by J H Brennan
At the same time, criticism of orthodox psychological theory hardly constitutes proof that spirits actually exist. There seems little doubt that there is a psychological aspect to much spirit phenomena and there have been many cases in which simple hallucination provides the obvious explanation. But it is only possible to maintain that all aspects of spirit encounters and communications are hallucinatory by ignoring vast quantities of intrusive evidence. One psychologist who found he could no longer ignore the evidence was Carl Jung.
Jung began his psychiatric career in agreement with Flournoy that the spirit communications produced by mediumship were essentially the medium talking to herself, or, more accurately, to her own subconscious mind. But Jung had too much intellectual honesty to cling to outmoded opinions, even when they were his own, and in time, life experience led him to revise his early ideas about spirits.
In 1925 he visited what was then British East Africa on an expedition commissioned by the British government to conduct ethnographic interviews with the Bugishu people inhabiting the western and southern stretches of Mount Elgon. Jung, who was then fifty, had by this time developed a broad interest in the paranormal and lost no time in questioning his hosts about spirits. But when he raised the subject during a palaver, “a deathly silence fell on the assembly. The men glanced away, looked in all directions and some of them made off.”19 Jung’s Somali headman and the tribal chief conferred together for a moment, then the headman returned to Jung’s side to whisper furiously in his ear, “What did you say that for? Now you’ll have to break up the palaver.”20 The incident was an object lesson for Jung, teaching him never to use the word seleteni (“ghosts” or “spirits”) if it could possibly be avoided. A little later in his stay, he discovered why.
One morning while visiting the water hole near Jung’s camp, a young native woman collapsed with a septic abortion and was carried back to her home in a high fever. Her tribespeople had little faith in any remedies their European visitors could offer, or indeed in their local medicine man. They decided to call in a witch doctor from another village. The man arrived and began to sniff around the woman’s hut like a dog, moving in decreasing spirals until he stopped suddenly and announced that the trouble was caused by the girl’s grandfather with whom she had lived since childhood. The grandfather had died recently and his spirit told the witch doctor that he was bored and lonely in ghost land so he had come down the trail at night to get the girl. This was what made her ill. Jung wrote:
The doctor prescribed building a ghost-house, so they made one very neatly of stone … and they put in a bed and food and water … And the next night the ghost looked in and thought it seemed very nice, so he went in and slept until very late … the girl’s fever went down and in three days she had quite recovered.21
Despite the lighthearted tone of his account, Jung took spirits very seriously. It must have been clear to him that something was going on here that went beyond hallucinatory perceptions of the personal unconscious. The incident with the woman led him to conclude that the tribe’s ancestral spirits lived in the bamboo zone high on Mount Elgon and he made a trip there in order to search for them. In the stillness of the bamboo groves, his guides began to behave strangely and clearly did not want to continue. When he confronted one of them, the ashen-faced man insisted there were “thousands and thousands” of ghosts in the groves.22 On a different occasion, Jung saw one for himself, a creature with an enormous owl-like face and eyes at least a yard in diameter. During a hike he heard music and people talking when no one was actually there.23
Later in life he was visited, first in a dream, then as a full-blown waking vision, by a figure he called Philemon. He described the figure as an “old man with the horns of a bull … [and] … the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colours.”24 Although he believed Philemon had arisen out of his unconscious, he also concluded that the vision was not his personal creation. Such figures somehow produced themselves and had a life of their own.25 Furthermore, Philemon often demonstrated superior insight to Jung himself.26
As Jung’s thinking matured and his personal experiences expanded, he went on to develop a theory of the unconscious that gave a whole new perspective to the problem of spirits. Jung claimed he discovered a collective unconscious—a suprapersonal layer of the psyche—due to a dream he had while returning home from America. In his dream he found himself in the upper story of a house he knew to be his own, furnished in a comfortable modern style. When he descended to the ground floor, he found everything much older—dating back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Stone steps led to a cellar that clearly dated to Roman times, while a trapdoor and more steps brought him to a cave cut in the bedrock with a scattering of bones and broken pottery “like remains of a primitive culture.”27 Jung interpreted this dream as a model of the psyche and concluded that the primitive cave represented a sort of mental bedrock that was in no way generated by the individual’s thoughts or experience but was common to the whole of humanity. He later found proof of his theory in an hallucination presented by one of his patients who experienced the sun as having an erect penis—a profound mythic symbol from a second-century CE Hellenistic magical text that was not published until four years after Jung had seen his patient.
This version of events is hotly disputed by Harvard psychologist Richard Noll, who argues that E. Schwyzer, the so-called Solar Phallus Man, had his hallucination much later than Jung claimed (so that it might well have been generated by something he read) and was not even Jung’s patient in the first place.28 For Noll, the roots of Jung’s ideas are more suspect than scientific. In sharp contrast to Jung’s own writings and those of his immediate followers, Noll’s biography of Jung29 portrays him as a practicing pagan,30 who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Goethe31 and Meister Eckhardt,32 studied alchemy, the Hermetica, and Blavatsky’s Theosophy, and, most important, took instruction from a spirit (the aforementioned Philemon). In short, Noll’s conclusion is that Jung was a practicing Hermeticist. Such a portrait, of course, places Jung—despite his protestations of academic and scientific respectability—firmly within the Western esoteric tradition and is particularly interesting in the light of similarities between his theory of a collective unconscious and esoteric ideas about a so-called Astral Plane.
Jung defined the collective unconscious in the following words:
The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious, but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes. The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere …
My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.33
Despite the careful formulation of his theory, Jung was well aware that it left him open to charges of mysticism, and he went to some pains to defend himself by insisting it contained no more m
ysticism than the concept of instincts.34 Nonetheless, when he came to give examples of his postulated archetypes, it became clear that some corresponded to the gods of ancient mythology. Others were capable of demanding worship or of possessing individuals and groups, sometimes to negative effect: “There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall a prey to.”35 Archetypal figures appeared in dreams,36 as visions and, as we have seen from his own experience of Philemon, as psychopompic projections—that is, apparent intrusions into day-to-day waking reality; all manifestations traditionally attributed to spirits.
Thus, Jung’s critics might be forgiven for assuming that his new theory was no more than a reformulation of some very old esoteric ideas: the archetypes were spirits and the collective unconscious was the spirit world visited by shamans and mediums. If there was any difference at all, it lay in the fact that for centuries, the spirit world was believed to be “out there” or “up there,” while Jung’s insight was that it was actually “in there.”
This closely mirrors an idea central to occult practice from the nineteenth century to the present day—the concept of an Astral Plane that runs parallel to and is accessible from our world. The starry terminology seems to have originated with the French magus Eliphas Lévi, who postulated a force of nature “more powerful than steam” that magnetized the stars and transformed into “astral light” therein.37 In human beings, the same energy formed a subtle body that acted as a mediator between the individual and the astral light, enabling him or her to act on the whole of nature by an application of will. Tellingly, Lévi also taught that the astral light was the “common mirror of all thoughts and forms.”38
Lévi’s ideas were taken up by the Golden Dawn, a pseudo-Masonic Victorian magical society. They taught the use of technical aids like tattva cards to enable the projection of the astral body into another level of reality, the Astral Plane.39 Golden Dawn initiates followed Lévi in their belief that their training enabled them to view this parallel reality, as one might today use a television set to view the actions of individuals in a distant studio. But by the time Dion Fortune founded her Society of the Inner Light in 1922, the expression “Astral Plane” was increasingly seen as an archaic term for the visual imagination itself.40 The distinction, however, is not so clear-cut. Imagination was no longer accepted by occultists as a subjective function of the mind but rather a perceptible world in its own right, particularly when it manifested in dreams and visions. Lévi went some way toward marrying the two viewpoints in the Introduction to his History of Magic when he stated:
A particular phenomenon occurs when the brain is congested or overcharged by Astral Light; sight is turned inward instead of outward; night falls on the external and real world, while fantastic brilliance shines on the world of dreams … The soul then perceives by means of images the reflection of its impressions and thoughts. This is to say that the analogy subsisting between idea and form attracts in the Astral Light a reflection representing that form, configuration being the essence of the vital light; it is the universal imagination, of which each of us appropriates a lesser or greater part according to our grade of sensibility and memory.41
Lévi’s use of the term universal imagination brings the concept of the Astral Plane closer still to Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious, and it is significant that the Astral Plane is believed by modern occultists to be the home of spirits. Perhaps more to the point, they also believe it to be part of a grouping of “Inner Planes,” seen as objective realities that are nonetheless accessible by turning the attention inward. For Jung, the collective unconscious was also an objective aspect of the human psyche. Esoteric doctrine and Jungian psychology blend absolutely in the therapeutic technique of “active imagination” defined by Jung as a “sequence of fantasies produced by deliberate concentration,” which he believed produced proof of a collective unconscious.42 Active Imagination is identical to a modern esoteric technique known as “pathworking,” which allows practitioners controlled access to the Astral Plane.43
But whether expressed in Jungian or esoteric terms, the concept of an objective aspect of the human psyche only goes partway toward an explanation of spirits. This becomes evident when spirit manifestations are accompanied by physical phenomena or seen by more than one person at the same time. Jung himself found it possible to accept that some physical events might have direct psychic causes, but many of his professional colleagues were not so sure. When Freud and Jung experienced what Jung called a “catalytic exteriorization phenomenon”—a loud report in a bookcase following a curious sensation in Jung’s diaphragm—Freud dismissed the idea that it might have had a psychological cause as “sheer bosh” and remained unable to accept it even when the noise repeated.44
Most of us are a little like that. Cultural conditioning in Western society brings with it a tendency to view all psychological content as subjective. Thus we can readily accept that spirits might be the unconscious constructs of a medium or the personal hallucinations of a magician. We might even accept, in the light of Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious, that some eruptions from the depths of the psyche have origins independent of our personal experience. But for most of us, the idea that psychic entities might become visible and even tangible, as the grimoires insist, or move tables and throw objects, as Spiritualism attests, is usually a step too far. Nonetheless, some experimental work has been done to suggest that a mechanism for such effects does exist.
In 1966, the British psychologist Kenneth J. Batcheldor published a report in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research entitled “Report on a Case of Table Levitation and Associated Phenomena.”
Batcheldor, an active member of the Society for Psychical Research, had become interested in Spiritualist reports of table-turning during the Victorian era. Table-turning is a specific type of Spiritualist séance during which participants sit, often in total darkness, with their hands placed on the surface of a table, which will then allegedly move of its own accord, due to the intervention of spirits. Batcheldor noted that the practice had become something of a rarity in the sixties and decided to carry out his own investigation. To this end, he set up a small group of sitters in Exeter and, on April 25, 1964, began what became a series of 200 experimental séances. None of the sitters laid claim to any mediumistic ability and Batcheldor himself did not accept the spirit hypothesis of séance room phenomena. Of the 200 sittings, 120 produced no paranormal results. Physical phenomena, not necessarily paranormal, occurred in the remaining 80.
Early sessions saw some movement of the table, but nothing that could not be explained by involuntary muscle action on the part of participants. On the eleventh sitting, however, Batcheldor reported that the table rose clear of the floor and floated in the air. Since sitters’ hands were only in contact with the top of the table, this ruled out involuntary muscle action. It did not, however, rule out deliberate fraud, as the séance had been held in darkness. With the aid of one of his sitters, who was a professional engineer, Batcheldor began to introduce tighter controls. At this point, a curious pattern emerged. Batcheldor discovered that phenomena were relatively easy to produce (with a little patience) when no controls were imposed and the séance was held in total darkness. Once controls were introduced—tape recording the proceedings, attaching sensors to the feet of the table, and so on—the phenomena immediately stopped but gradually crept back over a series of séances. Any new set of controls would cause the pattern to repeat.
Batcheldor found that by introducing controls very gradually, in small increments, and allowing his sitters to get used to them, he could induce not only table movements up to and including total levitation but a whole range of “spirit” phenomena familiar from Victorian reports. These included raps, breezes, intense cold, lights, the sensation of being touched, the pulling back of sitters’ chairs, movement of objects such as a rattle and a trumpet, the “gluing” of the table to the floor so that it could not be moved, and even apports (small
objects apparently appearing out of nowhere).
Batcheldor’s experimental technique proved repeatable. By 1979, he estimated that at least ten groups had produced paranormal phenomena using his methods. The leader of one of them, Batcheldor’s colleague and collaborator, Colin Brookes-Smith, reported that given suitable procedures, paranormal forces could be made available “by the pound.”45
The effect of these various experiments was to separate séance room phenomena from the automatic assumption of spirit intervention. It seemed clear to Batcheldor that what was behind the phenomena was not disembodied spirits but the (unconscious) minds of his sitters. Batcheldor theorized that “natural artifacts”—that is, unfamiliar occurrences like table movements caused by muscle contractions—gradually conditioned the sitters to accept the possibility of paranormal manifestations, thus clearing the way to produce them. It may be noted that Batcheldor’s ability to create paranormal effects “by the pound” did not absolutely rule out spirit intervention, but if spirits were somehow inhabitants of “inner space,” as postulated in Jung’s model, then it did clearly demonstrate the existence of a mechanism whereby they might influence the physical world.