by J H Brennan
The evidence grew more and more weird as more and more people were arrested. The judges heard how Madame de Lusignan masturbated in the woods at Fontainbleau with the aid of an Easter candle—all part of a magical operation with a naked priest. Three amatory masses were described, during one of which Father Tournet engaged in public intercourse with a girl on the altar. Father Davot was accused of ceremonially kissing a naked woman’s genitals during the course of a Mass he was celebrating. Abbe Guibourg called on the demons of lust, Astaroth and Asmodeus, at the elevation of the host. Sometimes these ceremonies were designed only to slaughter babies in a magical manner so that their bodies might be used in various esoteric potions and powders. But others, it appears, had been commissioned by aristocratic ladies in order to influence the king. A peculiarly detailed description of one of them has come down to us. The ceremony, conducted by the Abbe Guibourg, was designed to make a love charm to be used on the king by Mademoiselle des Oeillets, one of his mistresses.
Mademoiselle des Oeillets attended the rite in company with an occultist who was apparently instructing the abbe what to do. In the operation, it was necessary to collect and intermingle the sexual fluids of a man and a woman. While Mademoiselle des Oeillets seemed willing enough to contribute, she was having her period at the time and thus contributed a measure of menstrual blood to the chalice. Guibourg masturbated her friend and directed his semen into the cup. A powder made from bats’ blood was then added and the mixture thickened with flour. Abbe Guibourg recited a conjuration to Astaroth, then bottled the mixture and gave it to Mademoiselle des Oeillets to take away. Presumably she then fed it to the unsuspecting Louis.
A nauseated king suspended the Chambre Ardent in August 1680. Its findings were becoming altogether too embarrassing. Secret investigations continued for a while, notably into the activities of the king’s former mistress, Madame de Montespan, who, it transpired, was the central figure in the whole affair. Years afterward, in 1709, the Chambre records were burned on Louis XIV’s orders. But some copies escaped the flames, leaving us today with yet more evidence of the part played by spirits in history.
A special section of the Museum of Spirit Contact would, of course, be devoted to exhibits from the modern era. During the summer of 1904, for example, an Altai Turk named Chot Chelpan heard the voice of a white-robed spirit riding a white horse. The spirit spoke an unfamiliar language, but other spirits translated. The spirit had promised a time of change was approaching and his orders to the Altai people would shortly be communicated to Chelpan’s daughter. The girl soon confirmed that she had heard spirit voices and Chelpan began to preach a new religio-political creed among his people. One of its tenets was that all available money be spent on guns and ammunition to be used in the overthrow of Siberia’s Russian overlords. The Russians eventually arrested Chelpan, but the move came too late: by that time, he had attracted literally thousands of followers who simply melted into the fastnesses of Mongolia and conducted guerrilla warfare against the authorities up to the Russian Revolution.
The Russian Revolution failed, for a time, to dampen enthusiasm for the rich tradition of occult thought and spiritist practice that had characterized the country for centuries, but by the second decade of Communist rule, ruthless prohibition and political repression made any overt expression of this tradition impossible. The Soviet Union presented, and continued to present, an atheistic-materialist face to the world that had little room for the supernatural. But despite official denials of spirit realities, there are clear indications that occult influence was not wiped out but merely driven underground. For every theosophist and anthroposophist who left the country following the ban on their beliefs, many others remained at home, simply electing to hide their beliefs and maintaining contact with those who left. Cultural science professor, Birgit Menzel reveals1 that according to KGB records, the secret order of the Rosicrucian Templars in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with its spirit-based doctrines, remained active as late as 1937. Nor was it the only occult order to brave official Soviet wrath. Their influence proved so troublesome that the Kremlin established a host of “special agents for occult matters” in an attempt to root them out. The attempt was unsuccessful. By the 1970s there was an open revival of Qabalistic and various other spirit-inspired occult doctrines among Soviet intellectuals, writers, artists, poets, and musicians. Whether this renaissance reached into the political establishment and influenced the Cold War remains impossible to say.
A small but important exhibit of the museum would be the dairies of W. L. Mackenzie King, published in 1980 and showing that for decades he had been listening to spirit voices, including those purporting to be his dead mother and Franklin D. Roosevelt. King was prime minister of Canada between 1921 and 1930 and between 1935 and 1948. During the latter term, the dead Roosevelt told King he was wiser than Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, and that Churchill should listen to King’s advice. Churchill was infuriated when King, in his newly confirmed wisdom, sent him the text of the message. Also on display would be the newspapers that reported that the Italian president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, used a Ouija board in 1978 to make contact with a fellow politician who had died a year previously.2
The newest exhibit would display a fascinating potpourri of media reports indicating that in the United States, President Obama felt compelled to apologize personally to Mrs. Nancy Regan, widow of the late president Ronald Regan, for claiming she had been involved in séances. Media reports also asserted Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had been involved (during her husband’s presidency) in channeling the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt. There seemed to be no truth at all in the former allegation: Mrs. Regan’s interest in astrology and psychism had apparently tempted the president into making an unwise joke. But the claims about Mrs. Clinton had a far less clear-cut provenance. The Clinton office was swift to issue an official denial of the media reports, claiming that Mrs. Clinton had merely been engaged in an “intellectual exercise” of the visual imagination. But it transpired that her guide in this exercise was Jean Houston, one of the most respected spiritual practitioners at work in America today. Houston holds doctorates in both psychology and religion and is deeply involved in the Human Potential Movement. In 1984 she began to teach seminars modeled on the ancient Mystery Schools, which some authorities believe taught techniques of spirit contact. The exercises developed by Dr. Houston have somewhat similar aims, although they involve neither narcotics, sleeping dreams, nor trance, but rather, as Mrs. Clinton rightly claimed, the use of the visual imagination. However, anyone well versed in the techniques of occultism might hesitate to dismiss such use of the imagination as merely an “intellectual exercise.” There are modern Mystery Schools that hold that controlled use of the imagination is a valid method of contacting spirits.3
On display too would be an online jihad manual reportedly authored by Samir Khan, a US citizen killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011 and published under the auspices of al-Qaeda.4 Alongside predictable advice on living outdoors and maintaining secrecy, the writer devotes an entire segment to a discussion of spirits known in the Arab world as jinn (sometimes djinn).
Before I came to jihad, I knew the importance of adhkar [a remembrance of Allah through certain sayings and supplications] but not anything in relation to experience. On the first day I met with the mujahidin, before sunset arrived, a mujahid told me to make adhkar; he went on to explain that the Apostate Government of Saudi Arabia has individuals that work alongside evil jinns that spy on the mujahidin and give away their position. I was shocked and couldn’t believe it. Later, other mujahidin confirmed the same thing to me, including some shuyookh, who would say that the same thing happens with the Apostates of Yemen. They will use sihr (magic) in order to fight the mujahidin. However, by Allah’s grace, there are many good jinns that protect the mujahidin and defend us. This is the world of the unseen and Allah knows best. Therefore, it is imperative that you start memorizing the adh
kar for the morning and evening and start practicing it on a daily basis, not giving yourself an excuse to miss a single day. You need to do this in order to protect yourself from shaytan and the evil jinns that work for the shayatin among men.5
This ready, indeed casual, acceptance of spirits in the present day should surprise no one. Any careful reading of history presents a panorama of men and women in positions of power who have been influenced by, or actively practiced, the occult arts, almost always including communication with spirits. Are we to suppose that they kept their esoteric interests compartmentalized? Or is it more likely that voices from the Beyond guided their political decisions and hence the fate of nations?
On the face of it, the fundamental question posed in the Introduction—to what extent has contact with a “spirit world” influenced the course of human history?—has been answered. It is now clear that, whatever spirits may be, their influence has certainly been far-reaching. Yet so far we have concentrated exclusively on the social, political, and religious consequences of spirit contact. To understand the implications fully, it will be necessary to examine the personal impact of such communications.
PART FOUR
CONTACT—THEORETICAL AND PERSONAL
WHO ARE THE WHISPERERS? WHERE DO THEY COME from? What do they want? Where are they leading us? In the light of history, these are clearly important questions, yet they are almost never asked, let alone answered. When it comes to the nature of spirits, the world may be divided into two contrasting camps: the True Believers, who accept spirits as independent entities, and the Devout Skeptics, who prefer to claim spirits simply do not exist.
Yet it is clear that spirits do exist, at least as a recurring experiential phenomenon. Thus the fundamental question becomes: what is their actual nature? In this section we concentrate initially on the experience of contact as a foundation for evaluating various theories in a search for the answer that leads to a wholly unexpected and far-reaching conclusion.
20. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPIRIT KIND
IN THE SUMMER OF 1912, AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE NAMED EMILY G. Hutchings suggested to her neighbor, Pearl Curran, that it might be fun to try their hand at working a Ouija board. Today the name Ouija is a registered trademark of the game publishers Parker Brothers, but the board itself is a far cry from Monopoly or Risk. In its classical design, it features the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0 to 9, and the words Yes and No. It is the first of these words that gives the board its name: Ouija is a combination of the French oui and the German ja, both meaning “yes.” With the board comes a heart-shaped pointer set on universal rollers. If you rest your hand lightly on this pointer, the theory is that it will move of its own accord. When it does, it will sometimes spell out messages by moving to the relevant letters. In other words, a Ouija board is a device designed to contact spirits.
Neither Emily nor Pearl had a Ouija of their own, but they managed to borrow one from a friend. A little to their surprise, it worked and Emily received what purported to be a message from a dead relative. Encouraged by the communication, she bought a board of her own and she and Pearl embarked on a series of fairly lighthearted séances.
Although results were less than spectacular at first, the two friends persevered and after a time began to receive messages from Emily’s mother and Pearl’s father, both dead. Their interest in the board did not meet with the approval of their husbands. Mr. Hutchings, an agnostic, teased them both unmercifully. Pearl’s husband was a committed Christian and wholly disagreed with what he saw as necromancy. Nonetheless the women continued to use the board and about a year after the experiments began, Pearl received a message that was to prove a major turning point in her life. It came from a spirit who introduced herself as Patience Worth.
Patience claimed to have been a poor country girl, born in Dorset, England, in 1649. In later life she emigrated to America where she was killed in an Indian raid in 1694. Although virtually uneducated, she had ambitions to become a writer and, as it turned out, more than enough talent to achieve them. The spirit of Patience began the painstaking process of dictating a vast literary output to Pearl Curran, letter by letter via the board. Within five years, the total volume of the communication had reached an astonishing four million words and included poems, short stories, plays, and novels. By the time she had finished, her body of work was sufficient to fill twenty-nine bound volumes—the equivalent of a major encyclopaedia.
Nor was the material mediocre. A three-hundred-thousand-word novel on the early life of Christ became a best seller and attracted a review in the New York Times as “a wonderful, beautiful and noble book.” Another, set in seventeenth-century England, was described by the Los Angeles Times as a “masterpiece.” Several of her poems were accepted by prestigious anthologies and one of them won a national poetry contest. This was all the more astonishing when set against the fact that Pearl Curran herself had no writing skills, little interest in literature, and only a minimal eight-year education.
Although the Patience Worth contacts were clearly of a far higher literary standard than most séance-room messages, they remain in a category typical of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Spiritualism. While Pearl Curran never believed herself to be a medium and had nothing to do with the Spiritualist movement, the communicating entity claimed to be a spirit of the dead. Since the Fox Sisters produced their first raps in New Hampshire, virtually all attempts at spirit communication were aimed at establishing contact with dead relatives or individuals like Patience who, while not related, at least claimed to have once been ordinary living human beings. But in more recent years, that pattern has begun to change.
There were hints of an approaching change even in Victorian times. When Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, she claimed her authority ultimately derived from “Secret Masters,” highly evolved individuals who communicated to her a body of esoteric wisdom. These masters were magical and spiritual adepts who watched over the progress of humanity as a whole and, occasionally, tinkered with the mechanism of evolution by occult means. These claims were taken seriously by some of the finest minds of her day. Even a highly unfavorable report on her psychical abilities by the Society for Psychical Research in 1885 did little to stem the interest in Blavatsky’s doctrines—an interest that continues, embodied in a flourishing Theosophical Society, to this day.
Blavatsky was a Russian who turned to spiritualism after a narrow escape from drowning. She claimed psychic powers and demonstrated mediumistic abilities. Despite this, her Secret Masters were not spirits in the conventional sense of the term. Although they occasionally communicated telepathically, they were also capable of sending her letters from India, sometimes by ordinary post, sometimes by apport.1 While Blavatsky did not believe the Secret Masters were discarnate, other occultists were not so sure. The Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn was a Victorian occult order traditionally held to have been founded on the basis of a charter issued by a German adept. But its early leaders—notably the colorful S. L. MacGregor Mathers—believed themselves guided by Secret Chiefs who were wholly equivalent to Blavatsky’s Secret Masters except that they existed in another, spiritual reality and only rarely took on material form.
The Golden Dawn was the first example in recent historical times of what is called a “contacted” Mystery School—an esoteric teaching or training organization ultimately directed by a spirit entity or entities. It was certainly not the last: a number of occult organizations at work today claim the same provenance. But serious occult work is, almost by definition, a minority interest and it was not really until the 1930s that the doctrines of humanity’s secret guardians began to disseminate more widely. One of the better-known vehicles for this dissemination was the medium Grace Cooke. Grace was the ninth child of a large Victorian family who lost her mother at the age of seven. Although the family was Nonconformist, Grace’s father attended a séance after his wife’s death where the medium, Mrs. Annie Boddington, brought
through such a convincing message from Grace’s mother that he converted forthwith to Spiritualism. Grace and the remainder of the family followed suit. Even as a girl, Grace began to demonstrate psychic and mediumistic gifts—she gave her first spirit reading to a stranger at the age of thirteen—and through what appears to have been a lonely childhood was visited by a comforting presence she called simply the “old man.”
It is an article of Spiritualist faith that every medium is accompanied by a “guide,” a sort of psychic bodyguard who acts as a gatekeeper, vetting, organizing, and sifting those of the dead who clamor to communicate with the living. Such guides are usually seen as powerful and evolved entities. Grace Cooke’s husband Ivan remarked2 that they require “that gentle wisdom which comes by living close to God.” When Grace began her own career as a public medium in her late teens, it became clear that the “old man” who had been visiting her was in fact a visionary manifestation of her guide, an entity named White Eagle.
From this relatively modest beginning as a psychic gatekeeper, White Eagle evolved over a period of years into something much more like one of Blavatsky’s Secret Masters. He claimed to be in contact with, or possibly even a member of, a Brotherhood of Adepts resident in the Himalayas and began to use Grace Cooke as the vehicle for a body of teaching designed to assist the welfare of humanity. By the 1930s, the focus of Grace Cooke’s life had shifted. She concentrated less and less on the Spiritualist preoccupation with postmortem survival and more and more on the spiritual teachings that originated from White Eagle. In 1936, she and her husband Ivan established the White Eagle Lodge, described as an “undenominational Christian church founded to give practical expression to the White Eagle teaching.”