Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  What is so interesting about Toynbee’s experiences is that he apparently achieved this objectivity without any effort. What was the secret? His account of his experience at Mistrà suggests the answer. He had sat ‘musing and gazing … through most of a long summer’s day’, so was in a state of contemplative calm, the same calm that Wordsworth declared to be the essential condition for poetry. And although he was meditating on ‘the cruel riddle of Mankind’s crimes and follies’ he was not, like Koestler, in a state of seething indignation. It was this freedom from negative emotion, this calm intellectual contemplation, that provided the basic condition for the leap of imagination that placed him above human history. Nietzsche had had a similar experience above Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland, when he was seized with the inspiration for Thus Spake Zarathustra. He wrote in his journal: ‘Six thousand feet above men and time … .’ Both Toynbee and Nietzsche had fulfilled the basic condition: they were ‘the right way up’.

  *Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, volume 10, pp. 126–144.

  *The Occult, p. 58.

  *Eileen Garrett, Adventures in the Supernormal (1949), p. 172, cited in LeShan, Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal, p. 34.

  *Helen Keller, The Story of My Life.

  4

  The Information Universe

  One day in 1968 Mr P. J. Chase of Wallington, Surrey was waiting for a bus, and since the next bus was not due for some time he strolled a short distance along the road. Soon he found himself standing in front of two pleasant thatched cottages with attractive gardens; these had a profusion of flowers, and Mr Chase particularly noticed some hollyhocks. A date above the door of one of the cottages indicated that it had been built in 1837.

  The next day Mr Chase mentioned the cottages to someone at work — his place of work was not far from the bus-stop. The other man thought about it and shook his head. There were no such cottages on the site, he insisted — only two brick houses. The following evening Mr Chase walked back to the site, and discovered that his workmate was correct; there were only two brick houses. But an old resident of the area verified that there had been two cottages on the site; they had been demolished some years earlier.

  Mr Chase recounted this story to the historian Joan Forman, and she has published it in a book called The Mask of Time. The sensible reaction to such an anecdote is that it is pure invention — the kind of thing that happens in ghost stories, but not in real life. Yet the evidence of ‘time-slips’ is too strong for that. Undoubtedly the most famous ‘time-slip’ concerned two principals of an Oxford college, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who on 10 August 1901 visited the Trianon park at Versailles and were surprised to see many people in eighteenth-century costume. Both felt oddly depressed and experienced a ‘dreamlike’ sensation. It was when they compared notes that they decided that something rather strange had happened. Three years later they returned and found everything changed: the place had been ‘modernized’ — yet the changes they noted had not taken place in the past three years. Careful study of books on the period convinced them that they had somehow revisited the age of Marie Antoinette — and had probably actually seen her in person. The story of their strange experience, An Adventure, caused a sensation. Nevertheless, when Dame Joan Evans became the literary executor of the two ladies she decided to allow the book to go out of print on the grounds that what they had seen was almost certainly a fancy-dress party organized by a fashionable lady called Mme de Greffuhle, a friend of the novelist Proust. In fact later investigation showed that the fancy-dress party had taken place seven years before the Trianon visit, and that Mme de Greffuhle left Versailles for the country during the month of August. So the most famous ‘time-slip’ of all remains unexplained.

  I myself collected a similar experience at first hand from Mrs Jane O’Neill, a Cambridge schoolteacher.* When she and a friend visited Fotheringhay church — where Mary Queen of Scots was executed — in the autumn of 1973 she was greatly impressed by a picture of a crucifixion behind the altar. Later, when it happened to come up in discussion, her friend denied seeing the picture. Jane O’Neill rang the Fotheringhay postmistress, who arranged the flowers in the church every Sunday, and was told that no such picture existed. When the two women revisited the church a year later Jane O’Neill found its interior quite different. Some historical research revealed that the church she had seen in 1973 was the one that had been pulled down in 1553.

  Jane O’Neill’s ‘time-slip’ had been only one of a series of similar experiences that followed a severe shock earlier that autumn: she had been the first at the scene of a bad motorway accident near Heathrow and had helped to pull injured passengers from the wreck. On her way home later that night she had begun to ‘see’ injured passengers in front of her — a phenomenon known as ‘eidetic imagery’. On holiday in Norfolk soon afterwards she continued to ‘see’ things — but this time, apparently, they were visions from the past, and in each case she felt exhausted afterwards. So her ‘vision’ in Fotheringhay church was almost certainly a piece of eidetic imagery which she mistook for present-day reality. What is strange is that her vision corresponded so closely to the church as it had been before its demolition.

  Now in the case of Jane O’Neill we can at least form some rough idea of what happened. A bad shock has the effect of ‘loosening the psychic strata’ and shaking us out of habit patterns. It makes us more vulnerable, yet in a sense more alive — more sensitive to the reality that surrounds us, instead of taking it for granted. In this state of ‘wide-openness’ one becomes like a highly sensitive camera that can take photographs in a semi-darkness that would defeat an ordinary camera. So Jane O’Neill’s experience in the church is not dissimilar to Toynbee’s experience above Pharsalus — with this single difference: she mistook her ‘vision’ for reality. And the same explanation seems to fit Mr Chase’s two thatched cottages and the experience of the two ladies at Versailles.

  But if we are to accept this explanation, then we must make one absolutely basic assumption: that ‘information’ about the past is somehow ‘stored’ exactly like a tape-recording, and that our minds have some natural method of ‘retrieving’ this information. For the most part it seems to happen accidentally when the mind is ‘wide-open’ and in a state of relaxation. Then there is the experience that Toynbee describes as falling into a ‘time-pocket’ and that Eileen Garrett calls ‘a fundamental shift in one’s awareness’. The mind suddenly relaxes below its usual threshold of relaxation and falls ‘down the rabbit hole’. What it then seems to encounter is some more solid and permanent level of reality than our changing world. There is a feeling of timelessness, as if what is ‘glimpsed’ is happening now. In one of his last books J. B. Priestley speaks of his own experiences of such ‘glimpses’:

  … on these occasions I have been recalling a person or a scene as clearly and as sharply as I could, and then there has been, so to speak, a little click, a slight change of focus, and for a brief moment I have felt as if the person or scene were not being remembered but were really there still existing, that nobody, nothing, had gone. I can’t make this happen; either it happens or it doesn’t… .*

  This is obviously Toynbee’s experience of the reality of history, Faculty X, and again there is the ‘little click, a slight change of focus’, a kind of shift of awareness as if diving down inside oneself. And this is followed by the sense of being in touch with some more permanent reality. Sometimes, what is ‘glimpsed’ is logical and rational, like the battle of Pharsalus or the inside of Fotheringhay church. Sometimes it makes no sense at all.

  The biologist Ivan Sanderson records such an experience in the final chapter of More ‘Things’, a book concerned mainly with zoological oddities: the chapter is called ‘An Hallucination?’ After stating that he has never been interested in ‘the occult’, he tells how he and his wife were living in Haiti, engaged on a biological survey. One day, on a drive to Lake Azuey, they made the mistake of taking a short cut that landed them up to t
heir axles in mud and had to spend most of the night walking back. Sanderson and his wife were walking together, their assistant Frederick G. Allsop walking ahead, when:

  … suddenly, on looking up from the dusty ground I perceived absolutely clearly in the now brilliant moonlight, and casting shadows appropriate to their positions, three-storied houses of various shapes and sizes lining both sides of the road. These houses hung out over the road, which suddenly appeared to be muddy with patches of large cobblestones. The houses were of (I would say) about the Elizabethan period of England, but for some reason, I knew they were in Paris! They had pent roofs, with some dormer windows, gables, timbered porticos and small windows with tiny leaded panes. Here and there, there were dull reddish lights burning behind them, as if from candles. There were iron-frame lanterns hanging from timbers jutting from some houses and they were all swaying together as if in a wind, but there was not the faintest movement of air about us … .

  I was marvelling at this, and looking about me, when my wife came to a dead stop and gave a gasp. I ran smack into her. Then she went speechless for a time while I begged to know what was wrong. Finally she took my hand and, pointing, described to me exactly what I was seeing. At which point I became speechless.

  Finally pulling myself together, I blurted out something like, ‘What do you think’s happened?’ but my wife’s reply startled me even more. I remember it only too well; she said, ‘How did we get to Paris five hundred years ago?’

  We stood marvelling at what we apparently both now saw, picking out individual items and pointing, questioning each other as to details, and so forth. Curiously, we found ourselves swaying back and forth and began to feel very weak, so I called out to Fred, whose white shirt was fast disappearing ahead.

  I don’t quite remember what happened then but we tried to run towards him and, feeling dizzy, sat down on what we were convinced was a tall, rough curbstone. Fred came running back asking what was wrong but at first we did not know what to say. He was the ‘keeper’ of the cigarettes, of which we had about half a dozen left, and he sat down beside us and gave us each one. By the time the flame from his lighter had cleared frcm my eyes, so had fifteenth-century Paris, and there was nothing before me but the endless and damned thorn bushes and cactus and bare earth. My wife also ‘came back’ after looking into the flame. Fred had seen nothing… .

  A young native later commented to Sanderson, ‘You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could always see things if you wanted to.’ Presumably he meant that Sanderson was ‘psychic’. This could certainly help to explain the vision of ancient houses. Their situation may also have played its part: they were tired, plodding along a road in bright moonlight, feeling a little nervous, so their senses were ‘wide-open’. Sanderson’s wife may have seen the ancient houses by ‘tuning in’ to her husband — husbands and wives are often telepathic. But all that still leaves the mystery of what fifteenth-century houses were doing in twentieth-century Haiti. It is true that Haiti was occupied by the French, but this was two centuries later. Is it possible that there were once old ‘Elizabethan’ houses on that bare country road? That, on the whole, seems the likeliest explanation. Yet it seems unlikely that they could have vanished without leaving any trace. And if this explanation has to be abandoned, then the vision of fifteenth-century Paris in twentieth-century Haiti remains incomprehensible.

  In The Mask of Time Joan Forman makes a creditable attempt to explain ‘time-slips’ in scientific terms. Her suggestion is that events are ‘recorded by a material medium (stone seems to be a common recorder) … at a time when energy patterns were being created in the neighbourhood’. The culprit, she thinks, could be ‘Schumann waves’, ultraviolet energy of very short wavelength, which are present between earth and the ionosphere and which operate on the same frequency as our ‘brainwaves’.

  A similar explanation of haunted houses had been advanced towards the turn of the century by Sir Oliver Lodge, who suggested that powerful tragic emotions, like those associated with murders or suicides, might be ‘recorded’ in the walls of houses where such events have occurred. Half a century later a retired Cambridge don named T. C. Lethbridge came independently to the same conclusion. Lethbridge had often experienced ‘unpleasant sensations’ in certain spots, as if something ‘nasty’ had happened there and left traces behind. Lethbridge called these sensations ‘ghouls’, and believed that they were basically ‘recordings’. In one case he and his wife Mina were visiting Ladram beach to collect seaweed and both experienced an ‘unpleasant feeling’ near a stream that ran down the cliff: when Mina went to make a sketch at the clifftop she had the feeling that someone was urging her to jump. Lethbridge later discovered that a man had committed suicide from that spot and assumed that Mina was somehow ‘picking up’ a ‘recording’ of his emotions just before he jumped. On another occasion Lethbridge and his mother had been walking in the great wood near Wokingham when both had experienced acute depression; they discovered later that they had been walking close to the corpse of a man who had committed suicide.

  Lethbridge observed that the site of such an occurrence is usually damp and concluded that the ‘recording medium’ may simply be the electrical field of water. He suggested that ghosts are nothing more than ‘tape-recordings’ which for some reason become suddenly visible to human beings.

  This explanation seems to be favoured by Joan Forman. One of her correspondents had visited the Long Gallery at Hampton Court and experienced an ‘agony of distress’ at the door leading to the antechamber of the royal pew, and then again in the pew itself. Catherine Howard, the wife of Henry VIII, had been arrested at Hampton Court in 1541 and charged with misconduct: she had escaped from the guards and rushed screaming along the gallery to try to see the king, who was in his pew in the chapel; but the door was closed. Joan Forman, who had herself experienced a feeling of ‘utter misery and extreme physical coldness’ in the gallery, suggests that the two ‘recordings’ are, respectively, those of Catherine Howard and those of Henry VIII, who heard her screams. But Catherine was executed in the following year, and Henry VIII lived on for another six years. So it seems unlikely that their ‘ghosts’ haunt the spot. According to Joan Forman, a sudden tragic intensity of emotion is all that remains of the event: a permanent ‘tape-recording’ that can be ‘picked up’ by those who are sensitive enough.

  The first person to stumble on this notion of ‘recordings’ was an American professor, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, who has already been introduced in the opening chapter. When Buchanan first began experimenting with his students, handing them various chemicals wrapped up in brown paper packages and asking them to try and ‘sense’ what was inside them, he believed that our bodies are surrounded with a ‘nerve aura’ which has exactly the same kind of sensitivity as our tongues. So his students were really identifying the chemicals as they might have identified the taste of salt or sugar in their mouths. And when some of his ‘sensitives’ were able to hold sealed letters and describe the people who wrote them, Buchanan simply extended his theory and concluded that the personality of the writer had somehow ‘imprinted’ itself on the letter. His sensitives were in effect psychic bloodhounds who were able to distinguish between one ‘smell’ and another. However this pleasingly simple and logical theory soon ran into difficulties. The sensitives were able to produce equally precise descriptions if he handed them a photograph sealed in an envelope (photography was a recent discovery in the 1840s). At first that seemed reasonable enough — after all, most photographs have been in contact with their subjects and must have picked up something of their ‘smells’. Then Buchanan discovered that it worked just as well with newspaper photographs. And that was absurd. The ‘nerve aura’ theory had to be abandoned — or at least modified. Buchanan had to fall back on the notion of ‘clairvoyance’, and this undoubtedly helped to destroy his reputation with his scientific colleagues. By the 1860s few people still took him seriously.

  But by this time his disc
iple William Denton, a professor of geology at Boston, was producing even more remarkable results with geological specimens wrapped in thick paper. His chief sensitives were his wife, his sister-in-law Mrs Cridge and, later on, his son Sherman. Denton’s book The Soul of Things remains one of the most fascinatingly readable books in the whole field of paranormal research. He arrived at the conviction that every object in the world carries its own history hidden inside it and that most people can develop the ability to ‘read’ this history simply by holding it in their hands. A fragment of volcanic rock produced visions of an exploding volcano with a river of lava pouring into the ocean. Mrs Cridge even ‘saw’ ships on the ocean. In fact the lava was from the eruption in 1840 of the volcano of Kilauea on Hawaii, when the United States fleet had been visiting the island. A meteorite brought visions of empty space, with the stars looking abnormally large and bright. A fragment of dinosaur bone summoned a vision of aquatic dinosaurs on a prehistoric beach. And when Denton tried the same fragment on Mrs Cridge a month later (without telling her what was in the parcel) she also saw water and bird-like creatures with membranous wings — probably pterodactyls. A piece of a mastodon’s tooth produced an image of a monstrous creature with heavy legs, an unwieldy head and a very large body. A pebble from a glacier produced a feeling of being buried for a long time in a depth of ice. A pebble from Niagara brought an impression of the sound of a torrent and a deep hole full of something like steam (she thought it might be a hot spring). A piece of hornstone from the Mount of Olives brought an image so accurate that Denton’s wife deduced she was looking at Jerusalem.