by Colin Wilson
It is of course possible that this is a simple case of paranoia: but a number of points in Prince’s account suggest that he does not think so. He mentions that Mrs Latimer had no idea of why her cousin should feel resentment against her, and had to be reminded of the letter. If she had actually recalled writing the letter and guessed that her cousin had read it when she was out of the room, it might well account for her paranoia, but not for her insistence that she had no idea of why Marvin should dislike her. Marvin’s ability to foresee the future might also be explained naturally if his ‘spirit’ was merely a figment of her imagination: but Prince’s account suggests he thinks there was more to it than that, and so does the incident of the roses that were not displayed at the funeral. Finally there is Prince’s comment that he has never yet succeeded in curing a case of paranoia accompanied by hallucinations: it is hard not to feel that the successful conclusion of the case is intended as a hint to the reader that he believes this to be one of these rare cases where a person’s belief that he is being tormented by ‘invisible intelligences’ ‘has a basis in corresponding fact’.
Dr James Hyslop, whom Prince mentions, had come to believe that possession can be genuine through a rather curious case. In 1907 a goldsmith named Frederic Thompson came to see Hyslop, who was president of the American Society for Psychical Research from 1905 until 1920, the year of his death. Thompson had met the American landscape painter Robert Swain Gifford once or twice. In January 1905 he had unexpectedly been possessed by the urge to draw and paint, and later discovered that these compulsions had started at the time of Gifford’s death in New York. Now he heard Gifford’s voice urging him on and had visions of landscapes. Hyslop consulted his friend Dr Titus Bull, a neurologist who also happened to be interested in psychical research: Bull referred him to two other neurologists, who had contradictory opinions on the case. Then Hyslop learned that mediums were receiving messages from an entity that purported to be the late Robert Swain Gifford and who claimed that he was influencing Thompson. It began to look very much as if Thompson really might be ‘possessed’ by the dead painter. Thompson painted in Gifford’s style although he had no artistic training, and when Hyslop looked at some of Gifford’s final sketches, made shortly before his death and never exhibited, he was amazed to find that they were identical to some of Thompson’s. Moreover Thompson painted pictures of places he had never been to, and when Hyslop went to the New England swamps and coastal islands where Gifford used to paint he immediately recognized landscapes drawn by Thompson. That finally convinced Hyslop that this was a genuine case of possession, not of mental illness.
In fact William James had reached the same conclusion. After all, if a medium can be possessed — temporarily — by spirits of the dead, then is it not conceivable that other people might be? For the remaining thirteen years of his life Hyslop studied cases of ‘possession’, and when he died he asked Dr Titus Bull to take over where he had left off.*
Unfortunately most of Bull’s records have apparently been lost, but accounts of two of his most remarkable cases survive. One concerned another man who was apparently possessed by the spirit of a dead artist. C.E., as Bull calls him, had been a wreck since he had been ‘taken over’ by the spirit of an Austrian painter, Josef Selleny, who had been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian. He was suffering from premature senility, epileptic attacks and incessant sexual broodings. (We may recall Long’s assertion that epilepsy is due to attacks from low spirits who drain the subject’s vital energy like a vampire.) He had even been in an asylum. C.E. had apparently been hospitalized for a head injury, which might explain his ‘madness’ — or how a psychic entity had succeeded in ‘possessing’ him.
Bull had reached the same conclusion as Hyslop: that if someone was ‘possessed’ by an ill-disposed spirit then the best solution was to persuade well-disposed spirits to help get rid of it. (Of course in some cases, like that of Robert Swain Gifford, the possessing spirit was not actually ill-disposed and only had to be persuaded to leave.) For this purpose Bull used specially trained mediums, one of whom, Mrs Conklin, he had found in a madhouse and cured by exorcizing her. One of his mediums now researched C.E.’s story to find out whether Josef Selleny was a creation of his imagination. The answer was no. After much research she discovered that Selleny actually existed — although he was hardly known outside Austria — and that he had indeed been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian. C.E. could not read German, so it looked as if this was a genuine case of possession.
When the mediums got to work on ‘dispossessing’ C.E. they soon discovered that Selleny was only one of many spirits. The main one was a Muslim priest who defended himself against the attempts to throw him out by calling on the spirit of a young man: but eventually, after more than thirty sittings, C.E. was cured.
Another case — Bull calls the patient K.L. — concerned a manic depressive woman of thirty-seven. Her problems began when she was terrified by a thunderstorm as a child: her nurse had locked them both in a closet and prayed for help. Later an attempted rape had further undermined her self-confidence. Now she alternated between profound depression and fits of manic rage.
The sittings apparently revealed that the main ‘possessor’ was the nurse who was responsible for the original neurosis. She was not ill-disposed — only inclined to continue to dominate the patient and look after her affairs. Asked to go away and leave K.L. in peace she replied, ‘I do not know whether I will or not.’ But she was finally convinced that she ought to leave. Other possessors were less tractable: one of them declared, ‘She is mine and I am going to keep her. You keep out of this.’ But when the medium’s controls intervened and told her they could break her in two if they wanted to, she changed her mind and left. Eventually only one entity remained, and she had become an ‘obsessor’ by accident. She was a woman whose lover had abandoned her to die of venereal disease and was still in a mentally confused state. When Bull explained her situation to her she left voluntarily. After she had left K.L. ceased to be troubled by irritations in the genital area. The treatment was totally successful: two years later she wrote to Dr Bull, ‘I have never felt so well and happy in my life.’
It must be acknowledged that in most such cases there is bound to be a strong suspicion that no matter how convincing the evidence for possession, the real culprit is the patient’s subjective mind producing — as James says — a kind of unconscious self-hypnosis. Yet there are some cases which leave no possible room for doubt. One such was witnessed in Casablanca by Dr Natalie Monat, now practising in Alexandria, Virginia.* She has described how, in 1943, she was approached by a rich dry goods merchant whom she calls Mohammed Sayed, who told her that his son had been possessed for the past two months. The basis of the problem was Sayed’s own strictness as a father: his son was terrified of him. The boy, who was eighteen, had stayed out late one night and got drunk. In the early hours of the morning his mother heard him creeping through the house and going into the bathroom. When she knocked on the door — which was locked — a shrill woman’s voice answered, ‘Don’t call me your son. I am your daughter because I am using your son’s body.’ From then on their son behaved and sounded like a woman. Dr Pierson, a Casablanca psychiatrist, concluded that the boy had been so afraid of his father’s anger that he had had a nervous breakdown. On the doctor’s advice the youth was placed in a mental home. But since he had shown no improvement they had just brought him home.
The boy/woman spoke not only modern Moroccan Arabic but also an incomprehensible language that they could not understand. However one day the boy’s tutor heard ‘her’ speaking and recognized the language as Egyptian, the language spoken in ancient Morocco. Since the tutor himself could speak Egyptian he engaged ‘her’ in conversation and learned that she was a girl who had died at the age of eighteen many years before; she resented dying so young and had been looking for another body for a long time. Then she found the boy, ‘whose own spirit was loosely anchored to his body due to the influence of a few dr
inks and his fright of [his father’s] anger’, and threw him out of his own body, much as Margaret used to dispossess Doris Fischer. She violently resisted all the tutor’s attempts to persuade her to leave the young man.
The tutor knew of a witch who lived in the south: the merchant sent for her. She drew a circle round the youth and asked them to pray with her. The boy was unable to cross the chalk line and screamed with rage while they prayed. The woman — who was obviously a medium — addressed the spirit in a more and more imperative manner, using various strange incantations. The girl’s voice continued to scream, ‘No! I shall never leave the body.’ But eventually the boy collapsed in a kind of fit, his mouth foaming. Then there was a howl of rage and despair and the boy became unconscious. The tutor restrained his mother from rushing to him. A few minutes later he opened his eyes and asked dazedly, ‘Why am I sitting on the floor? Why are you all staring at me?’ The possession was over.
Such cases sound preposterous: yet by the time I came to research Mysteries in the mid-1970s I had come across so many of them that it was impossible to ignore them. One of the oddest was told to me by the head of BBC television drama, Bill Slater. In the early 1950s, when he was a drama student, he had attended a party where the guests began to experiment with an ouija board — an inverted glass with a circle of letters around it. The glass moved around the table at an incredible speed, spelling out answers to questions so quickly that it seemed unlikely that the guests were pushing it. Bill Slater made some facetious remark which the glass seemed to resent: asked if it would like anyone to leave the circle it shot unmistakably towards him. He went off to flirt with a pretty girl.
That night, in his room, he woke up with some ‘presence’ sitting on his chest and apparently trying to take over his mind and body. He concentrated his energies and fought back: the struggle seemed to go on for about twenty minutes. During this time there was a feeling of paralysis and he was unable to speak. At last he was able to cry out, and his room-mate woke up and switched on the light — ‘to find me’, says Slater, ‘well-nigh a gibbering idiot’. This was his one and only encounter with the ‘supernatural’.
All this sounds rather frightening — so much so that we may feel that even if possession really does take place it might be better not to talk about it. After all, mentally-ill people have enough problems without worrying about evil spirits. But the view of Hyslop, James and others who have accepted the possibility of possession is that it is rare, because there are ‘barriers’ between the human world and the world of ‘discarnate entities’. Most mediums are also firmly convinced that every human being possesses his own ‘guardian spirit’ and that other well-disposed entities also act as policemen to prevent incursions.
As we have seen, the psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen, whose views were quoted in chapter 5, came to the conclusion that not all patients who ‘heard voices’ were suffering from hallucinations. In his book The Presence of Other Worlds, a study of Emanuel Swedenborg, Van Dusen goes rather further than this. The chapter called ‘The Presence of Spirits in Madness’ begins with the words, ‘By an extraordinary series of circumstances I seem to have found a confirmation for one of Emanuel Swedenborg’s more unusual findings: that man’s life involves an interaction with a hierarchy of spirits. This interaction is normally not conscious, but perhaps in some cases of mental illness it has become conscious.’ He describes how, working in the Mendocino State Hospital in California in the 1960s and examining thousands of mentally-ill patients, he began to notice the similarity between their hallucinations and Swedenborg’s description of ‘spirits’. Like Kardec, Swedenborg states that there are two types of spirit, low and high, and that low spirits are basically the earth-bound spirits of the dead.
Van Dusen’s breakthrough came one day when he asked a patient suffering from hallucinations if he could talk to the ‘spirit’. From then on he made a habit of engaging the hallucinations in conversation as often as possible and found that it immensely enriched his psychiatric experience. In some cases psychotics had been so overcome by their hallucinations that the two had blended and they were unable to distinguish: ‘the ego had been overrun with alien forces.’ But patients who were still able to see their hallucinations as objective realities were able to provide invaluable insights.
Van Dusen soon observed that the hallucinations seemed to come in two varieties, and that they acknowledged that they belonged either to the ‘higher’ or ‘lower order’. Lower order voices seemed stupid and malicious, ‘similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment for the fun of it’. They found out a patient’s weak point and then worked on it interminably. They threatened disaster and death, or allowed the patient to hear voices plotting his death. Significantly, they seemed to have no identity and no memory (or no memory that they would acknowledge). They were often violently anti-religious, which seems to suggest that they may have been identical with the ‘spirits’ who possessed the nuns of Loudun. Van Dusen also discovered that they were quite willing to accept identities suggested to them — which may again help to explain why so many ‘possessing entities’ in the past insisted that they were demons. On the other hand the higher-order spirits were helpful and considerate: they respected the patient’s individuality and made no attempt to ‘invade’.
It struck Van Dusen as extraordinary that hallucinations should fall so neatly into these two categories: after all one might expect psychotic patients to believe they were tormented by birds, animals, perhaps even machines or hat stands. Yet this was not Van Dusen’s experience. As we have seen the experiences of patients sounded strangely like Swedenborg’s high and low spirits, or the ‘demons’ described in the literature on possession and witch trials: one woman declared that her sexual experiences with a male spirit were far more pleasurable and ‘inward’ than normal intercourse.
Van Dusen’s observations on high spirits seem to be supported by the curious case of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Dick’s early work had a strong tinge of neurosis and pessimism. He was obsessed by the idea that each of us lives in an individual universe and that therefore there is no such thing as an objectively real world — a dangerous notion that can obviously undermine our ‘reality function’. In an interview with fellow writer Charles Platt, Dick described how as a child he saw a newsreel of a Japanese soldier hit by a flame-thrower and burning like a torch, and how he was dazed with horror as the audience cheered and laughed. He continued to be obsessed by pain and suffering and finally, in his forties, reached a ‘trough’ in his life when he saw only inexplicable suffering. At this point, he says, ‘my mental anguish was simply removed from me as if by a divine fiat… . Some transcendent divine power which was not evil, but benign, intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world.’ It sounds as if some unconscious ‘will to health’ had intervened: but Dick is emphatic that it was more than this. In 1974 (when he was forty-six) he experienced ‘an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.’ This rational mind,
’… assumed control of my motor centres and did my acting and thinking for me. I was a spectator to it. It set about healing me physically, and my four-year-old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of. This mind, whose identity was totally obscure to me, was equipped with tremendous technical knowledge — engineering, medical, cosmological, philosophical knowledge. It had memories dating back over two thousand years, it spoke Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit. There wasn’t anything it didn’t seem to know.
It immediately set about putting my affairs in order. It fired my agent and my publisher. It remargined my typewriter. It was very practical: it decided that the apartment had not been vaccuumed recently enough; it decided I should stop drinking wine because of the sediment … . It made elementary mistakes such as calling the dog ‘he’ and the cat ‘she’, which annoyed my wife, and it
kept calling her ‘ma’am’.
… I made quite a lot of money very rapidly. We began to get cheques for thousands of dollars — money that was owed me, which the mind was conscious existed in New York… . And it got me to the doctor, who confirmed the diagnoses of the various ailments that I had … . It did everything but paper the walls of the apartment. It also said it would stay on as my tutelary spirit. I had to look up ‘tutelary’ to find out what it meant.’
Dick was later to describe the experience in his novel Valis. But his fellow science-fiction writers found it impossible to swallow: Ursula Le Guin told him she thought he was crazy. And the bewildered interviewer recorded, ‘I can’t suddenly believe that there really are extraterrestrial entities invading the minds of men.’ Yet he admits that ‘I do believe that something remarkable happened to him, if only psychologically… .’ On the evidence of Dick’s interview it is hard to decide whether the ‘possession’ was purely psychological or genuine — although the half million words that he wrote about his experience may eventually shed some light on it. (Dick died of a stroke in 1982.) But if Dick is correct in stating that the entity could speak Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit and that it had memories dating back for two thousand years, this would undoubtedly be powerful evidence for regarding it as one of Swedenborg’s ‘higher order’. Which of course raises the interesting question of why such an entity should wish to help Dick tidy up his life. One possible answer is that by the early 1970s Dick had become one of the most widely admired science-fiction writers of his time and was therefore worth converting to the conviction that life is not a meaningless nightmare after all.