Supernatural Read online

  After nine years of non-stop success, Bond decided that it would now be safe to tell the true story of the ‘Company of Avalon’ (as the monks called themselves). In 1918, he did so in a book called The Gate of Remembrance. The effect was instantaneous and disastrous. Budgets were cut; Bond was obstructed by red tape, and in 1922 was dismissed. He lived on, a lonely and embittered man, for another quarter of a century. While the abbey became a tourist attraction that brought the Church a satisfactory return for its investment, Bond’s book was not even sold in the abbey bookshop.

  Oddly enough, Bond himself did not believe that his information came from dead monks; he thought it probably originated in the ‘racial unconscious’. That made no difference; the Church of England was not only opposed to Spiritualism, but to anything that sounded ‘supernatural’. Fourteen years after Bond’s dismissal, Archbishop Cosmo Lang recognised the absurdity of this position, and appointed a committee to look into the claims of Spiritualism. The committee sat for three years, and finally concluded that the claims of Spiritualism were probably true, and that, in any case, there is nothing in the idea of communication with the dead that contradicts Christian doctrine. Embarrassed by this report, the Church decided to drop it into a drawer, where it remained for another forty years, until its publication in 1979.

  The problem remains: why is it that CSICOP and the Church of England can both take up the same uncompromising position on the paranormal? On one level, the answer is obvious. Coping with this complex material world requires a down-to-earth attitude, and the most successful copers will be the down-to-earth materialists. We all want to be successful copers, therefore we are all inclined to be impatient with anyone who seems to live in a world of ideals and abstractions. We all agree that ideals and abstractions are important for the progress of humanity; but we would like to keep them at bay until they have proved their worth. Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft remarks: ‘That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. What’s the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankrupcy every year.’

  In 1962, Thomas S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions set out to investigate this reluctance to scrap old prejudices. He points out that when scientists have accepted a theory as satisfactory, they are deeply unwilling to admit that there might be anything wrong with it. They ignore small contradictions, but get furious if the contradictory facts grow larger. They are unaware that there is anything wrong about this reaction; they feel that it is the natural attitude of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities. New ‘paradigms’ are always seen as time-wasting absurdities.

  All this is as natural as the urge to self- preservation; in fact, it is a part of the urge to self-preservation. William James made the same point in an essay called ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’. Cart-horses used to be blinkered to stop them from shying in the traffic; human beings need blinkers to keep them relaxed and sane. Kuhn tells a story of an experiment using playing cards, in which some of the cards were deliberate ‘freaks’—black hearts and red spades. Subjects were asked to call out the suits as the cards were shown to them. When the ‘freak’ card was shown only for a moment, nobody noticed anything wrong. But if the exposure was slightly longer, they became puzzled and upset; they knew there was something wrong, but didn’t know what it was. Some suffered ‘acute personal distress’. When they fathomed what was wrong, the distress was replaced by relief. But a few failed to spot the deliberate mistake, and suffered an increasing build-up of anxiety. According to Kuhn, the demand to introduce new factors into our belief systems causes the same distress and anxiety—and encounters the same resistance.

  What we are talking about, of course, is preconceptions. What is a preconception? It is a kind of mental map that enables you to find your way around, and saves you a great deal of trouble and anxiety—and no anxiety is worse than the anxiety of not knowing where you are and where you are going. Once we have gone to the trouble of acquiring a map, we are naturally anxious not to have to alter it. Small changes are not too difficult to accept. But large changes produce a sensation like the ground quaking under your feet.

  The psychologist Abraham Maslow described an experiment that takes this argument a stage further. The subjects this time were baby pigs. The most timid pigs wanted to stay close to their mother in the sty. More enterprising ones explored the sty, and, if the door was left open, went outside. If the door was then closed, they squealed pitifully until let in. Next time the door was left open, they hesitated about venturing out. Then curiosity overcame them, and they decided to take the risk. These ‘explorers’ were, in fact, the most dominant and healthy among the piglets.

  I shall not press the comparison too far, since the members of CSICOP may be offended at being compared to non-dominant piglets. Besides, some of the most obstructive conservatives in the history of science have been highly dominant. I simply want to plead my point that CSICOP is not furthering the progress of science by shouting abuse at scientists who are engaged in paranormal research and demanding that they be driven out of the workshop of science (which means suspending their grants). By trying to repress research into the paranormal they are striking at the very essence of science. And in telling the rest of us to stop thinking about the frontiers of science and leave it to the professionals (i.e themselves), they are ignoring the fact that anyone who applies his intelligence to the solution of a problem is, by definition, a scientist. And that includes all the readers of this book.

  I am not trying to argue that we should drop all standards, and give serious consideration to every crank theory. But when I look at the number of fairly well-authenticated white crows in the field of paranormal research—telepathy, dowsing, psychometry, precognition—the attitude of CSICOP seems akin to Nelson clapping his telescope to his blind eye and declaring that he could see nothing.

  In a chapter of The New Age entitled ‘PK (Psycho-Krap)’, Martin Gardner remarks that ‘most professional parapsychologists will be embarrassed by . . . the scribblings of such irresponsible journalists of the occult as Colin Wilson, Lyall Watson and D. Scott Rogo’. Whether my father’s work on the paranormal amounts to embarrassing scribbling I leave to the reader to decide; you are undoubtedly less biased than I am.

  Contents

  Foreword by Damon Wilson

  Preface

  1 The Rebirth of Magic

  Publication of The Morning of the Magicians. The ‘Magical Boom’ of the ’60s. Ouspensky’s fascination with the paranormal. The success of The Outsider and the subsequent attacks. I flee to Cornwall. My conviction man is on the point of an evolutionary break-through. I write The Occult. Osbert Sitwell visits a palmist. Charles Dickens dreams the future. Wordsworth’s mystical experience. Richard Church flies through the air. The girl who floated off the table. Saint Joseph of Copertino. Richard Church wears his first pair of glasses. The Robot. Ouspensky and the Peter and Paul fortress. Maslow’s peak experiences, Doppelgangers—the ability to be in two places at the same time. W.B. Yeats ‘projects’ his astral body. John Cowper Powys ‘appears’ to Theodore Dreiser. Emilie Sagée and her Doppelganger. S.H. Beard ‘appears’ to Miss Verity. Human beings possess the ability to be in two places at the same time. The Elizabethans and their lack of imagination. Samuel Richardson invents the modern novel. The importance of Pamela. The ecstasies of the romantics. Richard Church’s piano tuner plays Beethoven. Hoffman and his tom-cat. ‘Every man wants to be a balloon.’ Powys’s Wolf Solent. ‘Mythologising.’ ‘A certain trick of turning inwards.’ ‘Romanticism in a nutshell’—Jean Paul’s Titan.

  2 The Powers of the Hidden Self

  Mesmer and the invisible energies of nature. Illness is due to ‘energy blockage’. His miraculous cures. ‘Animal magnetism’. He cures Bar
on Haresky. His failure with Maria Paradies. He flees to Paris. Initial successes. Benjamin Franklin signs a denunciation. Mesmer flees again. Wilhelm Reich and ‘Orgone energy’. The vital aura. The Marquis de Puységur discovers hypnosis. Victor Race reads Puységur’s mind under hypnosis. Lavoisier declares that meteorites cannot exist. Charcot rediscovers hypnotism. Freud learns from his discovery. Does hypnosis involve the will of the hypnotist? The story of the wicked magician Thimotheus. The Heidelberg case—a woman is hypnotised into becoming a sex slave. The case of the Notting Hill hypnotists. Doctor who raped his patient under hypnosis. Robert Temple on hypnosis. J.B. Priestley makes a woman wink at him. Wolf Messing hypnotises a bank clerk into handing over a fortune. Janet’s case of Leonie. Thomson Jay Hudson and ‘man’s two selves’. The subjective mind and the objective mind. Maeterlinck and the ‘unknown guest’. The Borodino case. Man’s two brains. Völgyesi on animal hypnosis. The ‘will-beam’.

  3 Visions of the Past

  Buchanan discovers psychometry. Pascal Forthuny ‘reads’ a murderer’s letter. The strange talents of Bishop Polk. Buchanan practises on his students. Baron von Reichenbach discovers Odic force. The mystery of Caspar Hauser. William Denton decides to ‘psychometrise’ geological specimens. A vision of a volcanic eruption. Why Denton forgot to guard against telepathy. Plesiosaurs on a prehistoric beach. A mastodon’s tooth. Cicero’s Roman villa. A description of life in Pompeii. Newton on eidetic imagery. Hudson’s objection to Denton. Calculating prodigies. Death of Buchanan and Denton.

  4 The Coming of the Spirits

  The rise of Spiritualism. Mrs Crowe and The Night Side of Nature. Friederike Hauffe, the Seeress of Prevorst. Out-of-the-body experience of a banker. Jung-Stilling’s story of travelling clairvoyance. Mrs Crow on hypnosis. Why the Victorians were sceptical about ‘the occult’. The haunting of Willington Mill. Doctor Drury sees a ghost. The Hydesville affair. The Fox family and the beginning of Spiritualism. The Davenport brothers. The life of Allan Kardec. Kardec on Poltergeists. Hudson on Spiritualism. The career of Daniel Dunglas Home.

  5 Enter the Ghost Detectives

  The scientific revolt against Spiritualism. Alfred Russel Wallace hypnotises a schoolboy. Mrs Guppy flies through the air. Myers and Sidgwick go for a starlit walk. The founding of the Society for Psychical Research. Why the SPR was not taken seriously. The Florence Cook scandal. The exposure of Rosina Showers. The Creery sisters admit to cheating. The Fox sisters confess. The inefficient cheating of Eusapia Palladino. The death of Edmund Gurney. The Portsmouth hoax. Myers is taken in by Ada Goodrich-Freer. Assorted cases. Prince Duleep Singh sees his father looking out of a picture frame. The wife of a railway worker has a vision of an accident. Rider Haggard and his daughter’s retriever Bob. Mrs Spearman sees her dead half-brother. Lieutenant Larkin sees a ghost. The Chaffin Will case. An apparition delivers a warning. The red scratch case. Sir William Barrett’s case of a death-bed vision in a maternity hospital. Sir Oliver Lodge and the Raymond case. The ghost of the chimney sweep Samuel Bull. ‘Death is the end of all.’ The red pyjamas case. Jung: ‘. . . the spirit hypothesis yields better results than any other.’

  6 On the Trail of the Poltergeist

  The phantom drummer of Tedworth. The Wesley poltergeist. The Cock Lane ghost. The Stockwell ghost. The case of the Bell Witch. The Phelps case. The case of Esther Cox.

  7 The Scientist Investigates

  Professor Lombroso and man’s criminal tendencies. Lombroso is asked to investigate a poltergeist. T.C. Lethbridge and his theory of ‘ghouls’. Are ghosts tape-recordings? The theory of disturbed adolescents. Are poltergeists due to the right brain?

  8 Ghost Hunters

  The Cross Correspondences case. Harry Price, ghost -hunter extraordinary. Willi Schneider. Stella C. The case of Eleonora Zugun. The Dracu that bit and scratched. The talking mongoose. The Battersea poltergeist. The case of Borley Rectory. The phantom nun. Borley’s poltergeists. Andrew Green hears the phantom nun. Stephen Jenkins sees a ghostly funeral. The career of Nandor Fodor. Fodor’s first seance. The Lajos Pap case. The case of Aldborough Manor. The Chelsea poltergeist. The ghost of Ash Manor. Eileen Garrett’s seance. Fodor’s investigation of the talking mongoose. The case of Mrs Fielding.

  9 The Spirit Mafia

  Modern theories of the poltergeist. The case of Philip, the invented ghost. Guy Playfair in Rio de Janeiro. Playfair undergoes ‘psychic surgery’. How Edivaldo became a psychic surgeon. Laboratory analysis of poltergeist noises. Are poltergeists caused by black magic? The case of Maria Ferreira. The case of Marcia and the statue of the sea goddess. David St Clair’s experience of a black magic curse. Guy Playfair investigates the Enfield poltergeist.

  10 The Power of the Witch

  Montague Summers causes a scandal. The witchcraft craze in Europe. Angéle de la Barthe. The moon goddess Diana. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ The Devil. The Cathar heresy. The Knights Templars. The case of Jehanne de Brigue. The Papal Bull denouncing witchcraft. The Malleus Maleficarum. Witchcraft in Germany. The North Berwick case. Did the North Berwick witches possess genuine magical powers? The case of Isobel Gowdie. The career of Matthew Hopkins. The case of the Salem witches. The Chambre Ardente affair. African witch-doctors and rain-making. The case of the band-saw. Charles Leland and the English Gypsies. Leland’s Aradia. The Witchcraft Act is finally repealed in Britain. Gerald Gardner and modern wicca. The case of the Jersey rapist.

  11 Possession: Illusion or Reality?

  Kardec on possession. Oesterreich’s book on possession. Janet’s case of Achille. Wickland’s Thirty Years Among the Dead. Wickland’s possessed patients. Is possession due to infected tonsils? The spirit from the dissection room. Ghosts who believe they are still alive. The case of Minnie Morgan. Anita Gregory on Wickland. The case of Lurancy Vennum. The Devils of Loudun. The possessed priests. Madeleine de la Palud is seduced by her confessor. Fornication among the clergy. Possession of the Louviers nuns. Max Freedom Long and his theory of the ‘three selves’. William James and Doctor Titus Bull on possession. The Thompson case. Doctor Adam Crabtree and ‘voices in the head’. The case of Sarah Worthington. The case of Art. Julian Jaynes’s theory of the ‘bicameral mind’. The case of Anna Ecklund. Ralph Allison and the case of Janette. Is possession ‘multiple personality’? The case of Elise. The case of Douglass Deen. A note on reincarnation. The case of Shanti Devi. The case of Jasbir. The Search for Bridey Murphy. Arnall Bloxham and hypnotic regression. Doctor Arthur Guirdham and the Cathars. The scepticism of Ian Wilson. The case of the Pollock twins.

  12 Magicians and Wonder Workers

  What is a magician? Simon Magus. The Faust legend. Paracelsus. The system of the Cabala. The career of Doctor John Dee. Casanova as magician. The career of Cagliostro. Frances Barrett and The Magus. Eliphas Levi and his History of Magic. Levi raises the spirit of Apollonius. Madame Blavatsky. The Golden Dawn. The magic of Aleister Crowley. The career of Rasputin. Gurdjieff and ‘The Work’, The career of Dion Fortune,

  13 The Mystery of Time

  Professor Joad and ‘The Undoubted Queerness of Time’. The Versailles case. Dunne’s experiment with time. H.G. Wells’s Time Traveller. Sir Victor Goddard sees Drem airfield as it will be in the future. Goddard’s dream of disaster. Peter Fairley dreams the Derby winner. Wilder Penfield learns how to replay the ‘memory tape’. Peter Hurkos falls off a ladder. Jane O’Neill and the old church at Fotheringhay. Faculty X and the nature of time. The ‘ladder of selves’. The problem of synchronicity. The case of M. Fortgibu. The I Ching. Rebecca West in the London Library. Jacques Vallee and the cult of Melchizedek. ‘As above so below’. The prophecies of Nostradamus. Mother Shipton. The Brahan Seer. The prophecy of Jacques Cazotte. Is the future predetermined? Warning dreams. Chaos Theory. The wreck of the Titanic.

  14 Vampires, Werewolves and Elementals

  Stan Gooch becomes a medium. Stan Gooch and the female demon. Sandy and the incubus. The original vampire—Vlad the Impaler. The beginning of the v
ampire craze in Europe. The Mykonos vampire. The case of the vampires of Medvegia. Do vampires drink blood? Is vampirism another example of possession? The Buckinghamshire poltergeist. The vampire of Berwick on Tweed. The Shoemaker of Breslau. The case of Johannes Cuntze. Daskalos, the Magus of Strovolos. Daskalos and the vampire bat. The ghost of the shepherd Loizo. Are vampires ‘earth bound spirits’? The vampire as sexual pervert: Vincent Verzeni. Plato’s legend of the creation of woman. Hungry ghosts. Jo Fisher’s case of Filipa. The werewolf. Early European cases. Peter Stubbe. The Gandillons. Man into Wolf. Elemental spirits. T.C. Lethbridge’s theory of elementals. Lethbridge on Ladram beach. Lethbridge and dowsing. The suicide in the Great Wood of Wokingham. The poltergeist on Skellig Michael. Lethbridge on poltergeists. Yeats and Lady Gregory go hunting fairies. AE’s theory of lower elementals. The case of the Cottingley fairies. Frances confesses to fraud. Were there really ‘fairies at the bottom of the garden’? Cooper’s other cases. Marc Alexander hypnotises a friend. Lois Bourne sees an elf.

  15 Standing Stones and Space Men

  Lethbridge on Christian churches. The sacredness of Stonehenge. Ley lines and Alfred Watkins. ‘Ranging a line’. Guy Underwood and Aquastats. John Michell and Atlantis. The legend of Atlantis. Was Atlantis Santorini? St Michael and the standing stones. Legend of the sons of God. Was Stonehenge a beacon for space men? Daniken and Chariot of the Gods? Ancient astronauts. Daniken’s inaccuracies. The underground library in Ecuador. The Dogon and the Sirius mystery. Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Was there a maritime civilisation 12,000 BC? Lethbridge and flying saucers. The first sightings. John Keel is pursued by a UFO. Are UFOs spirits? Andrija Puharih and ‘The Nine’. Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth. The case of Catherine Muller. F.W. Holiday and the Loch Ness Monster. Holiday on phantoms. Holiday sees a ‘Man in Black’.

  16 The Expansion of Consciousness