Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  Maslow made the important observation that all healthy people seem to have peak experiences with a fair degree of frequency. This deepened in me the insight that the main trouble with ‘Outsiders’ is that they tend to shrink from their own experience and to accept it half-heartedly. If we could grasp the lesson of the ‘holiday experience’ we would get on with what we have to do with cheerful determination, which would have the effect of reinforcing the lesson of the ‘holiday experience’ and making it still easier to put into practice. Maslow made an important observation that confirmed this: as his students talked among themselves about peak experiences, they began having more of them. I noted the lesson: the best way to induce peak experiences is to recall past peak experiences and to try to recreate their very essence, the feeling of delight and courage.

  It can be seen that Yeats was talking about a peak experience when he wrote:

  Something drops from eyes long blind,

  He completes his partial mind,

  For an instant stands at ease,

  Laughs aloud, his heart at peace… .

  The peak experience is essentially an experience of ‘completing the partial mind’.

  I have described in the opening chapter how as I came to research The Occult I became increasingly convinced of the reality of the ‘paranormal’. I defy anyone to make a serious study of the subject and not to end up totally convinced. Scepticism is only another name for a certain lazy-minded dogmatism. And as I wrote the book it became quite clear that ‘occultism’ is simply a recognition of man’s ‘hidden powers’ — that is, a recognition that everyday consciousness is merely the ‘partial mind’. At the same time I realized what had always repelled me about spiritualism and ‘occultism’. The ‘believers’ treat them as a religion, something towards which they direct their faith — generally another name for credulity. Their attitude is essentially passive. The result is that their credulity is reinforced, and they are further than ever from thinking for themselves. What attracted me about ‘occultism’ was the same healthy element that lies at the heart of religion — that obsession with the mystery of human existence that created saints and mystics rather than ‘true believers’.

  The next major clue came from that curious byway of psychology, the study of multiple personality. It had fascinated me ever since I came across the Christine Beauchamp case in a popular book by Dingwall. In 1898 Dr Morton Prince of Boston began treating a girl called Clara Fowler for nervous exhaustion. One day he decided to hypnotize her and to his astonishment, a completely different personality emerged under hypnosis, a bright, mischievous child who called herself Sally. She insisted that she was not Clara (or Christine, as Prince preferred to call her in his book about the case) although they shared the same body. Sally was tough and healthy and found it hard to understand why Clara was so feeble. Eventually a third personality appeared under hypnosis, a self-possessed, schoolmistressy girl whom Prince called B-4. It gradually transpired that B-4 had first made her appearance when Clara had a bad shock.

  She was a nurse at the time, and a friend of her father’s named William Jones had come to call on her at the hospital. Finding a ladder outside, he had put it against Clara’s window and climbed up. The sight of Jones’ face peering through her first-floor window had given Clara such a bad shock that she went into a nervous decline, and B-4 suddenly appeared and took over.

  Sally and B-4 loathed one another, and Clara herself had no suspicion of the existence of either. Unfortunately Prince had let a genie out of the bottle when he ‘released’ Sally. Being stronger than Clara, Sally could push her out of the body — out of the driving seat, so to speak — and do as she liked. She loved playing practical jokes on the timid Clara, such as taking a long walk in the country then vacating the body and leaving poor Clara to walk back home. On one occasion Sally even went off to another town and got a job as a waitress. During these pranks Clara suffered total amnesia, and would wake up to find herself having to cope with some embarrassing situation.

  Prince achieved some kind of success by finally integrating Clara and B-4 under hypnosis. Yet, as he admitted years later, he never wholly succeeded in getting rid of Sally.

  A case like this seems to defy all common sense: it certainly seems to defy all our comfortable, logical notions about what it means to be an ‘individual’. Of course it is not difficult to understand the vague outline of Clara’s illness. She was always a timid sort of person. When she was thirteen her mother had died an unpleasant death and her father, an irresponsible alcoholic, was largely to blame. An experience like that is enough to make anyone decide that they do not want to face life. It is conceivable that Clara left home because her father was sexually interested in her: she never said as much, but we know that the majority of contemporary cases of multiple personality are caused by sexual abuse in childhood. (A recent study of multiple personality by the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, directed by Brendan O’Regan, concluded that all such cases have their origin in childhood sexual abuse.)

  Clara Fowler placed all her affection and trust in the family friend William Jones, who seemed to be everything that her father was not. But he also seems to have conceived designs on her, and when he appeared outside her window — somewhat the worse for drink — and later made suggestive remarks, her courage collapsed completely and B-4 suddenly appeared and took over. But why should another ‘person’ take over? Most people who allow themselves to become defeated by some traumatic experience simply have a nervous breakdown. Does the answer lie in the observation that we seem to become different persons at different stages in our lives? Is it possible that Clara was Sally when she was six years old, but that she then became nervous and shy so that Sally remained suppressed?

  Dozens of other recorded cases of multiple personality make it clear that there is no simple answer. The mystery seems to defy all our normal criteria of individuality. Perhaps the most famous case was the one recorded by Thigpen and Cleckley in their book The Three Faces of Eve. Eve White (whose real name was Christine Sizemore) was a colourless young married woman who came to see the doctors because she was suffering from headaches and blackouts. She returned one day and told them that her husband was enraged because she had been on an expensive shopping spree and bought a lot of sexy clothes, yet she had no recollection whatever of doing so. And one day as she was talking to Dr Thigpen, another Eve made her appearance: a sophisticated, self-confident, brash young woman who smoked, drank and liked virile men. (The original Eve was a rather priggish young woman and a born-again Christian.) Apparently Eve Black had made her first appearance when Christine was six years old: after a blackout she came to and found herself being beaten for attacking her twin sisters as they lay in their cot. It was her ‘other self’ that had done it.

  Christine Sizemore’s case has many parallels with that of Clara Fowler, down to the appearance of a third personality, Jane, who was more sensible and integrated than the other two. Even the outcome of the case was similar. Thigpen thought he had cured Christine by integrating the three personalities, but in her later book, Eve, Christine Sizemore revealed that the problem had returned in a more virulent form and a whole host of new personalities had appeared — about thirty in all.

  One of the oddest features of the case is that the two Eves had different physical characteristics. Eve Black was allergic to nylon — it brought her out in a rash: as soon as Eve White took over the rash disappeared. When one personality was under anaesthetic another took over and ‘she’ promptly awoke.

  Another curious feature of the case is that Eve White was ‘psychic’. When she was a child her sister became ill, apparently with pneumonia. In a dream Christine saw Jesus, who told her that her sister had diphtheria, not pneumonia. She told her parents the next day and they sent for the doctor, who confirmed the diagnosis and obtained the necessary drug from fifty miles away. A few hours’ delay would have cost the child’s life. As an adult Christine had a vision of her husband being electrocuted a
t work: she persuaded him to stay at home. The man who took over his job was electrocuted. When her daughter was to be inoculated against polio a presentiment made her try to prevent it. She was overruled and her daughter almost died from a bad batch of vaccine. On a drive through the mountains she begged her husband to stop the car and check the wheels: a rear trailer wheel was so loose that it was about to fall off at any moment.

  The obvious question raised by such a case is whether the ‘dual personality’ phenomenon has any connection with the doppelgänger phenomenon discussed in the last chapter. An example will clarify the point. In a celebrated case a Mrs Butler, who lived in Ireland, dreamt repeatedly of ‘the most enchanting house I ever saw’. She and her husband decided to move to England and inspected many properties around London. One day they went to look at a house in Hampshire and Mrs Butler recognized it as her dream house. She was so familiar with it that she was able to show the housekeeper around the premises and describe every room before they entered it. The price of the house was absurdly low, and when they went to see the agent he told them why. ‘The house is haunted.’ But, he added, ‘you need not be concerned. You are the ghost.’ He had recognized her from the owner’s precise description. Rudyard Kipling came upon a similar case, of a house ‘haunted’ by a former occupant who brooded upon it obsessively, and dramatized it in a story called ‘The House Surgeon’. But if a doppelgänger can appear elsewhere without its owner being aware could it not perhaps also ‘take over’ the body if the owner was in a state of nervous depression and low vitality?

  Speculations like these seemed to me an important step towards creating some comprehensive ‘Newtonian’ theory of ‘the occult’. But just as I began to feel I was making some progress I came upon the extraordinary Doris Fischer case, which introduced a new complication. Doris (whose real name was Britta L. Fritschle) had a childhood not unlike that of Clara Fowler, with a drunken father and a mild, uncomplaining mother. Her first ‘split’ occurred when her father snatched her from her mother’s arms and threw her on the floor. The girl who sat up was no longer Doris but a personality who claimed to be a spirit. For the sake of simplicity, I will call her Ariel. Ariel was immediately succeeded by a mischievous child who resembled Clara Fowler’s Sally. And from then on Doris’s life was made a misery by Margaret’s endless practical jokes. Doris would promise not to go swimming in the river, then would ‘wake up’ to find herself returning home with wet hair. When Doris reached out for a piece of cake Margaret would take over and gobble it down. But Margaret allowed Doris to share the body. Sometimes the two of them would hold conversations using the same mouth: but although Margaret seemed to be able to read Doris’s mind, Doris would never know what Margaret was about to say until the words came out of her mouth. That was an interesting complication. Doppelgängers can behave like independent entities, but this seemed ridiculous.

  Doris, like Christine Sizemore, had flashes of clairvoyance. One day at work she had a vision of her mother: she rushed home and found her suffering from pneumonia. Twelve hours later she was dead. And as Doris sat by the body her drunken father staggered in and without even noticing that his wife was dead, slumped into bed and fell asleep. At that moment Doris ‘split’ again. The newcomer had no memory and no personality: she was virtually a newborn baby. And as she ‘grew up’ she developed into a dull and lifeless young woman. A year later Doris fell on the back of her head and yet another person appeared, this time an even duller personality who seemed to be little more than a memory circuit, a kind of tape-recorder. Doris was now virtually a family inside the same body.

  The interesting thing was that they formed a kind of hierarchy. Ariel — the ‘spirit’ — could read the minds of the other four and knew all about them. Margaret, the next down the ‘ladder’, knew about the three below her but not about Ariel, who was above her. Doris knew about the two below her but not about Margaret and Ariel (except when they chose to communicate). Ariel used to get angry at the way Margaret often ‘pushed’ Doris out of the driving seat and took over. And one day, when it had just happened, Ariel pushed Margaret out of the driving seat. This was how Margaret came to realize that there was somebody else in the body besides the ‘people’ she knew about.

  Eventually Doris became acquainted with a kindly Pittsburgh doctor, Walter Franklin Prince (the same man who later tested Maria de Zierold with the sea bean). He allowed her to move into his house as a kind of adopted daughter, and she steadily improved. He observed with amazement the complex relationships between this odd ‘family’. Sometimes two of them shared the body and would answer Prince’s questions alternately. As Doris became more confident and healthy the lower personalities gradually faded out. The girl who had started as a newborn baby now began to revert to childhood until she could only prattle. She and Prince took a final walk together then she ‘died’. The ‘tape-recorder’ personality also faded out. As Doris’s confidence and strength grew Margaret also began to grow back towards babyhood. At last she went blind and ‘faded out’. Now only Ariel remained. But she had always taken care never to interfere in Doris’s life — in fact Prince was inclined to accept her statement that she was a spirit. Later she actually took charge of Doris and escorted her to New York, where Doris had some sittings with a famous medium. Margaret appeared at one of these sittings and when asked about her after-life replied drily, ‘I never had a life before: how can I have an after-life?’ (Sadly, Doris was shattered by Prince’s death in 1934 and died in a mental home.)

  The Doris case made me realize that the simple doppelgänger theory of multiple personality had to be abandoned; but in favour of what? If Margaret was an ‘alternative’ Doris then how could she occupy the same body at the same time, and hold conversations? In some sense at least Margaret was a separate person. And even Prince believed that Ariel was a separate person. But it was in 1973, when I was preparing to begin Mysteries, a sequel to The Occult, that I had an interesting new insight into the problem. It came through an experience which at the time seemed quite shattering: a sudden spate of panic attacks which brought me very close to nervous breakdown. I was greatly overworked at the time, writing a series of articles on crime for an encyclopaedic work called Crimes and Punishment, of which I was an associate editor. The publishers wanted the articles at the rate of seven a week — each one about 3,000 words — and soon increased their demand to ten a week: that entailed writing the equivalent of a full-length book every three weeks. I ploughed on, refusing to be discouraged, but the strain was enormous. It was brought to a climax after two young journalists came to interview me and kept me up until the early hours of the morning. I woke up a couple of hours later feeling hot, sticky and hung-over and began worrying about the sheer amount of work I had to do. As I began to feel obsessively tense and worried I was tempted to go down to my typewriter and begin work immediately — but I realized that this would be the worst thing I could do. I tried to suppress the anxiety by sheer will power — and suddenly felt a surge of panic, a flood of adrenalin into the bloodstream. My heart began to beat at twice its normal speed and I was afraid I might be having a heart attack. I got up and spent an hour in the sitting room trying to reason myself out of it. Finally I climbed into bed and lay awake struggling with the panic and wondering if I was going insane. In the morning I felt exhausted and shattered. But I made a determined effort to exorcize the experience by writing an account of it, which became the opening pages of Mysteries.

  In retrospect I can see precisely what happened. Human beings are called upon continually to face problems and difficulties, and to overcome them. When they succeed they feel a surge of optimism that doubles their strength. When they fail they experience a feeling of discouragement that halves their strength. Then we seem to shrink from life and to lose all desire to summon up courage and vitality. Every time we try to envisage the future we foresee disaster and further defeat. Suddenly all life seems a hopeless struggle; we understand precisely what Emily Bronte meant when she asked:
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br />   Does the road wind uphill all the way?

  Once we have sunk into this state of pessimism the problem is suddenly complicated by self-doubt. It is bad enough to be faced with what seems an endless succession of difficulties. It is far worse to feel that it is not even worth making a start on them because all life is futile. Logic tells you that you cannot lie down and refuse to move: you have a home and family to support. Yet this conviction is continually undermined by a demon inside you that whispers, ‘It will all be wasted effort anyway … .’ And when you take yourself by the scruff of the neck and say, ‘You’ve got to go on, whether you like it or not,’ there is a terrible sinking feeling, as if you are a horse beaten and spurred beyond endurance. Something inside you wants to burst into tears and turn its back on life.

  All this enabled me to understand clearly the kind of misery and discouragement that had turned Clara Fowler and Doris Fischer into multiple personalities. But how did it explain those ‘other selves’? In a sense the answer was obvious, for here was I, basically self-divided, with one rational self trying to keep order and drive myself to work and a non-rational or emotional self — perhaps even more than one — doing its best to foment a rebellion. It was horribly easy to imagine my rational self being permanently overthrown. Was that what had happened to Clara Fowler when she saw Jones’ face at the window, and to Doris Fischer when her drunken father hurled her to the floor?