by J H Brennan
The church was later followed by the White Eagle Publishing Trust, designed primarily to commit the words of White Eagle to print. Through these twin vehicles, the esoteric doctrines of the “Brotherhood of Adepts” today reach out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide. It is probably fair to say that many, perhaps even most, of these people consider White Eagle to be a disembodied spirit, but according to Ivan Cooke:
White Eagle’s contact with his medium is always by a process of projection. He lives … in the mountains of the East and he can project either himself or his influence half across the world to her by functioning, like other initiates, in the ethereal body. So while he lives in a physical body … he is able … to function in the ethereal world which pervades this physical globe.3
Grace Cooke is now dead, but the communications from White Eagle continue through the mediumship of her immediate family. Whether White Eagle himself still inhabits a body in the Himalayas is not altogether clear. What is clear is that this form of “spirit message” is now being disseminated to more people than at any other time since the days of the Iliad. And the phenomenon continues to grow.
In the 1960s, a young American author named Jane Roberts decided that with the emergence of flower power and renewed interest in things spiritual, there might be a market for a book on the development of ESP. In order to research the work, she bought a Ouija board, and in December 1963 she embarked on a series of experiments with the help of her artist husband, Robert F. Butts Jr.
Their initial contact was with the spirit of an English teacher named Frank Withers, who had lived with his wife Ursula in Elmira, New York, and died in 1940. On the face of it, this appeared to be a straightforward postmortem communication of the Spiritualist type, but in the next Ouija session, Withers expanded the picture by revealing that the American schoolteacher was only one of his incarnations. In a much earlier life as a soldier in sixth-century Turkey, he had known both Jane and her husband. The three of them had also been friends during incarnations in Denmark.
This interesting development took a further step forward with the third Ouija session. Frank Withers told them he would prefer to be known as “Seth” which was more appropriate to the totality of his being than the name he happened to have been given in his last earthly incarnation. At the same time, he suggested new names for both Jane and her husband. These names—“Ruburt” for Jane and “Joseph” for Robert—were, he claimed, more closely associated with their spiritual essence than the ones they used in their mundane existence. This renaming is not at all unusual in occult circles where there is a widespread belief that the individual should seek out a name that more fully expresses his or her innermost essence. It is less common in the wider context, although some religious groupings have it as part of their conventions.
Seth, it quickly transpired, was much more than a teacher of English. If anything, he was a Teacher (with a firmly placed capital “T”) in the tradition of White Eagle and Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Masters. The Seth doctrines are generally founded on the concept that human beings come into physical incarnation in order to learn and evolve, but that there are even greater opportunities for personal development in other higher levels of existence. Emphasis is laid on ethics and karma.
Jane and her husband embarked on regular Ouija sessions. As they did, a curious thing happened. Jane discovered that instead of having to wait for answers to be spelled out letter by letter, they had begun to formulate in her mind almost as soon as the question was asked. Since she was certain she was not generating the answers herself, it occurred to her that they were being implanted telepathically by Seth. The idea panicked her. She had never thought of herself as any sort of medium and was not at all sure she wanted to become one. Robert reassured her. He felt she should go along with what was happening. Eventually Jane relaxed. From using the Ouija it was a short, but important, step to automatic writing—a much more efficient and satisfying method than Ouija. Eventually she agreed to hold séances and before long direct voice channeling was taking place.
Direct voice mediumship is one of the more spectacular esoteric pursuits, harking back to the days of the great prophets and sibyls. The medium allows a benign possession by the spirit entity, who then uses her vocal cords to converse directly with sitters or to dictate, and sometimes to record, specific messages. Typically the possession is marked by changes in posture, facial expression, body language, and voice. Witnesses will occasionally, albeit rarely, report what is called an “overshadowing” in which the relevant spirit form appears to be mistily superimposed on the physical channel.
Like most individuals caught up in this form of communication, Jane underwent periods of doubt—a pattern often repeated in other mediums—but overcame them, often with the help of Seth himself. The result, within two months, was a 230-page typewritten manuscript of Seth material. It was the first example of an outpouring that continues to this day. Like Patience Worth, the writings were subsequently published and attracted substantial interest—so much so that several of the Seth books have become best sellers and brought both Seth and Jane Roberts international fame.
Blavatsky and MacGregor Mathers were enthusiastic occultists. Grace Cooke practiced for years as a Spiritualist medium. Pearl Curran and Jane Roberts experimented with Ouija boards. But sometimes spirit contact can arise, wholly unexpectedly, without the presence of any of these factors. A case in point was what happened to a young Londoner, Ian Graham, in the early 1980s.
Although mildly interested in subjects like astrology, and a meditation practitioner, Ian saw himself as neither an occultist nor a medium. His religious background was conventional—his family were members of the Church of Scotland. But at the age of twenty-nine, the name “White Bull” popped into his mind during a meditation session. Years before, the pop singer Tommy Steele had recorded a novelty song called “Little White Bull.” Ian owned a copy as a child and now could not get the song out of his head. It was a bizarre beginning to what proved to be a life-changing event.
A few weeks after the meditation session, he first heard of the term “channeling,” a new buzzword coined to describe the type of teaching contact experienced by people like Grace Cooke and Jane Roberts. This contact was now becoming so prevalent that it needed to be differentiated from the familiar phenomenon of mediumship, which sought a much more straightforward communication with the dead. A friend had visited one of the new “channelers” and proceeded to tell Ian all about it. Ian was frankly skeptical— he thought the whole thing smacked of a con game—but was sufficiently intrigued to organize a channeled reading for himself. The communicating entity told him he was wanted as a member of the entity’s group.
It was too good an opportunity to miss and Ian went along a week later. The session began with a meditation and the moment he closed his eyes, he found himself in a North American Indian encampment. It struck him as a corny vision, an opinion that solidified as he seemed to be shown around the encampment by the communicating entity. He had just decided it was all his own imagination when the entity suddenly pointed to a tall Indian holding his horse beside a tree. “That’s my friend White Bull,” the communicating entity said. “He’s going to work with you.”
The final breakthrough came less than a month later while Ian was meditating. He had the sensation of his hands growing and his body filling out. The bone structure of his face seemed to be changing as well. Then a voice that was not his own used his mouth to announce, “I am White Bull.”
With an exclusive public school background, Ian Graham might easily have become a stockbroker or surgeon. Instead he found himself embarking on a career as a channeler. For a long time he could hardly believe it was happening. In the first two years he was wracked with self-doubt, more than half convinced that White Bull was some sort of self-created fiction and the act of channeling was sheer delusion. But he quickly discovered that the advice White Bull gave to clients was helpful and sometimes carried them through serious
crises. He also discovered that the advice was not always what he himself would have given. It became increasingly difficult to hold on to his skepticism.
It is clear from all this that something extraordinary had happened to Ian Graham, something that went well beyond his early doubts. In many ways, he was like the early Greeks of Julian Jaynes’s study. His life became increasingly focused on a specific and very personal spirit contact prepared to give advice and guidance when required. Where Ian—and others like him—differed from those early Greeks was in his ability to resist the voice. Where the heroes of the Iliad seem incapable of denying their “gods,” even when divine orders led them into destructive situations, modern channels retain their autonomy.
After initial doubts, Ian Graham settled into a career as a professional channeler and became, if anything, too successful. A constant stream of callers to his London flat meant he had less and less time for himself. At this point, skepticism was the least of his problems. He grew increasingly resentful of White Bull. The spirit had in many ways taken over his life. Friends would turn up demanding to talk with White Bull when Ian wanted them for himself. For someone who was meeting different people every week, it was a lonely existence. It was also a curiously absent existence. He was spending a great deal of his time in trance. There were days when, on his own admission, he threw tantrums and had furious arguments with White Bull. Sometimes he refused to channel altogether.
But Ian Graham and White Bull eventually reached a mutually beneficial compromise. Ian had decided he wanted to forge a career for himself as a teacher and lecturer, but the decision was reached that this would be in addition to, not instead of, his work as a channeler. He moved to France and began to organize workshops and seminars on spiritual topics.
Although the lectures and workshops have now taken something of a backseat, Ian Graham is today an internationally known and respected channeler with a particularly enthusiastic following in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. White Bull’s influence is even more far-reaching. There is a valley named after him in New Zealand and a White Bull record label in Belgium. His advice on creative themes has been sought by an American moviemaker and he has contributed to the choreography of a ballet presented at the Paris Opéra. The first dictated book of White Bull’s wisdom, now published in eight languages, has become a bible for his international followers.
Grace Cooke had a Spiritualist background, so it is perhaps not entirely surprising that she developed a spirit contact. Blavatsky and Mathers were practicing occultists whose techniques might be expected to generate such experiences. But Jane Roberts, Ian Graham, and even Pearl Curran—just three of many who might have been studied—seem to represent a different trend. They are all people who, in a sense, had spirit contact thrust upon them. More important, today’s media technology means that the words of each spirit can potentially reach a wider audience than at any time in human history. If the trend continues, we may yet see spirit influence in human affairs comparable to that of ancient times. In such circumstances, it is useful to examine both the details of some spirit contacts and what spirits can and cannot do, again drawing on the experiences of those in closest contact with them—mediums and magicians. An interesting place to begin might perhaps be the most notorious magician of them all, the “wickedest man in the world,” Aleister Crowley.
Aleister Crowley, the modern English magician whose contact with the spirit Aiwass led him to proclaim a ‘New Aeon’ and establish a new religion
In 1906, while the British poet Victor Neuburg was an undergraduate at Cambridge, he fell under the influence of Crowley, an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Neuburg was enormously attracted to Crowley, and not alone because of his magical erudition. Crowley was bisexual and had initiated the young writer into a homosexual relationship. By 1908, he was composing poems to his “sweet wizard” that left little doubt as to the depths of his feelings.4
Three weeks before his finals, Neuburg traveled to London and took initiation into Crowley’s magical order, the Astrum Argentinum, vowing “in the presence of this assembly to take a great and solemn obligation to keep inviolate the secrets and mysteries of this Order.” In the summer of 1909 he was at Crowley’s house on the shores of Lough Ness, practicing ritual magic and having his bottom flogged with stinging nettles. In late autumn of the same year, the two lovers set sail for North Africa and docked at Algiers on November 17. They took a tram to Arba, then walked south. By November 21, they were in Aumale where Crowley bought Neuburg several notebooks. His plan was that Neuburg should use them to record the results of an operation in Enochian magic.
Crowley carried in his rucksack a copy of the Enochian Calls he had made from Dr. John Dee’s manuscripts in the British Museum—lengthy incantations in an obscure language claimed to call up certain energies and spirits. He had already experimented with two of them and was now determined to find out what would happen if he used the rest. Over a period of days and nights they worked their way through the Calls until, by December 6, they had reached what was technically known as the Tenth Aethyr, an area of magical reality inhabited by the “mighty Devil” Choronzon, Lord of the Powers of Chaos.
In the early afternoon they walked a considerable distance from the town of Bou Saada to reach a valley of fine sand. There, in the desert, they traced a magic circle of protection, sealed with the words Tetragrammaton, Ararita, and Shadai el Chai. The first of these is a reference to the four-lettered name of God (JHVH), which, according to magical tradition, must not be spoken aloud. Ararita is a magical formula associated with skin problems according to Crowley’s own writings,5 while Shadai el Chai is a Hebrew godname the magicians associated with the mudra chakra, a subtle sexual center of the human body. Beyond the circle, Crowley and Neuburg traced a triangle in the fine sand of the valley floor and fortified this too with divine names. This figure was designed to contain any spirit entity that might appear. Crowley then sacrificed three pigeons he had brought so that the released energy would give Choronzon something with which to manifest.
Neuburg moved into the circle. Crowley, acting on an impulse that most experienced magicians would find bizarre, entered the triangle. It is possible that Crowley, as eccentric in his magical practice as he was in most other aspects of his life, wanted to find out what it felt like to be possessed by a demon. Jean Overton Fuller, who wrote a biography of Neuburg, considered that Crowley had “ceased to be completely sane” by this stage.
Neuburg began the ceremony by chanting aloud the following oath:
I Omnia Vincam, a Probationer of the Argentinum Astrum, hereby solemnly promise upon my magical honour and swear by Adonai the angel that guardeth me, that I will defend this magic circle of Art with thoughts and words and deeds. I promise to threaten with the dagger and command back into the triangle the spirit incontinent if he should strive to escape from it; and to strike with the dagger anything that may seek to enter this Circle, were it in appearance the body of the Seer himself. And I will be exceedingly wary, armed against force and cunning; and I will preserve with my life the inviolability of this circle. Amen. And I summon mine Holy Guardian Angel to witness this mine oath, the which if I break, may I perish, forsaken of him. Amen and Amen.6
Neuburg then performed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. This short ceremony, which he presumably learned from Crowley, who in turn had it from the Golden Dawn, is a method of preparing a place for magical working. It performs essentially the same function as disinfecting an operating theater prior to surgery. With the place suitably prepared, Crowley, wearing a black magician’s robe, made the Enochian Call in his high-pitched, rather nasal voice:
The thunders of judgment and wrath are numbered and are harboured in the North in the likeness of an oak whose branches are nests of lamentation and weeping, laid up for the Earth which burn night and day: and vomit out the heads of scorpions and live sulphur, mingled with poison. These be the thunders that 5678 Times (in ye 24th part) of a moment
roar with an hundred mighty earthquakes and a thousand times as many surges which rest not neither know any echoing time herein. One rock bringeth forth a thousand even as the heart of man does his thoughts. Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Yea Woe! Be on the Earth, for her iniquity is, was and shall be great. Come away! But not your mighty sounds.7
Neuburg heard Crowley’s voice call out “Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanda Zazas” followed by a string of blasphemies. Neuburg glanced toward the triangle and there discovered a beautiful woman, somewhat similar in appearance to a prostitute he had known in Paris. She began to call softly to him and make seductive gestures. Neuburg ignored her. The woman then apologized for trying to seduce him and offered instead to lay her head beneath his feet as a token of her willingness to serve him. Neuburg ignored this too.
The demon—for so Neuburg considered the women to be—promptly changed into an old man, then a snake that, in Crowley’s voice, asked for water. Unmoved, Neuburg demanded “in the name of the Most High” that the demon reveal its true nature. The thing replied that it was Master of the Triangle and its name was 333. This is a reference to Gematria, an aspect of Qabalah in which numbers are substituted for letters in an individual name, then added to provide a final code. The best-known example appears in the biblical book of Revelation where the Antichrist is numbered as “six hundred, three score and six”—double the number of Neuburg’s demon.
A curious argument developed between Neuburg and the creature. Neuburg called on his own and Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angels. The demon claimed it knew them both and had power over them. Neuburg firmly demanded that it reveal its nature and the demon finally admitted that its name was Dispersion and it could not be bested in rational argument.