Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  It is, I agree, difficult for normal, sensible people to accept this notion of spirits. Most of us have never encountered a ghost during the course of a lifetime and are never likely to. So ghosts are, quite simply, an irrelevancy. And since most children spend a great deal of time being quite unnecessarily afraid of the dark it is probably just as well that belief in spirits is not a basic part of our culture. The fact remains that anyone who will take the trouble to study the evidence will concede, regretfully, that there are such things as spirits and that under certain conditions, they can impinge on human existence. And when Montague Summers declared that modern spiritualism is a revival of mediaeval witchcraft, he was being strictly accurate. Summers admits that many of the men and women burned during Europe’s three centuries of witchcraft madness were innocent. But he also insists that witches made use of spirits and ‘demons’ to perform their magic. And the evidence gathered by Playfair and Max Freedom Long makes it practically certain that he was correct.

  Rudolf Steiner has an interesting notion — which we may take or leave according to our inclination — to the effect that man has been through various distinct stages of evolution, each of which began and ended in a particular year. At the time of Jesus, he says, man was launched on to a new stage of evolution in which he finally developed a conscious ego, an ‘I’ which could make its own choices. Before that he had been essentially a communal being whose identity was bound up with the group. In this earlier stage there was no clear distinction between the human world and the world of spirits, and shamans and ‘witches’ (or witch-doctors) took the world of spirits for granted. This faded away in the new epoch of the ‘intellectual soul’ (as Steiner calls it). And when, in 1413, the age of the ‘intellectual soul’ gave way to the age of the ‘consciousness soul’, man virtually lost contact with the invisible world. The new spirit gave rise to experimental science and has finally led to an age in which the invisible world has been totally forgotten.

  This view undoubtedly contains a hard nugget of symbolic truth. There can be no doubt that modern man has become increasingly a ‘split brainer’ who has lost contact with his intuitive half, and that primitive peoples are far more naturally intuitive — and ‘psychic’. In The Occult I cite an article by Norman Lewis which I found in a Sunday colour supplement. Lewis had gone to study the Huichol Indians of the Mexican Sierra Madre and had been fascinated by the way they took powers of extra-sensory perception for granted. While Lewis was there the shaman Ramon Medina, visiting a village called San Andreas, had sensed death, and walked up to a locked house. The corpse of a murdered man was discovered in the roof. Even the local Franciscan missionary fathers accepted the ability to solve crimes by ESP as a natural part of life.

  If Steiner is correct then the ‘witchcraft craze’ began at exactly the same time that man changed from ‘intellectual soul’ to ‘consciousness soul’ and the last vestige of that sense of ‘invisible worlds’ vanished from western Europe. Witches ceased to be accepted as a natural part of life, as the Huichols still accept shamans, and became a symbol of evil, of intercourse with demonic powers. And faced with persecution many witches no doubt used their mediumistic powers — for that is what it amounted to — to cast spells and torment their tormentors.

  The rationalization of witchcraft entered a new phase with the publication of Margaret Murray’s book The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and its successors The God of the Witches and The Divine King in England. Margaret Murray was an archaeologist who spent the First World War in Glastonbury studying the King Arthur legends and old witchcraft trials. Starting from the assumption that witches were poor old women who were persecuted for their delusions about the Devil, she was suddenly struck by the ‘revelation’ that they were really members of an ancient religious cult that predated Christianity and worshipped the powers of nature. Their priest, she suddenly realized, was simply a primitive shaman dressed up in an animal skin with horns — like the drawings on the walls of Cro-Magnon cave dwellings. Being a fertility cult it naturally laid heavy emphasis on the phallus and sexual intercourse — another reason that it horrified the Christian Church. Witches, according to Margaret Murray, were simply worshippers of the goddess Diana who still practised their fertility rites in country areas.

  To some extent she was undoubtedly correct. But in the excitement of her insight into the pre-Christian religion she went too far and decided that all tales of black witchcraft were pure invention. She even went on to declare that dozens of famous historical characters like William Rufus, Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais were really members of the old religion who allowed themselves to be ritually sacrificed as kings were once sacrificed to ensure a good harvest. Half a century later Professor Norman Cohn went back to many of the original documents cited by Margaret Murray and discovered that she had been guilty of considerable distortion to support her arguments. Where she had left leader dots to indicate that something had been left out there were often wildly improbable events, like Isobel Gowdie’s descriptions of sexual intercourse with the Devil or Agnes Sampson’s description of sailing to sea in a sieve. Cohn of course had no doubt that the whole ‘witchcraft craze’ was sheer delusion. In fact his criticism of Margaret Murray tends to show that the Rev. Montague Summers may have been closer to the truth than his contemporaries thought.

  But what can we make of these absurd descriptions of satanic orgies and witches’ sabbats? Playfair’s investigations into ‘the psi underworld’ indicate that Isobel Gowdie’s confession of having sex with a ‘demon’ may have been factually correct. And this receives unexpected support from the contemporary psychologist Stan Gooch, whose first book, Total Man, published in 1972, argued that man’s darker, more instinctive being resides in the area of the brain known as the cerebellum, the ‘old brain’ which man inherited from the animals. But in that otherwise academic book Gooch also admitted casually that he had once attended a seance at which he suddenly lost consciousness: when he awoke he discovered that several ‘spirits’ had spoken through him. In a later book, The Paranormal (1978), Gooch goes on to describe his subsequent experiences as a medium and his increasing interest in the paranormal. But in books like Personality and Evolution, The Neanderthal Question and The Double Helix of the Mind (which rejects the split-brain hypothesis in favour of his own cerebellum theory), his approach remains cautiously scientific even when challenging the accepted wisdom. So his 1984 book Creatures from Inner Space caused astonishment and consternation among reviewers. It begins by describing the experiences of an ex-policeman, Martyn Pryer, who began trying to induce hypnagogic states as he lay in bed and who soon found himself being ‘attacked’ by some invisible entity which lay on top of him. And one night, when the entity seized him from behind, he realized that it was a woman who wanted him to make love to her. He lay there, paralysed, until it faded away. Gooch then goes on to quote the experiences of an actress named Sandy who was interested in ‘the occult’. She woke up one night to find that a spotlight in the corner of the ceiling had apparently changed into an eye, and she felt a weight lying on top of her. Soon it began to move gently, and she felt pressure on her vagina. Part of her was quite willing for the lovemaking to proceed; another part rejected it. She struggled and eventually broke free: when she went to the bathroom she found that her mouth was full of half-dried blood although there was no sign of a nose-bleed.

  At this point Gooch goes on to describe his own experience of a succubus (the female equivalent of an incubus). Lying quietly in bed one morning he became aware of another person in the bed with him — a female. Without opening his eyes he was aware that it was a composite of various ex-girlfriends, including his previous wife. As his conscious interest in the situation got the better of him, the creature faded away. But he admits, ‘on subsequent occasions … the presence of the entity was maintained, until finally we actually made love.’

  In fact Gooch goes on to conclude that entities like these are not real (in the sense of being genuine spirits) but
are creations of the human mind. He cites at length the case of Ruth, described in a book by Dr Morton Schatzman*. At the age of ten Ruth had fought off a rape attack by her father. After she married and moved to England she had dreams of actually being raped by him. Then she began having hallucinations of him, or she would hear him walking around the house. He continued to intimate that he wanted to make love to her. Then the father began to appear to her in Schatzman’s consulting room, and Schatzman was able to hold conversations with him through the medium of Ruth. Little by little Ruth realized that she could control her apparitions — she was even able to produce two Schatzmans. What she was doing was literally self-hypnosis. A good hypnotist can make his subject see ‘apparitions’ as Dr Carpenter made the young American see Socrates, and psychological tests prove beyond all doubt that the hypnotized subject really sees a solid, three-dimensional being. On a later occasion Ruth created an apparition of her husband — for whom she had formed an aversion — in bed, and went through a full act of sexual intercourse with it, ending as it ejaculated inside her. Ruth’s recognition that she could control her hallucinations finally led to her cure.

  Gooch’s argument is certainly plausible and serves to remind us that our ‘hidden powers’ are far greater than we normally recognize. But then Gooch is also convinced that the poltergeist is ‘an extension of some form of living energy projected by the nervous system’ — in other words a manifestation of the unconscious mind. In my view Playfair is correct, and there is overwhelming evidence that most poltergeists are spirits. A subsequent book, This House is Haunted (1980), is an account of Playfair’s own investigations at a house in Enfield (north of London) where a particularly destructive poltergeist caused problems for more than a year. The focus on this occasion seemed to be the eleven-year-old daughter of the family, Janet. In December 1977, five months after the disturbances began, the poltergeist began to make whistling and barking noises and then began to speak. It at first identified itself as Joe, then later told the investigators, ‘I am Bill Haylock and I come from Durant’s Park and I am seventy-two years old and I have come here to see my family but they are not here now.’ (I have the tape-recording of these sessions: the voice sounds oddly jerky and mechanical, like a record I possess of an ‘electronic brain’ singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’.) When Guy Playfair asked, ‘Do you know you are dead?’ he was told to ‘fuck off’. Investigation revealed that the Joe referred to was a Joe Watson who had lived in the house, and that Bill Haylock had been a local resident who was now buried in the graveyard, Durant’s Park.

  Playfair commented of the various entities that manifested themselves in the house, ‘It looks as if we had half the local graveyard at one time or another.’ The ‘haunting’ was finally ended by a Dutch medium, Dono Gmelig-Meyling, who persuaded the entities that they were dead and ought to stop tormenting the Harper family. The Enfield case powerfully supports Playfair’s view that poltergeists are ‘earth-bound spirits’ who are often unaware that they are dead.

  This does not mean, of course, that Gooch is incorrect to believe that his own experience with a succubus was some kind of manifestation of his own unconscious mind. But it certainly means that Gooch is mistaken to believe that all such experiences can be explained in these terms. If it is unlikely that Diane Pritchard’s unconscious mind dragged her upstairs and made bruises on her throat, then it is also unlikely that the unconscious mind of Marcia F., the lecturer in psychology, created the entity that raped her as she lay paralysed in bed.

  It seems likely that we shall never know what really happened at witches’ sabbats, or whether the entity that made love to Isobel Gowdie was a genuine incubus or a product of her unconscious mind. But it does seem safe to say that witchcraft in mediaeval Europe was probably a great deal like witchcraft in modern Brazil, and that it would be a mistake to dismiss it entirely in terms of superstitions and delusions.

  *Morton Schatzman, The Story of Ruth, (1980).

  3

  The World of Spirits

  In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung reveals that he has come to admit the reality of life after death and describes one of the experiences that finally convinced him. One night he was lying awake thinking of a friend whose funeral had just taken place. ‘Suddenly, I felt he was in the room. It seemed to me that he stood at the foot of my bed and was asking me to go with him. I did not have the feeling of an apparition: rather, it was an inner visual image of him.’ Jung asked himself whether this was a fantasy, then decided that he might as well — for the sake of experiment — assume that it was real. Thereupon his friend beckoned him to the door. In imagination (and it must be remembered that Jung had a highly developed faculty of ‘active imagination’) Jung followed him to his house next door. In the study his friend climbed on a stool and showed Jung the second of five red books on a high shelf. The next morning Jung called on the man’s widow to ask if he could go into his friend’s study. There was the stool that he had seen the night before and, near the ceiling, the books with the red bindings. Jung had to stand on the stool to read the titles. The book indicated was a novel by Zola with the title The Legacy of the Dead.*

  Citing this experience, Gooch declines to accept it as proof of life after death, pointing out that our minds have the power to obtain paranormal information by other means. But he then mentions a case that he regards as almost watertight. It was described in a book called Life Without Death? by Nils Jacobsen. In 1928 Jacobsen’s uncle was run over by a lorry. The lorry slammed him against a wall and he died three days later without regaining consciousness. Six years later, at a seance in England, the medium told his father that his dead brother was present. The brother then described the accident that had killed him and added that he had not died of an injury to his skull, as his family had always assumed, but that ‘it came from the bones’. Years later Jacobsen realized that he could check the hospital records, and did so. The post mortem report showed that his uncle had not died of a skull fracture, but from a brain embolism caused by a blood clot from the bone — lower-bone thrombosis.

  The loophole in this story, says Gooch, is that the surgeon who performed the post mortem must have known the truth. So the ‘information’ was available in someone’s mind and might have reached the medium’s mind through this source. It is true that this is remotely possible but it seems so far-fetched that it is hard to take seriously — like believing that the road from London to Southend goes via the North Pole. We have to suppose that the medium obtained the facts of the accident from the sitter’s own mind and then somehow contacted the mind of the surgeon to find out what really happened. On the whole it is simpler to believe that Jacobsen’s uncle survived death.

  The truth is that these stories, and thousands more like them, are parts of a jigsaw puzzle that build up into an overwhelmingly convincing picture, and the general purport of this picture is that the human soul, or spirit, is independent of the body, and can survive the death of the body. Again I must admit to a certain embarrassment in writing these words, for in a very real sense I couldn’t care less whether human beings survive their death. My own increasing conviction that the mind can survive death has not tempted me to become a spiritualist — that is to attend seances or read spiritualist newspapers. And when I am not actually writing books about ‘the occult’ I am inclined to ignore it altogether and read books on philosophy, science and history. Yet whenever I return to the subject I am again overwhelmed by the sheer consistency of the evidence. And where ‘survival’ is concerned I cannot believe, like Stan Gooch, that we can explain the evidence in terms of telepathy. Where, for example, is there room for telepathy in the following experience described by Wilbur Wright:

  In early 1941 I was stationed at RAF Hemswell, Lincoln, as a ground engineer. I returned from leave by bus late one Sunday evening completely out of cigarettes, and all the canteens were closed. But I remembered I had left some cigarettes in the hangar and walked down in the black-out, entering the hangar through the central steel doo
rs at the front. The aircrew room was on the right, where flying personnel of 61 Bomber Squadron kept their flying clothing. I heard a noise from the crew room, and opened the door to investigate it. It was in total darkness and I switched on the light: the black-out curtains were in position and I saw a figure in uniform groping in one of the lockers. He was wearing a flying helmet, a leather fur-lined jacket, black knee-length flying boots, and I recognized him as Leading Aircraftsman Stoker, a mid-upper gunner on the Hampden bomber, who had to fly with the hood open to look for attacking fighters. (This was before all aircrew had sergeant rank to gain improved treatment for POWs.)

  I said, ‘Hey, Stoke — what are you doing?’

  He replied irritably, ‘I can’t find my bloody gloves.’

  ‘Well, that’s your problem,’ I said. ‘Put out the lights when you go.’

  He made no reply to that, and I entered the hangar, found my cigarettes and went back to my billet. Next morning I went to breakfast, and as always happened, I asked the man next to me what had been happening during my week’s absence.

  ‘Very dodgy two nights ago,’ he said. ‘They went mine-laying in the Dortmund Ems Canal and we lost McIntyre and his crew, hit at low level by flak, rolled and went straight in. The mine went off — they had no chance.’