was that matter at a low rate of vibration is solid, whereas at a high rate of vibration it is subtle. Thus for physical and spiritual health one needs to raise one’s vibrations. How is this accomplished? Although there are many paths to God, Jack stresses meditation techniques. By the end of his lectures the punctures had disappeared from his back.

Dick Roberts then offers a biographical summary of Schwarz. As a child and youth he could see the colours of people’s ‘psychic auras’.* He became a hypnotist and worked on the stage; subsequently he worked in the Dutch Resistance.

The curious intimations about other planets apparently began in 1958, when Schwarz was a welfare officer of the Dutch ship New Holland going through the Suez Canal to Indonesia with two thousand soldiers on board. Everyone was watching a magician who had been brought on board to entertain. ‘It was on the bridge of the ship,’ said Schwarz in a taped interview with Dick Roberts, ‘when suddenly a tall, lanky Arab in a striped robe appeared and went down on his knees before me and kissed my feet, saying, “You are my master.” Then, just like that, he got up and walked out. Naturally I tried to follow him because it was poor security to allow him on the bridge, or even on the ship, unless he was connected with the entertainment. But he had disappeared. I checked with the watch at the gangway, and no one of his description had been seen coming aboard or leaving. And he was not connected with the magician – all those people had been accounted for.’

In 1959, Schwarz continues, he was living in Los Angeles with his wife. He was invited to attend a lecture on hypnosis at Whittier. As they left the lecture, a woman approached their group saying, ‘A man wants to talk to you.’

He was sitting at the wheel of a green station wagon, and as we walked up Bill said: ‘You want to speak to us?’ ‘Not you, not you, him!’ said the man pointing at me. ‘Get in the car.’ His manner was very abrupt and he seemed a little angry, so my wife said: ‘Don’t do it, Jack.’ But I told her to go along with Bill, because I wanted to hear what he had to say, and I told her not to worry. He wasn’t very big – about five foot six – slight, with a toupée. The way you knew it was false was because the wax was sticking out from under the hair. He didn’t look very dangerous …

As soon as I got into the car, he grabbed my hand. ‘It’s all right, I just want to be sure I have the right man. Once before I got the wrong man, but from your vibration I know you are the right man.’ Then he kissed my hand. I look at him like what the heck is this? ‘Once before I kissed you, but I kissed your feet. Do you remember, I told you you were my master.’

Looking at the man in the car now, I could see no connection between him and the tall Arab. But then he began to tell me details of this incident which I had told to no one else. He must have been reading my mind, because I was thinking it could not be the same man when he said: ‘We can appear in any shape or form we desire. I have just come from Australia, and before that I was in Nepal where your master is. I bring you a message from him.’ ‘How do you get the idea I have a master?’ ‘Because we come from a tribe of people who crash-landed in a rocket ship on earth thousands of years ago. My code name is XB-15 and you are my master. The message from your master is that you should now begin teaching the spiritual truth that is being given to you inspirationally. You are God’s vehicle to bring the truth that is meant to be. That’s all I have to tell you. You can go now. I will get in touch with you again.’

The remainder of this story, to date, is odd and rather frustrating. A phone message purported to come from the Rev. Elvira Shreider, but when Schwarz phoned the only man by that name in the phone book, he denied all knowledge of the call. But two weeks later, the man with the toupée rang up to congratulate Schwarz, telling him that he had been chosen to be a member of a steering council of the New Age. He gave Schwarz eleven other names, one of which was Elvira Shreider. In 1966, after attending a lecture on flying saucers and the language of their occupants, Schwarz’s meditations were constantly interrupted by four syllables that sounded like ‘El, Su, Shei-la’, and afterwards he felt dazed. He made enquiries with the group who were responsible for the lecture on saucer language, and was told that the syllables meant ‘God’s vehicle to bring to truth that is meant to be’. It was after this that the ‘hypnotic messages’ came. The first was through a woman patient, who suddenly began to speak in a metallic voice, informed him that he was from Pluto and that he, the voice, was from Venus and was called Linus. Linus added that Venusians were composed of a gaseous substance. The scientific detail that the hypnotised woman proceeded to give about Venusian life would have been completely beyond her normal intellectual capacity – she was amazed when the tape was played back to her. Two months later, ‘Linus’ again made contact through a hypnotised patient – Schwarz does not go into detail about the message – and finally, a psychic girl in Vancouver told him, out of the blue, that she had travelled astrally to Venus the previous night and had seen him there with Linus – she mentioned the name. She added that he was instructing the Venusians because he was from a higher plane than theirs. And that, to date, is the last contact Jack Schwarz has had with his Venusian friend Linus.

I would be the first to agree that the story is one of the weirdest in this volume. With the talk about ‘God’s vehicle on earth’ and so on, it bears all the signs of ordinary religious monomania. The kind of thing for which hundreds of people get committed to asylums every year. But there are several factors here that incline me to reject this view. I have not met Schwarz, but Dick Roberts describes him as a very solid, ordinary kind of person, quite un-guru-like. This is borne out by Schwarz’s own comments on all this: ‘By this time I was beginning to get upset by the whole thing. I was happy with my wife and children and I was not interested in steering the spaceship, or even going along for a short ride. I was very happy to stay on earth as ordinary Jack Schwarz.’

This rings true. So does the inconclusiveness of the whole weird story. Schwarz has not tried to set himself up as ‘God’s vehicle’ or to teach spiritual truth inspirationally; he has remained ‘ordinary’ Jack Schwarz, a highly gifted psychic with remarkable talents as a fakir. Neither of these faculties necessarily indicates great spiritual advancement; in India, fakirs – men able to perform remarkable feats of physical self-control – are regarded as being on a lower level than the God-obsessed yogis.

The probability is that Jack Schwarz is genuine, that he believes every word of his story as it appears above. There remains, of course, the equally plausible hypothesis that the events are an example of Jung’s ‘psychic projection’ – that is, the active interference of the subconscious mind in everyday life. We all know how unexpected and alien dreams can be. Could this not be an example of the subconscious manifesting itself physically, as, for example, when Jung produced explosions to disconcert Freud? This hypothesis strikes me as altogether more likely, certainly in the case of the metallic voice speaking from hypnotised patients. But it does not cover ‘XB-15’ in the car, or the Arab on the ship.

Let us, for a moment, make the assumption that the whole story is literally true. It is staggering, but no more strange than many things we have discussed in this volume. In fact, it suggests some tentative unifying principles. If we can accept reincarnation, then there is nothing surprising in the idea of Jack Schwarz being the reincarnation of a traveller from Pluto. The idea that he is ‘teaching’ on Venus when his earthly body is asleep in bed may sound strange, until we reflect that in 90 per cent of cases of astral projection, the ‘projector’ has no idea that he has left his body, as in the case of Powys or Yeats, already cited.

Schwarz’s theory of vibration sounds very close to David Foster’s. Explaining this theory to me in a letter, David Foster wrote, using capital letters to emphasise his point: ‘The universe is a total construction of waves and vibrations whose inner content is “meaning”, and man is a micro-system of the same vibratory nature floating at some depth in the universal and meaningful wave system. The universal wave system is qualitative or value-structured (this is quantum theory) according to its vibration rate spectrum (faster frequencies have more information capacity).’ He goes on to remark that the dualism of mind and matter is a false one, since all is mind and meaning, and we assume that ‘body is matter’ simply because its frequencies are too fast for our minds to understand and analyse. In fact, the human body understands the meanings in nature directly, by harmonic resonance. ‘And how on earth could the human body control its fantastic chemical complexities unless it was all mind … But the human mind is a vibratory system that operates so slowly that it is capable of analysis, and thus of synthesis, and so can partake in your “step by step” thinking operations.’ He goes on to say that the mind is a radio set that can ‘tune in’ to thousands of different vibrations in the ether. We only have to think of Powys or Wordsworth to see what he means. In poetic experience, the mind becomes oddly negative, ‘open’, tuning in to vibrations that it normally ‘cuts out’ for the purposes of getting on with everyday life.

Obviously, the most incredible part of Jack Schwarz’s story, because the least substantiated, is the talk about Venus, Pluto and so on. This is not, a priori, more incredible than Arthur Guirdham’s story of the Cathars and reincarnation or the various cases already discussed; but the evidence there is strong, and there is no evidence whatever for Jack Schwarz’s assertion (or Linus’s) that life forms on Venus are gaseous – although space probes indicate that the surface of Venus is too hot to support life, and that the upper atmosphere is filled with vapours. (On the day I am writing this, a Soviet space probe is due to make a soft landing on Venus; but I doubt whether it will do anything to confirm or contradict Linus’s assertion.) As to the statement that Jack Schwarz originated on Pluto, the outermost of the planets, there is nothing to contradict this in our knowledge of the solar system; millions of years ago, Pluto must have been as warm as the earth is now, and undoubtedly could support life. If this life managed to evolve to a high level without destroying itself, it may have learned the secret of staying alive on a planet that is now around minus 230 degrees centigrade – only 43 degrees above absolute zero. Its density is the highest in the solar system – about 50 grams per cubic centimetre, which almost certainly means that any beings who lived on it would have had denser bodies than human beings. If David Foster is correct about his ‘vibrational system’, this would also imply a higher level of powers than most humans possess; but all this, of course, is mere guesswork.

If other planets, and their inhabitants, were involved in the ‘chain of reincarnation’, it would certainly simplify some awkward problems – for example, how the present population of the earth could be so many times greater than it ever has been in previous centuries. (Did the souls in the next world have to form a queue, waiting for a body?) No doubt space travel will eventually provide an answer; meanwhile, we can at least regard it as an entertaining speculation.

* Browning’s biographer, Betty Miller, points out that the Browning household was a ‘matriarchal society’, Browning’s mother was a Sunday School teacher and a woman of inflexible morality. In his teens, Browning was bowled over by the poetry and personality of Shelley. But it was impossible to model himself upon his idol without alienating his mother. He chose his mother, thus violating his intellectual integrity. This, Mrs. Miller argues, is why he preferred to write ‘dramatic monologues’, using other people as a mask, rather than speaking with his own voice.

* Psychic News, November 7, 1970.

* JK spoke directly through the medium of Dorothy Perkins.

* See Wilson Knight’s study of Powys, The Saturnian Quest, 1964; also his Neglected Powers, 1971.

* Leeds University periodical, Gryphon, March 1960.

* See The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, by Trevor Hall (London, 1964).

* The Unknown – Is It Nearer?, by E. J. Dingwall and John Langdon-Davies (London, 1956).

* See pp. 581 et seq.

* See Man, Myth and Magic, No. 33, ‘Frontiers of Belief’.

* See p. 60.

* The World of Violence, Part I, Chapter 3.

* This account is apparently taken from The Moon and Two Mountains, by Anthony Stratton-Smith. Richard Cavendish, the editor of Man, Myth and Magic, tells me that the Brazilian embassy in London admitted they knew of the case, but refused to confirm or deny anything. Understandably.

* Russian Old Style dating; by European style this would be thirteen days later – June 30.

* See Phoebe Payne in the next chapter.