by J H Brennan
Not alone does the evidence point to a high-level prehistoric civilization with substantial technical skills, but there are clear indications that our species has had a much longer history on the planet than orthodox science currently allows. In 1969, for example, twelve fossil footprints dated to 1,000,000 years BP were discovered between Woolongong and Gerringong, Australia. A year later, construction workers on a dam near Demirkopru, in Turkey, discovered a set of human footprints pressed into volcanic ash. They are 250,000 years old. In 1997, human artifacts 116,000 and 176,000 years old were found at the Jinmium site in Australia’s Northern Territories. Finds in Siberia, England, France, and Italy indicate human habitation of those countries prior to 1,000,000 BP, the time most orthodox scientists believe the first hominids (Homo erectus) were only just beginning to leave Africa. England, Belgium, India, Pakistan, and Italy are just a few of the countries that have yielded up weapons and other implements in strata older than the 2 million years commonly assigned to the evolution of Homo habilis, the first tool-user.
All this—and I would stress again that the foregoing finds represent only a very few examples selected from a vast body of evidence—would appear to put paid to the simplistic linear progression of human evolution on which Jaynes developed his theories. If you accept the orthodox picture of prehistory, it is easy to understand how he came to believe the primitive hunter-gatherer communities—assumed to represent the highest development of humanity prior to about 7000 BCE—were characterized by a bicameral mind. It is also easy to trace the threads of evidence that led him to conclude that the introduction of large-scale urban communities (about 5000 BCE) began to put pressure on the ancient bicameral structures while the development of writing led to their eventual breakdown.
Once you realize that the orthodox picture of this linear progression is in error, what appeared to be evidence supporting Jaynes’s theory quickly falls away. If urban civilization and the invention of writing were key factors in the development of consciousness, then consciousness developed not between 3000 and 1300 BCE but with the emergence of an advanced—and, according to Hapgood, global—civilization in the distant depths of the Ice Age.
But the new ideas about prehistory only throw into doubt Jaynes’s notions about the emergence of consciousness. They leave untouched his whole body of research into humanity’s widespread experience of voices and visions. This is distinctly weird, for it means that Jaynes’s examination of ancient history has unearthed something quite extraordinary. He has shown, from an analysis of inscriptions and texts, that there was a time within recorded history when virtually everyone could hear “spirit” voices and sometimes see “spirit” visions. He has also shown that the ability gradually atrophied—or, if you prefer, that the “spirits” gradually withdrew. His analysis suggests they disappeared altogether with the last of the great oracles. But we know this was not the case. Throughout human history, for good or ill, the voices have never ceased. In such circumstances, we may be justified in asking if the human race is mad, for our objections to Jaynes’s theory refer only to his postulate of the bicameral mind. They leave open the possibility of hallucinations stemming from some other source.
25. SPIRITS OF THE DEEP MIND
IN 1895, CARL GUSTAV JUNG, THEN AGED TWENTY, BEGAN HIS MEDICAL studies at the University of Basel, but events in his early life had already directed his attention to the possibility of a career in psychiatry, a somewhat disreputable profession at the time. Five years later, he was working in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, and researching his doctoral dissertation, later published under the title On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. The object of his research was his fifteen-year-old cousin, Helene Preiswerk, who had begun to experiment with table-turning in July 1899 and only one month later was already showing signs of mediumistic somnambulism. Jung attended her séances almost from the beginning and made careful note of the phenomena she produced.
Helene’s first spirit contact was with Samuel Preiswerk, her grandfather, whom she had never known during his lifetime. Witnesses who had known him remarked on how accurately she conveyed his voice and manner. She was, it appears, what the Spiritualist movement calls a “direct voice medium”—that is to say, the spirits would take control of her vocal cords while she was in trance and speak directly to sitters through her. In this way, she “brought through” various deceased family members, several of whom spoke flawless High German, in stark contrast to Helene’s customary Basel dialect. The sittings were impressive, so much so that people began to come to her for advice, an unlikely development considering her age. Soon she began to exhibit a different kind of mediumship in which she remained aware of her surroundings but took on a new persona called Ivenes, a quiet, dignified, more mature character altogether.
In September 1899, someone presented her with a copy of Kerner’s The Seeress of Prevorst and her manifestations changed again. She took to magnetizing herself using mesmeric passes during her sessions and, possibly as a consequence, began to exhibit the ability to speak in a wholly unknown language.1 In her Ivenes persona she claimed to visit Mars, where she saw firsthand its great canals and the flying machines of its advanced civilization.2 She claimed interstellar journeys as well and visited spirit worlds to receive instruction from “clear spirits” while she herself gave instruction to “black spirits.” Jung noted that the spirits manifested in her tended toward two distinct types—the dour and the exuberant—corresponding with the mood swings of Helene’s own somewhat volatile personality.
The young C. G. Jung, who earned his doctorate with a thesis on spirit mediumship
Helene meanwhile began to produce detailed memories of what purported to be past lives. She had been a Christian martyr at the time of Nero, a thirteenth-century French noblewoman named Madame de Valours who was burned as a witch, a young girl seduced by Goethe, and a host of others. In many of these incarnations she had borne children, who produced their own descendants, so that over a period of only a few weeks, she constructed an elaborate network of genealogies that often stretched down to her present day. Sometimes these became complex indeed. As the mother of Goethe’s love child, for example, she became Jung’s great-grandmother.3 As Madame de Valours, she was the mother of Jung in a previous incarnation. More complexities were to follow. By March 1900 she had begun to elaborate her own cosmology. Jung stopped attending her séances at about this time, but some six months later Helene was discovered engaging in fraud when she began to produce apports, small objects alleged to be mystically transported into the séance room by spirit helpers.
Jung interpreted the totality of the phenomena produced by Helene in the light of current German and French psychiatric theory, based on developments and experiments dating back more than a hundred years to the time when Franz Anton Mesmer believed he effected his cures through the medium of an invisible fluid. His star pupil, Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, came to think differently. By the summer of 1785, when a Strasbourg Masonic Lodge asked him to teach its members the principles of animal magnetism, he summed up the entire doctrine in two words: belief and want. “I believe that I have the power to set into action the vital principle of my fellow men; I want to make use of it; this is all my science and all my means.”4 He had come to see certain conditions and their cures in terms of psychological rather than physical processes. In so doing, although the fact is seldom acknowledged, he laid the foundation of modern psychiatric theory.
Puységur donated a practical technique as well. Mesmeric healing was based largely on the production of a series of crises in the patient, who would typically convulse violently for a time, then emerge improved in health and finally cured. While Puységur was attempting to induce a convulsive crisis in a twenty-three-year-old peasant named Victor Race, whom he was treating for a minor respiratory complaint, the patient exhibited a very peculiar reaction. Instead of convulsing, he fell into a strange kind of sleep in which he appeared to b
e aware of everything going on around him, was capable of answering questions, and actually seemed more alert and intelligent than in his normal waking state. When Mesmer was consulted about the development, he proved less than impressed and dismissed the new state as a “sleep crisis”—just one of various mesmeric crises, and not even a particularly important one. He proved wrong on all counts. The new state had nothing to do with sleep. It was not just one of various mesmeric crises; in fact, it was not a mesmeric crisis at all. And it ultimately proved more important than mesmerism itself. Puységur had inadvertently discovered the art of hypnosis. His experiments with the technique quickly convinced him that the real curative agent was not some mysterious magnetic fluid but the exercise of the magnetizer’s will.
It was not the only presage of things to come. Toward the end of his life, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Justinus Kerner, the parapsychologist who investigated the famous Seeress of Prevorst, fell into a depression. To divert himself, he took to making inkblots on a sheet of paper, which he would then fold in half. He elaborated on the resultant shapes, referring to the final figures as klecksographien, which he said were ghosts and monsters, each assigned to its own place in Hades. His book on the subject, posthumously published and also called Klecksographien, became in later years the inspiration of Hermann Rorschach in his development of modern psychology’s inkblot test.
At much the same time, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot was making an international name for himself for his work in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. His most spectacular achievements were the success of his efforts to have hypnotism accepted by the French Académie des Sciences and his investigation of traumatic paralysis,5 which he showed often to have psychological roots that lay outside the patient’s awareness. Hypnotism itself was investigated and the discovery of aspects like somnambulism and posthypnotic suggestion implied the existence of an area of the mind of which the individual was normally unaware. Before long, Charcot was postulating the existence of unconscious “fixed ideas” that acted as the nuclei of neuroses. Although there was no developed theory of the unconscious as a whole, there was certainly a growing acceptance that certain mental areas and aspects lay outside individual consciousness.
An important factor that influenced emerging psychological theories was the wave of Spiritualism that crossed the Atlantic from America to sweep nineteenth-century Europe. Techniques like automatic writing, seen by mediums as a method of communication with spirits, were increasingly investigated by neurologists for their insights into the workings of the human mind. Other practices, traditionally associated with spirit contact, included the use of black mirrors, crystal balls, and even bowls of water. One experiment involved the drawing of a white circle on a black floor, then having patients stare at it until they produced a variety of visions and hallucinations. The combination of hypnosis with such techniques virtually guaranteed results, so that by the 1880s, even the founders of the Society for Psychical Research were coming to the conclusion that these methods were more likely to detect hidden contents of a subject’s mind than to communicate with spirits. It was only a matter of time before the new psychology began to investigate mediumship itself.
Among the very first to do so was Theodore Flournoy, a physician, philosopher, and psychologist who held the post of professor of psychology at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He was a man somewhat interested in psychical research, but he approached the subject from the standpoint of an experimental psychologist. His guiding principle, derived from Hamlet, was “Everything is possible” … but he was careful to add a modification: “The weight of evidence must be in proportion to the strangeness of the fact.” In December 1894, Flournoy was invited by a fellow professor at the university to attended a private séance held by a Swiss medium named Catherine Muller. She was, by all accounts, an impressive figure, a tall, beautiful, thirty-year-old with black hair and eyes, who was so convinced of the truth of Spiritualism that she made no charge for her demonstrations. At the first of these sittings, she certainly impressed Flournoy by telling him accurately of events that had happened in his own family prior to his birth. This seemed, on the face of it, to be information she could not possibly know, but Flournoy was far from satisfied that there could not be a rational explanation. He launched an exhaustive inquiry into Muller’s background and discovered that there had once been a brief connection between her parents and his own. He concluded that she might consequently have heard of the events she mentioned in a wholly explicable way.
Flournoy did not, however, suspect fraud. As a psychologist he thought the more likely explanation was that she had long forgotten the events but somehow accessed the memories in the peculiar atmosphere of the séance. He decided to continue his investigation and became a regular sitter at Muller’s mediumistic demonstrations. Coincident with this decision, Muller’s mediumship underwent a change. In her original sitting, she had remained awake while she described psychic visions of spirits as they arrived and produced raps by which they conveyed messages. Now, however, she fell into a deep trance state and began to recall scenes from previous lives, manifesting personality changes as she did so. Flournoy continued his investigation for five years and subsequently published his findings in a book called From India to the Planet Mars,6 which contained an exhaustive account of Muller’s experiences and an analysis of their content.
What emerged from their collaboration was strange indeed. Muller made contact with a spirit guide named Leopold, an apparent reincarnation of the eighteenth-century Italian magician Cagliostro. The entity frequently possessed her completely during séances and took to advising Flournoy on how he should respond to her revelations. The revelations themselves fell into three distinct cycles. In the first of these, Muller recalled details of a past life in fifteenth-century India where she had lived as an Arab princess Simandini, married to Sivrouka, a Hindu potentate. The life ended when Sivrouka died and Simandini was obliged to commit suttee on his funeral pyre. Muller claimed Flournoy was the reincarnation of Sivrouka and reminded him of several incidents from their life together. The second cycle had an equally unhappy ending: Muller became possessed by the reincarnatory personality of the French queen Marie Antoinette who was executed for treason by guillotine on October 16, 1793. The third cycle was bizarre. It involved life on Mars. Muller claimed to travel there in spirit and knew the planet intimately. She offered proof by describing its terrain and inhabitants: carriages without horses or wheels, emitting sparks as they glided by; houses with fountains on the roof; a cradle having for curtains an angel made of iron with outstretched wings. Its inhabitants were exactly like the people of Earth, apart from the fact—somewhat shocking in Flournoy’s era—that both sexes wore the same costume, formed of ample trousers and a long blouse, drawn tight about the waist and decorated with various designs.
It was a rich vein for analysis and Flournoy mined it thoroughly. He discovered that the main verifiable details of Muller’s Indian incarnation were drawn from a published History of India. Sources for her supposed life as Marie Antoinette were also easy to find. It quickly became apparent that much of the information Muller gave originated in books she had read as a child—and had in all probability forgotten. The vivid landscapes of Mars, he decided, were “romances of the subliminal imagination”7 generated by wish fulfillment and forgotten memories. His investigation further suggested that each “past incarnation” was built upon what he called a “reversion”—an involuntary regression to an earlier stage of life. Her Martian fantasies originated in early childhood, her Indian “incarnation” was built on her personality at the age of twelve, while Marie Antoinette arose out of the girl she was at age sixteen. Flournoy’s analysis of the Martian language that Muller could write as well as speak convinced him that it was structured on French. After his book was published, an expert linguist attested that the content was actually a distorted form of Hungarian, the mother tongue of Muller’s father. The medium’s spirit gui
de, Leopold, was, Flournoy decided, an unconscious subpersonality of Muller that emerged from its subliminal state, freed by her experience of trance. He concluded that her visions began as “simple entoptical phenomena” produced naturally by the retina and later transformed into full-blown hallucinations under the influence of suggestion. The raps and table movements were, Flournoy thought, probably produced by Muller herself through involuntary muscle movements. He was even more dismissive of Muller’s apparently paranormal abilities such as speaking Sanskrit while manifesting details of her Indian incarnation:
No one dares tell her that her great invisible protector [Leopold] is only an illusionary apparition, another part of herself, a product of her subconscious imagination; nor that the strange peculiarities of her mediumistic communications—the Sanscrit, the recognizable signatures of deceased persons, the thousand correct revelations of facts unknown to her—are but old forgotten memories of things which she saw or heard in childhood.8
Flournoy used this and other investigations to draw far-reaching conclusions about the subliminal mind, mediumship, and spirit contact in general. He was convinced of the extraordinary creativity vested in the subliminal mind: one of his patients was a young mother who proved capable of dictating philosophical fragments far more sophisticated than her apparent level of knowledge would allow. He believed the subliminal mind acted as a compensatory mechanism, pointing to Muller as a well-educated, ambitious woman who, frustrated by her social and economic status, created her elaborate fantasies as a form of wish fulfillment. He believed too that such fantasies often had a playful element. One interpreter of Flournoy’s insights put the case succinctly: “Most mediums do not wish to deceive, they just wish to play, like little girls with their dolls, but sometimes fantasy life gains control.”9