Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  This notion of benificent possession is of course older than civilization. In his classic work Possession, Demoniacal and Other (1930) Professor T. K. Oesterreich concluded that the ‘possession’ of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece was a case of benevolent possession. Joseph Rock, a member of the National Geographic Society’s expedition to Yunnan in 1928, described an extraordinary performance in which a sungma (a kind of medium) was possessed by the ‘demon’ Chechin. The sungma took his seat in the temple while the Tibetan monks chanted, rang bells and blew conch shells: he was wearing a tall iron hat strapped under his chin. When the spirit arrived his face swelled so much that the chin-strap split and blood trickled from his mouth and nose. Then the sungma was handed a Mongolian steel sword a third of an inch thick and proceeded to twist it into knots as though it were paper: presumably the spirit possessed the same kind of metal-bending powers as Uri Geller. He ended by performing a spectacular dance in a pile of burning straw, ‘whirling like a demon’ in the flames without getting burnt.*

  Dr Titus Bull carefully concealed his belief in possession from his professional colleagues and ordinary patients. In recent years at least two American psychiatrists, Adam Crabtree and Ralph Allison, have shown a bolder spirit. Crabtree was a theological student in Minnesota when he came upon a pamphlet called Begone Satan, which described one of the most extraordinary cases of ‘possession’ on record.

  In 1896, when she was fourteen, Anna Ecklund found herself unable to enter a church building, although she was a devout Catholic. She was troubled with fantasies of committing ‘unspeakable sexual acts’ and an impulse to attack holy objects. In her mid-twenties she asked for help, but the Church was sceptical and it was not until 1912 that an exorcism ceremony seemed to bring relief. In 1928 she was still suffering from attacks and Fr Theophilus Reisinger, a Capuchin monk from the community of St Anthony at Marathon, Wisconsin, decided to carry out a second exorcism at a convent in Earling, Iowa. As soon as he began the formula of exorcism Anna shot up from the bed — in spite of the vigilance of several strong nuns — and stuck on the wall above the door. As he continued the exorcism her howls and screeches brought the townspeople running to see what was happening.

  Anna spoke in a variety of hoarse voices even when her mouth was closed, and when it was open her lips did not move. Her head swelled to the size of a water-pitcher and her face was fiery red. She vomited incredible quantities of foul matter — another sign of ‘possession’ (Fr Tranquille in the Loudun case had also vomited). If food had been sprinkled surreptitiously with holy water, she knew instantly. When the priest was reciting sections of the exorcism rite in German and Latin, ‘the devil’ would reply correctly in the same tongue. And a devil who called himself Beelzebub explained finally that they were tormenting her because her father had cursed her. Attempts to summon her now deceased father were finally successful, and he admitted that he had made many attempts to commit incest with her but she had resisted him: this was why he had cursed her and wished that devils would enter into her to entice her into sex. His ex-concubine also appeared and confessed to killing four of her children — probably in abortions. All this went on for twenty-three days, during which time several nuns had to be moved to another convent because of the disturbances and the pastor was involved in a strange car accident. Anna remained unconscious during most of the exorcism, but speaking in multitudes of voices. Then, on the twenty-third day, her body shot erect as if propelled by a spring, only her heels touching the bed. She collapsed on to her knees while a terrible voice repeated the names of the tormenting spirits until it died into the distance. At this point Anna opened her eyes and smiled.

  The monk who had translated the pamphlet from the German was in the same monastery as Crabtree and was able to verify the details of the story. He naturally believed that Anna was contending with demons from Hell. But it seems far more likely that they were the same ‘earth-bound spirits’ that caused so much trouble in the Harper household in Enfield.

  In 1969 Crabtree decided to leave the cloister and become a psychiatrist. He soon came to accept the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance. But it was not until 1976 that a colleague told him about a ‘possessed’ patient and he witnessed the phenomenon for the first time. He flatly declined to believe that he was witnessing anything ‘paranormal’. But in the following year he began to encounter cases among his own patients. These finally led him to the highly unorthodox conclusion that living persons can be possessed by the dead — and, incredibly enough, by the living.

  His first case was of a young woman whom he calls Sarah Worthington, who was referred to him by a colleague. Crabtree started by asking her if she had heard ‘voices inside her head’, and she admitted that she had. Then he persuaded her to go into a deep state of relaxation on the couch. Suddenly Sarah spoke in another voice, a stronger, more authoritative voice, declaring she was hot. Asked to name itself, the voice said it was Sarah’s grandmother, Sarah Jackson. Her aim, she said, was to help Sarah. And the comment about being hot referred to a traumatic experience in Sarah Jackson’s early married life when she thought her seven-year-old son was trapped in a blazing house. It became clear that Sarah Jackson — who claimed to have ‘entered’ her granddaughter while she was playing the piano and was therefore in an ‘open’ state of mind — had as many psychological problems as her granddaughter, possibly more.

  In the long run it turned out to be unnecessary to ‘dispossess’ Sarah Worthington. Now that she understood that the voice inside her was her grandmother she ceased to worry, and even came to derive a certain comfort from her grandmother’s presence at the back of her mind. In this case the cure was effected simply by understanding what was happening.

  In another case a social worker named Susan had been ‘possessed’ by her father, who had died in a car crash and who had been so sexually obsessed by his daughter that he used to creep into the bedroom when she was asleep to fondle her genitals. The possession was not deliberate: the car crash had left him in a state of confusion. Crabtree was able to persuade him to leave her alone.

  Crabtree worked with a female colleague on the case of a girl called Jean who was obsessed by the memory of her mentally-retarded sister Amy, who had died at the age of twenty. Jean felt a kind of ‘alien mass’ inside her which she had tried — unsuccessfully — to get rid of through bio-energetics. Now, lying on Crabtree’s couch, the childish voice of Amy began to speak through her mouth. Amy told the doctors that she had first ‘entered’ Jean when she was five years old and had then ‘lived through’ her. ‘She could go places and learn things that were otherwise impossible in her condition.’ The family background was full of violent, negative emotions, so their ‘partnership’ was important.

  Under Crabtree’s instructions Amy ‘looked around her’ and observed a grey-haired, elderly man who told her that he had been appointed to be her teacher. It was hard to persuade Amy to go away and listen to her instructor, but eventually Crabtree succeeded — after a ‘heated exchange’. Following this Jean continued to feel Amy as a vaguely benevolent presence, but the ‘alien mass’ inside her went away.

  If we can accept that Jean was really ‘possessed’ by Amy and was not simply experiencing guilt about her — as she herself believed at one point — then the most interesting part of the case is the fact that Amy ‘entered’ her sister while both were still alive and was able to use her for the sake of vicarious experience. Presumably what happened was that she established some sort of telepathic contact which enabled her to share her sister’s life.

  The same thing seems to have happened in another extraordinary case, that of a university professor called Art who experienced ‘inner storms’ in which his mother’s censorious voice expressed her dislike of his friends and his behaviour. His mother was alive and living in Detroit. In a state of deep relaxation, Art identified himself as Veronica, his mother. ‘Art is mine and his life is mine.’ She began to make harsh comments on a girl Art proposed to marry. She had alw
ays been a highly possessive mother and even in his teens would call him into her bed after her husband had left for work and tease him into a powerful state of sexual excitement. It was obviously this intense relationship between them — and his sexual interest in her — that had opened him to the ‘possession’.

  Veronica eventually admitted that this obsession with her son was good for neither of them. And when, still in Detroit, she developed a cancerous growth and needed an operation, the possessing entity agreed that this might be because dividing her energies between herself and her son had robbed her of vitality. At this point the ‘possession’ gradually faded away, while Art’s mother in Detroit underwent an astonishing transformation: from being dull and withdrawn she began to lead an active social life. (It would be interesting to know whether Art’s mother realized she was possessing her son, but Crabtree does not mention this.)

  In the writings of Titus Bull, Crabtree came upon the interesting remark that dead ancestors can influence the lives of their descendants, the aim being to ‘keep the mortal in line with family ideals’. Two of Crabtree’s female patients seemed to illustrate what Bull meant — one an Italian, one an east European, both subject to a ‘dark cloud’ that made them subject to some ‘external agency’ — but both these cases could also be interpreted as ordinary neurosis. However in the case of a man called Mike Doan a strange entity emerged that seemed like the traditional leprechaun. Speaking in a strong Irish brogue it made witty and amusing remarks about Mike and his family. Eventually this character — who called himself Shamus — explained that he was one of Mike’s ancestors. The family had originally been prosperous and successful, but then avaricious women had taken over and their meanness had finally led to poverty and misery. One day the menfolk of the family — probably drunk — attacked the women and subjected them to sexual humiliation, also desecrating a statue of the Virgin Mary. From then on they were convinced that they were accursed, and the guilt persisted down the centuries. Shamus, who had taken part in the ‘crime’, was burdened with guilt and was still dominated by ‘the women’. When he had talked about the crime and his sense of guilt he was finally freed from the burden of sinfulness and Mike was freed from his presence. Both Crabtree and Mike Doan keep an open mind about whether Shamus was a real person or a creation of Mike’s unconscious mind, but Crabtree insists that from the therapist’s point of view it makes no difference: Mike’s cure justifies the method.

  Of all the cases cited by Crabtree the most normal and typical — from the point of view of psychical research — is that of a friend of Crabtree’s named Pat who spent a weekend at the farm of a friend’s grandparents and allowed herself to be drawn into automatic writing. She immediately went into a trance-like state and seemed to see a woman dressed in mauve, while her hand wrote ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’. Other ‘entities’ caused her hand to write messages but it was not until she returned home that she began to hear ‘Elizabeth’s’ voice inside her head, trying to persuade her to do more automatic writing and insisting, ‘We need you.’ She ignored it and tried to read, but experienced a sensation as if someone was pressing her face against hers. It took several days of ignoring the entity before it gradually departed and at last she thought she could see the woman receding.

  Some of Crabtree’s cases sound so preposterous that it is difficult to take them seriously, and he explains — perhaps defensively — that he feels the same but is nevertheless telling them exactly as they occurred. One young woman who showed signs of dual personality finally began to speak with the voice of an entity that identified itself as ‘the coach’ and assured the doctors that the young woman was totally within his control. After a great deal of questioning ‘the coach’ recalled that he had once been a human being. Little by little he was able to recall details of three lifetimes, in the last of which he had been horrifyingly executed by being thrown into a pit with a hungry python or boa constrictor; as he had died he had had an ‘out-of-the-body experience’ and had watched himself being crushed to death. (Describing this scene, the girl filled the room with shattering screams.) A kind of amnesia had supervened and ‘the coach’ became a bodiless entity wandering without memory and possessing several successive generations in the patient’s family. After a month of intensive therapy the girl ceased to be on the point of nervous breakdown and ‘the coach’ departed. Whether or not it was a delusion of her unconscious mind, the treatment certainly worked.

  The oddest case concerns an entity that seemed to possess a university history lecturer named Marius, who began to experience irrational impulses to kill his wife. He talked of a ‘monster inside’. When Crabtree and a group of helpers eventually succeeded in exorcizing some of Marius’s pent-up rage he was able to describe a scene in the remote past when ‘half human’ hunters had killed a bear with appalling sadism. While they did so some unspecified entity — a ‘round hole in space’ — absorbed the violence. One of the hunters had been ‘possessed’ both by the spirit of the bear and by the ‘round hole’. After Crabtree’s session with Marius ‘the bear’ departed but the ‘round hole in space’ remained. The next day Crabtree succeeded in speaking to this entity, which described itself as a non-human vortex which needed the energy of living beings for nourishment. When the group concentrated feelings of love and affection on Marius the entity complained of his discomfort at ‘the white light’. In later sessions it recalled its experiences before it had come to earth and that it had not always been totally dark. Eventually it was persuaded to leave, and Marius experienced no more impulses to commit violence.

  Obviously these cases must be accepted for what they are — studies of clinically disturbed individuals from which it would be unwise to draw general conclusions. Yet there is nothing in them that contradicts the conclusions reached by Guy Playfair as a result of his years in Brazil. One thing puzzled me: that Crabtree should have encountered so many cases of ‘possession’. It sounded too good to be true, rather like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marples who constantly stumbles across murders. The dozen or so possession cases that Crabtree cited were of course only a tiny fraction of his clinical experience, yet it still seemed odd, and when I entered into correspondence with him — as a result of writing an introduction to his book Multiple Man — I took the opportunity to ask this question. He replied that he had often pondered on this himself and wondered whether he was ‘creating’ the phenomenon in his patients. Another possibility was that he might somehow unconsciously ‘draw’ such patients to himself. But it seemed to him that the likeliest explanation was that the phenomenon is not as rare as might be supposed but usually goes unrecognized. He pointed out to me that another therapist, Ralph Allison, had also encountered a surprising number of cases of multiple personality in the relatively small area of Los Osos, California.

  In fact I was not unfamiliar with the notion that mental — or even physical — illness may be caused by ‘discarnate entities’, for my old friend Dr Arthur Guirdham had written a book, Obsession, on precisely this subject. But then Guirdham is a firm believer in reincarnation, which has the understandable effect of making his ideas suspect in the eyes of his medical colleagues — he took care not to publish his unorthodox ideas until he had retired from medical practice.

  Adam Crabtree and Ralph Allison are both working psychiatrists who had been forced to entertain their unusual hypotheses as a result of clinical experience. Allison’s story is just as remarkable as Crabtree’s. In Minds in Many Pieces he offers an interesting and amusing account of his early days as a psychiatrist. He began practising in Santa Cruz in the mid-1960s, when many of his patients were hippies suffering from drug abuse, alcoholism and a general feeling of meaninglessness. It was not until 1972 that he encountered his first case of multiple personality. Janette was a quiet, rather mousy woman who had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic with compulsive tendencies: she experienced impulses to kill her husband and children. In one hospital where she had been treated she had been raped by a group of orderlies who
had then given her a pair of earrings to bribe her into keeping quiet. Allison sent her to another psychiatrist for a second opinion, and it was the other psychiatrist who told him that he had another Three Faces of Eve case on his hands: Janette had been walking about agitatedly, saying, ‘She’s the one who’s depressed, not me.’ So the next morning Allison explained to Janette that he thought there might be another personality inside her body, persuaded her to relax deeply, then asked if he could speak to the ‘other person’. Instantly Janette changed: her face hardened and she spoke in a grating voice, ‘God, it’s good to get rid of that piss-ass Janette.’ This new personality identified herself as Lydia. And like Eve’s alter-ego, she seemed to be the total opposite of the original personality. Asked what she considered fun she explained, ‘Drinking, dancing, fucking’, then moved into a provocative position. It struck Allison that perhaps the rape by the orderlies had not been entirely unprovoked.

  Janette’s problem turned out to be lack of affection during childhood. She hated her mother, and when her father, whom she adored, had been inducted into the army she felt he had abandoned her. She was delighted when he finally returned then shattered when her mother had another child, a son. At this point Janette retreated from life and the ‘naughty’ alter ego, Lydia, took over. Lydia even dropped her baby brother, hoping to smash his skull, but failed. The local minister tried to molest her sexually, and at the age of eleven she was raped by a boy of fourteen. Another girl called Marie now took over, but Marie was so stupid that she learned nothing and left school at sixteen to get a job as a waitress. Her first marriage — to a homosexual — had been a disaster.

  Allison’s main problem with Janette was that his patient was not really convinced that she was a multiple personality — or not enough to make her really want to get well. What finally made her make up her mind was an experience she had while driving home one day. Lydia had picked up a couple of drunken and particularly smelly beatniks. Janette took over, and when she glanced around to see what was causing the smell she screamed and shot off the road into a ditch. From then on she was determined to get well.