Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  When Playfair had finished reading Maria’s file he asked Andrade why it was that such cases always seemed to happen in the backwoods to uneducated people. Andrade shook his head and took a file from his drawer: ‘Look at that.’ The story was so incredible that Playfair decided to double-check and went to meet the girl involved. She was a Catholic with a master’s degree in psychology, and Playfair calls her Marcia F. Marcia had incurred the wrath of the spirits by picking up an offering made to the sea goddess Yemanja. It was a small plaster statue of a woman with most of the paint washed off it, and when Marcia found it on the beach near Santos she decided it would make a nice ornament for the apartment she shared with another girl. A few days later Marcia was violently ill with food poisoning. Then she began spitting blood. A holiday with her parents was pleasant and uneventful — the statuette stayed behind on the mantlepiece. But when she returned the pressure cooker blew up and burned her face and neck. The oven exploded, shooting out a sheet of flame towards Marcia; a gas fitter could find nothing wrong with the gas pipes.

  Marcia began to experience suicidal impulses — an impulse to fling herself before oncoming cars and out of a window. A voice inside her seemed to be urging her to throw herself out. Then she became aware of the presences. They came at night and entered her bed: she felt hands touching her all over. Then a male presence climbed on to her and she felt a penis entering her. She tried without success to push him away. But the ‘incubus’ — as such spirits were known in the Middle Ages — came for several nights.

  Finally Marcia did what she should have done a long time before and went to an umbanda centre. When she mentioned the statue she was told to go and throw it back into the sea, where she had found it. After that life returned to normal. It was only after she had been to the umbanda centre that Marcia noticed something that shook her. The burns on her face and neck corresponded precisely to the areas of paint left on the neck of the statue. A patch of TB which had showed up on the X-ray plate after she began spitting blood corresponded to another patch of paint on the statue’s back. The only other paint on the statue was one piercing blue eye: Marcia preferred not to think about that.

  As I read these stories in Playfair’s Flying Cow and The Indefinite Boundary I felt exactly as he must have done as he investigated them: that they are so preposterous that normal, sensible people can never accept them. That is one of those strange and persistent facts about ‘the occult’: it somehow never lends itself to general consumption. The facts are always just that little bit too absurd to fit into our picture of things. Human beings can be persuaded to widen their mental boundaries, but it has to be done little by little: whatever the New Testament says to the contrary, they will swallow a gnat but not a camel. When Frederick Myers and Professor Henry Sidgwick decided to found a society for psychical research in 1869 they felt that it surely ought to be possible, with modern techniques of scientific research, to decide once and for all whether spiritualism was based on fact or nonsense. But they quickly discovered that the paranormal has its own equivalent of the uncertainty principle. A psychical investigator can establish the reality of the paranormal beyond all doubt — in private. But as soon as he tries to drag his evidence into the light of public scrutiny it melts away like ice in the sun. And if in despair he shouts, ‘Please stop playing games and give me some public evidence!’ the practical joker replies blandly, ‘But of course, my dear fellow — how about his?’ and presents a ‘proof’ so preposterous that no one will take it seriously — such as surgeons tearing open stomachs with their bare hands and pulling out tumours, or mediums who, like Daniel Dunglas Home, float out of one second-floor window and in at another, or wash their faces in red-hot coals.

  I suspect I know why this is so. Eileen Garrett once warned that ‘communication with the “other world” may well become a substitute for living in this world.’ But this world ought to have priority. The greatest question of human existence is why we are here and what we are supposed to do now we are here. To say that we shall go on living after death is simply no answer. This is why all mentally healthy people experience an instinctive dislike of looking too closely into spirits and ghosts. Yet a totally pragmatic society would also be counter-productive, for a lifelong obsession with material security also begs the real question. So presumably the head of the Supernatural Civil Service has issued a directive to the Department of Diplomatic Contacts with Earth stating that the evidence must either be kept ambiguous, or so absurd that no one will believe it anyway. Poltergeists and psychic surgeons are sufficiently outlandish; so are synchronicities, provided they are rare enough to be dismissed as chance or outrageous enough to be simply unbelievable. But anything more credible is to be strictly avoided.

  In fact when I looked back on my own interest in the paranormal I recognized every sign of the same reluctance and resistance that now irritates me in sceptics. I had accepted the commission to write The Occult solely because I needed the money. I would not have been too upset to discover that the whole thing was merely a proof of human gullibility. Instead I was overwhelmed by the sheer consistency and variety of the evidence. Before I was a tenth of the way into the book I knew beyond all doubt that telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance take place. Yet although I wrote sections on reincarnation, life after death and poltergeists, I still preferred to keep what I called an ‘open mind’ about them — meaning really that I preferred to remain ambivalent. When I came upon Tom Lethbridge’s ‘tape-recording’ theory about ghosts I was glad to incorporate it into Mysteries. I had no doubt whatever that poltergeists are a manifestation of the unconscious mind, that ‘demoniacal possession’ (as in the famous case of the nuns of Loudun) was a matter of sexual repression, and that witchcraft and magic were simply old-fashioned names for the ‘hidden powers’ of ‘the other self’. It was a neat little package and I felt justly proud of it.

  A few doubts began to insinuate themselves when I began to look more closely into witchcraft and magic. In The Occult I had taken it for granted that witches are unfortunate old ladies who happen to possess certain odd powers — of healing, for example — and who are consequently regarded with superstitious fear by their neighbours. This view seems to be supported by the fact that the first secular witchcraft trial, which took place in Paris in 1390, was of a woman called Jean de Brigue who had cured a man named Ruilly when he was on the point of death. She insisted that she was not a witch but had simply used charms which included, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ (I had myself investigated some local wart-charmers whose ‘charms’ worked. They told me that they simply repeated a text from the Bible which had been passed on to them by another wart-charmer.) Under torture Jean de Brigue confessed to having sexual intercourse with her demonic familiar and to trying to kill Ruilly by witchcraft at the request of his wife. (It is not quite clear why she then saved his life.) Both she and the wife were executed.

  I had always been fascinated by the strange case of Isobel Gowdie, a Scottish farmer’s wife who in 1662 quite suddenly and voluntarily decided to confess to being a member of a witches’ coven and having sexual intercourse with demons. She claimed that a ‘grey man’ whom she had met on the downs had persuaded her to become a witch, and that she had been baptized the same evening and had joined a coven of other witches. After this she was able to transform herself into a hare or cat. The Devil himself used to flog the naked witches with a broomstick and often violated Isobel with an immense scaly penis, which produced pangs as excruciating as childbirth yet immensely pleasurable — his sperm was as cold as ice. He sometimes possessed her as she lay in bed beside her sleeping husband.

  In my analysis of this case I wrote,

  The picture that emerges is of an imaginative and highly-sexed girl being driven half insane with frustration, until she evolves a whole fantasy about the powers of evil … . Her sexual perversion develops until it becomes a kind of sweet poison, made all the more potent by the rigid Presbyterianism, the Calvinistic Bibl
e-thumping, that dominates the community … . After fifteen years of this she is suddenly seized by a terrifying, an almost unthinkable idea … . Why not make her fantasy public, shatter everybody by telling them what has been going on in their stolid, sabbatarian community? … They strip her and search her minutely for devil’s marks, and she finds it all deliciously voluptuous.

  And in due course, she and her fellow ‘witches’ are all executed. (We have no record of Isobel’s execution but it seems a reasonable certainty.)

  The problem with this theory is that the other accused women also confessed. The natural assumption is that this was under torture, but the detailed court records make no mention of torture.

  The same problem arose in another celebrated case, that of the North Berwick witches. This again looked like a case of a naturally gifted ‘healer’ who was tortured by a superstitious bigot until she implicated various other women. David Seaton, the deputy bailiff of Tranent (near Edinburgh), grew suspicious about the nocturnal movements of a young servant girl, Gilly Duncan, who had a reputation for curing sickness. He crushed her fingers in a vice, twisted a rope round her throat and examined her for devil’s marks. Finally she confessed to being a witch and implicated the local schoolmaster, John Fian, an elderly gentlewoman named Agnes Sampson, and two more well-connected ladies named Barbara Napier and Euphemia Maclean. Under torture they confessed to being involved in a plot to drown King James I by raising a storm that almost wrecked his ship when he was on his way to Oslo to collect his future bride, Anne of Denmark. King James understandably took a keen interest in the affair, but when Agnes described how the witches had sailed in sieves to North Berwick then performed their black magic rituals in a church under the direction of the Devil, he suddenly decided it was all nonsense. At this point however Agnes whispered in his ear some words that he had spoken to Anne of Denmark on their bridal night in Oslo, and the king changed his mind. John Fian also confessed under torture, his leg crushed by ‘the boot’: but twenty-four hours later he escaped and made his way back home. Recaptured, he withdrew his confession, claiming that it had been obtained by torture; and although his nails were pulled out and his legs again crushed in ‘the boot’, he continued to deny everything and was finally burned, like Agnes Sampson and Euphemia Maclean. Barbara Napier escaped on the grounds that she was pregnant and was finally released.

  In his Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology Russell Hope Robbins takes the view that the whole ‘witchcraft craze’ was a matter of absurd superstition, and has some of his harshest words to say about the inquisitors of the North Berwick witches. Yet there are certain matters that demand explanation. Why did Agnes Sampson tell the king about the words he spoke to Anne of Denmark on his wedding night when he had already decided that the witches were ‘all extreme liars’? She was condemning herself to death. Robbins makes the odd comment that ‘the only witness of this extra-sensory perception was James himself; and a fanatic could be easily persuaded, particularly when a possible plot against his life was introduced.’ But that fails to explain why Agnes did whisper in his ear and make him change his mind. Robbins also ignores the fact that John Fian had been secretary to the Earl of Bothwell, who is believed to have been plotting to kill King James (Bothwell would have been heir to the throne). And Bothwell in later life acquired a reputation of dabbling in black magic. There was good reason for Fian to be involved in a witchcraft plot to kill the king. And it may be significant that the three other accused witches were all gentlewomen, related to the nobility, not just poor old hags as in the Isobel Gowdie case.

  Robbins fails to explain another oddity. After his original confession, obtained under torture, Fian volunteered the information that the devil had visited him in his cell that night. Since he was in no danger of being tortured again this seems an odd thing to do. Perhaps Fian was crazed with the pain of his crushed leg? But if the leg was so badly crushed then how did he escape and make his way home? Robbins explains this by suggesting that this escape was pure fiction, yet there is no evidence for that view.

  On re-reading The Occult it struck me that I had accepted the evidence for African witchcraft and quoted stories to confirm it. My friend Negley Farson told me that on several occasions he had seen a witch-doctor conjure rain out of a clear sky. Another friend, Martin Delany, described how a Nigerian witch-doctor had assured his European company that the torrential rain that had lasted for weeks would stop in time for a staff garden party. The rain stopped just before the party was due to start and started again immediately after it finished. Martin Delany had told me some other very strange stories of African witchcraft, which I had cited in my book on Rasputin. So why could I accept that an African witch-doctor could control the weather but insist on regarding the North Berwick witches as innocent? By the time I wrote a second small book about the paranormal, Strange Powers, shortly after The Occult, I had recognized this inconsistency and pointed it out in that book.

  In 1926 the Reverend Montague Summers had caused a sensation with his work The History of Witchcraft in which he set out from the assumption that ‘black witchcraft’ was a reality and that many of the women who were burned at the stake were guilty as charged. H. G. Wells was so shocked that he launched a vituperative attack on the book in the Sunday Express. Many reviewers took the view that Summers was merely trailing his coat for the sake of publicity. This was untrue: Summers believed that witches may possess real powers, and that these powers are dependent on ‘forces of evil’. In Strange Powers I concluded that ‘the truth probably lies somewhere midway between Summers’s total acceptance of black witchcraft and Robbins’s total scepticism.’ Seven years later, after reading Max Freedom Long, Allan Kardec, David St Clair and Guy Playfair, I began to feel that the truth lay closer to Summers than to Robbins.

  Yet in a basic sense this change of viewpoint made very little difference. I continued to believe — as I still believe — that the ‘occult’ or paranormal is about the hidden powers of human beings, not about spirits. But acceptance of the reality of spirits made me rather less dogmatic about individual cases. At the time I was making the Rosenheim programme at the BBC in Bristol a girl approached me in the canteen and asked my advice about her flatmate, who was the focus of a poltergeist outbreak. Her clothes were hurled all over her locked bedroom, her possessions were damaged and on one occasion her coat had burst into flame. I assured the girl that poltergeists were manifestations of the unconscious mind and asked if her friend suffered from psychological tensions or sexual problems. When she admitted that this was so, I said, ‘There — you see!’

  Soon after the Rosenheim programme I received a letter from a clairvoyant who called herself Madame Rose. She told me that she had held a ‘sitting’ in Rosenheim and had been in contact with a spirit that claimed to be responsible for the poltergeist outbreak. It was a girl who had been murdered during the course of the war and whose body was still in a secret grave. She had been trying to use Anne-Marie to draw attention to herself, to persuade someone to have her reburied in hallowed ground. I replied politely to Madame Rose but had no doubt whatever that she was talking nonsense. After writing Poltergeist I changed my mind and decided to contact her again. A German friend who spends her winters in Munich agreed to go to Rosenheim and look for some documentary evidence of the existence of the murdered girl. If this proved to exist then we would ask Madame Rose’s assistance in trying to find the body. To my surprise Madame Rose now proved to be totally uncooperative. Yet that should not have surprised me: if we had traced the girl’s existence, then located her body, it would be positive proof of the reality of the paranormal — and that would have been a violation of the directive from the head of the Supernatural Civil Service stating that such matters must remain in a state of misty ambiguity.

  Soon after writing Poltergeist I encountered a case that might have been reported by Guy Playfair. A young married woman wrote to ask my advice about an unpleasant experience in Brazil. She began to suspect that her husband was
having an affair with a native woman. A stranger who claimed to be a clairvoyant stopped her in the street and told her that she was a victim of a trabalho (‘job’ or spell). Then, as for David St Clair, life became a nightmare of frustrations with ‘every alley blocked’. Lying in the bath, she was amazed to see her wedding ring slipping from her finger. It was a fairly tight fit and the water should have made her flesh swell, yet it slid off and fell into the water. She decided not to pull the plug out — in case the ring went down — but to drain the bath with a saucepan. When the bath was empty there was still no sign of her ring. One day, convinced that her husband was about to leave her, she obeyed a sudden impulse to go and talk to him at work and beg him to make up. Oddly enough it worked, and their differences were resolved. Back home, immensely relieved, she decided to have a bath. And as she sat in the warm water she decided that she might as well wash her knickers. As she did so her wedding ring fell out of them.

  A year earlier the story would have baffled me and I would probably have made vague pronouncements about ‘apports’ or poltergeists. Now I was able to tell the young woman precisely what Guy Playfair would have told her: that the ‘other woman’ had determined to make the husband desert his wife and had gone to some ‘backyard terreiros’ or umbanda specialist and paid good money to have a spell cast. The specialist, in turn, would perform the correct rituals and make offerings to the low spirits — including food, alcohol and tobacco — and the spirits would do their best to carry out the instruction. Fortunately, as Playfair remarks, these spirits seem to need very precise conditions in which to carry out their tasks, and meet with many obstructions. And the successful outcome of this particular case may be explained by a remark of Playfair’s mentor Hernani Andrade: ‘To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist.’ The wife’s decision to make a direct appeal to her husband seems to have short-circuited the trabalho. When I talked to her she was living happily in England with her husband.