Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  As she became more absorbed in this kind of scientific work she abandoned mediumship in favour of clairvoyance. She summarizes the result of her years of experience thus: ‘Now I believed I saw a certain principle at work behind all communication — namely that the subconscious mind was a vehicle capable of expanding indefinitely and able to contact all possible realms of understanding which it might choose to reach’ — in short a recognition that we are living in an ‘information universe’ and that all this information is accessible to certain levels of the human mind.

  Oddly enough her attempts to demonstrate her powers at Duke University with J. B. Rhine — the man who would become the father of scientific parapsychology — were unsuccessful: her score in reading Zena cards was no more than average. This, she was convinced, was because ‘clairvoyance and telepathy depended upon an active radiation registering between two people or between an individual and an object’, and since the Zena cards had no ‘radiation’ there was no link between them. (According to Max Freedom Long our vital force — mana — acts through an invisible substance called aka or ‘shadowy body stuff’. This aka is ‘sticky’, according to the Kahunas, and can be drawn out into long, sticky threads, like spiders’ webs; telepathy, clairvoyance and psychometry operate through these invisible telephone lines of aka. This would explain why Eileen Garrett found Zena cards impossible to work with but would not explain why other subjects obtained a high score.)

  In 1934 she returned to England and entered into more scientific work with Dr William Brown in his laboratory at Oxford. Brown thought that she might be simply a multiple personality and wanted to question her under hypnosis. But although she was able to recall childhood memories in detail under hypnosis there was no sign of her ‘controls’. It was only when she went into a mediumistic trance at the last session that Brown was finally able to talk to Uvani.

  In her autobiography Eileen Garrett is so concerned with explaining the scientific investigations that she fails to make even a passing reference to one of the strangest cases she ever became involved in: the haunting of Ash Manor in Sussex. The house had been bought in June 1934 by an American named Keel, who had been surprised that the owner asked so little for it — he decided the drains must need extensive repairs. But one night in November Keel woke up to find an intruder — a little old man — in his bedroom. When he tried to grab him, his hand went straight through him, and Keel fainted. Then he rushed to his wife’s bedroom, babbling incoherently, and she went to fetch brandy. Outside her husband’s bedroom she saw the same old man — wearing old-fashioned clothes including leggings and a pudding-basin hat. When she tried to hit him her hands went through him and he vanished. After this the family saw him frequently: he would appear from a chimney and walk into a cupboard that had once been a priests’ hole. He became such a frequent visitor that the family ceased to worry about him — particularly when Mrs Keel found she could make him vanish by reaching out to touch him.

  The research officer for the International Institute for Psychical Research was Nandor Fodor, and he persuaded Mrs Garrett to accompany him to investigate Ash Manor. She went into a trance, and Uvani took over and explained that hauntings only occur when someone is in a bad emotional state. (It soon emerged that the Keel family had serious problems: Keel was homosexual and the daughter had a father-fixation and was jealous of her mother.) There had been a prison close to the house in the fifteenth century and many men and women had died there.

  After this Uvani allowed the spirit of the old man to ‘possess’ Mrs Garrett. The old man seemed to mistake Fodor for his jailer and fell on his knees, seizing Fodor’s hand so tightly that he howled with pain and was unable to free it. Finally the old man began to speak in an odd mediaeval English, talking about the Earl of Huntingdon and the Duke of Buckingham — who had apparently betrayed him — and begging Fodor to help him find his wife. The man said his name was Charles Edward Henley, son of Lord Henley, and referred to the nearby village under its mediaeval name of Esse. When he talked of revenge they tried to persuade him that the desire for revenge was binding him to the earth, and that he should make an effort to forgive. Finally, crying, ‘Hold me, I cannot stay …’ the spirit vanished. Mrs Keel, who was also present, said that Eileen Garrett’s face looked like that of the old man while he was ‘possessing’ her.

  Several more sessions seemed to bring no further result although, oddly enough, Henley manifested himself through another medium at the College of Psychic Science. Uvani made the interesting statement that the Keels were responsible for preventing the ghost from escaping its earth-bound existence: he said that they were using it to get at one another. Confronted with this observation Keel admitted that it was true — and his admission had the effect of finally ‘laying’ the ghost.

  It may be worth mentioning that more than thirty years later, Fodor remarked in his book The Unaccountable that not a single statement of the Ash Manor ghost had been verified by painstaking historical research, and that scholars had not found its mediaeval English authentic. So like most true ghost stories the tale of Ash Manor — which is authenticated by a number of scientific observers — fades into the realm of ambiguity demanded by James’s Law.

  Eileen Garrett returned to America, where she continued to work with scientists — among them Lawrence LeShan and Andrija Puharich — and gradually came to be accepted as the most remarkable ‘psychic’ of the century. Many other mediums, such as Mrs Piper and Mrs Leonard, had been extensively tested and found to be genuine, but only Eileen Garrett had been as determined as her investigators to understand the secret of her own powers.

  In our Western culture such powers are regarded as abnormal or simply fraudulent. In other cultures they are taken for granted. In the late 1950s an anthropologist named Stiles spent some time studying the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada. When he returned he described to his colleague Professor Clarence Weiant how the Indians could communicate with one another over a distance of hundreds of miles by ‘clairaudience’. They would construct a small hut about the size of a telephone booth out in the woods, and stay in it until the power built up sufficiently for them to hold a two-way conversation with some distant relative. While this was going on the shelter would shake. Stephen Schwartz has recorded that a Roman Catholic missionary and a Canadian trapper who lived among the Montagnais also bore witness to the phenomenon.*

  Another anthropologist, Doug Boyd, accompanied a team of scientists to observe an American Indian medicine man in action, and the results, recorded in Rolling Thunder, leave no possible doubt about his ‘magical’ powers. Boyd confirms the ability of the Indians to communicate with one another by means of telepathy, and their ability to control the weather. He watched as Rolling Thunder poked a stink bug with a stick and caused a violent storm. Each time Rolling Thunder flipped the bug over on to its back,

  … there was a loud, sharp crack: a bolt of lightning … . Again and again the act was repeated and again and again the lightning came … . It seemed to be synchronized precisely with the actions of the bug. I might have been watching someone scratching a screwdriver on a battery pole or touching two live wires together. It became apparent as it continued that this was an uncommon but natural phenomenon produced by a real cause-and-effect relationship.

  After a few minutes of this there was a ‘wild downpour’.

  Rolling Thunder also demonstrated his powers in freeing an Indian who had been imprisoned for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Although Boyd did not witness this he confirmed the story through reliable witnesses. Another anthropologist, John Welsh, described how he had accompanied Rolling Thunder to Leavenworth prison and told the guards that he had come to collect the Indian to take him back home. A prison officer finally came out and told them that it would be impossible to visit the man. Rolling Thunder was persistent, and finally another officer came out and told them that the man had been transferred to another prison. Welsh and Rolling Thunder went to a nearby motel for the night. In the middle of the
night Rolling Thunder became furiously angry: he told Welsh that he had been inside the prison and knew that the officers had lied. If they could use lies to get their own way, he could use fear.

  The next morning Rolling Thunder insisted that Welsh join him in smoking a pipe and chanting on the river-bank. After a while the fire produced an intense black smoke that rose straight into the air. Then there was a crash of thunder and the clouds began to gather. One big black cloud, shaped like a funnel, seemed to follow them as they approached the prison again. There Rolling Thunder shouted so fiercely that the guards rushed in to fetch the prison officers. They told him to go away. Rolling Thunder pointed to the funnel and told them to watch it. As they did so it came towards them. Then sand and rocks started flying through the air and they were in the midst of a whirlwind. The prison gate was ripped off its hinges and went flying through the air. At this the prison officials were finally convinced: they brought out the prisoner and allowed him to leave with Rolling Thunder.

  According to Boyd, Rolling Thunder’s powers are the result of a special relationship with Nature based on his recognition that the earth is a living being. But such an attitude is not apparently essential to the practice of magic — as some of the guards at Leavenworth must have been aware at the time of Rolling Thunder’s unwelcome visit. A quarter of a century earlier Leavenworth had housed a multiple murderer called Hadad. The psychologist Donald Powell Wilson first encountered him when he was taken to Hadad’s cell and found his body hanging from the cell bars. It seemed that Hadad had used the belt of a warder whom he had hypnotized on his rounds earlier in the day. The warder — who was also present when the body was discovered — was convinced that he was still wearing the belt around his waist, even when a colleague pointed out that it had disappeared. A few days later Hadad’s corpse was carried into the autopsy room. As the surgeons were picking up their scalpels he slowly rose to a sitting position and said with an impeccable Oxford accent, ‘Gentlemen, I would rather not, if you don’t mind.’ His later explanation was that he was able to enter a trance so deep that all his natural functions ceased.

  The following day Hadad offered another demonstration of his powers. There were many epileptics on the psychopathic ward who had regular seizures. Hadad offered to stop all such attacks for three days. He did as he promised: the attacks started up again on the following Thursday afternoon. Wilson’s own explanation was that Hadad had exercised his hypnotic powers when he was last in the ward, and that this was merely a demonstration of post-hypnotic suggestion.

  Hadad offered Wilson another demonstration of his powers. He removed his clothes and lay across two desks, then went into a death-like state. Then, as he had predicted, the twelve signs of the zodiac appeared at different places on his body in the form of red welts — what Wilson calls an example of ‘controlled dermographia’. When Hadad’s vein was punctured there was almost no blood: Wilson confirmed that this was beyond the usual psychotic trance or catalepsy.

  Wilson’s investigations revealed that Hadad could enter and leave the prison at will. On one occasion he had vanished when in transit: the guards opened up the van to find it empty. Soon afterwards Hadad came knocking on the door of the prison, explaining that he had got lost on the way. On another occasion he was seen by the warden at a symphony concert in a nearby town and explained, ‘It has been some time since I have been to a concert, and I felt it would be such a shame not to go. After all, I am only a short distance from the city.’

  When Wilson asked him what he was doing in prison, Hadad declared that he was here on a mission. He was, he explained, destined to wander throughout the world seeking two ‘excessively evil and malign spirits’ — he meant human beings — ‘and to relieve them of their corporeal anatomy’ (i.e. kill them). He had already found one of them, ‘and he is not’. But Wilson’s enquiries revealed that Hadad had been a member of a notorious gang that was terrorizing the southwest. He had been the gang’s ‘finger man’, using his occult skills to draw the gang’s victims out of hiding so that they could be killed. When he was caught the police had riddled the car with machine-gun fire until it looked like a sieve, but Hadad had emerged unharmed. He claimed he had deflected the bullets.

  Hadad told Wilson and a fellow medico that his mission on earth was almost completed and that he had selected them as the pupils on whom his mantle was to descend — they were to present themselves at his cell at 2 a.m. to take part in a ‘blood rite’. They both declined the honour — possibly to the loss of medical science. On the other hand Wilson’s judgement may have been correct. He describes Hadad as a boaster who liked to claim he was greater than Mohammed or Christ (he even pointed out that he had risen after three days while Jesus had only been dead for two) — a kind of egoism that has been the Achilles’ heel of many ‘magicians’, including the late Aleister Crowley. In spite of his obviously remarkable powers Hadad seems to have been rather a dubious human being, which may be why Wilson relegates his case to a mere few pages in a later chapter of his book My Six Convicts. On the other hand that could be the result of sheer embarrassment at having to admit to anything so preposterous.

  Wilson’s assumption that Hadad was a hypnotist may be incorrect. Another remarkable modern magus, Spyros Sathi (known as Daskalos) was questioned by an American academic, Kyriacos C. Markides, about some of the extraordinary feats of the Yacqui shaman Don Juan, as described by Carlos Castaneda: for example how Don Juan had given Castaneda a push and Castaneda had suddenly found himself two miles away. (The correct explanation is almost certainly that it never happened, but this was before Richard de Mille’s analyses had revealed that the Don Juan books were probably a hoax.*) Daskalos replied by making a distinction between hypnosis and induced hallucination. Daskalos described a visit from an English scientist who had witnessed the Indian rope-trick — how the rope was thrown into the air and a boy then climbed up it. Later the scientist photographed the rope-trick and was disappointed to find that his photograph showed that both the boy and the rope remained on the ground. According to Daskalos ‘the fakir spread his aura around and put the audience inside. Then he began to think intensely and he created with his mind all those images they were “seeing”.’ Markides asked if this was not a form of hypnosis. ‘Hypnotism is a different phenomenon altogether. In hypnotism the hypnotist uses powerful suggestions through words or the help of some instrument [i.e. a pendulum] to an audience which is receptive and co-operative. The fakir uses the power of thought to influence his unaware audience telepathically and made them “see” things that did not exist on the gross material plane.’ So what the fakir did — and probably what Hadad did — was ‘magic’ according to Crowley’s definition: ‘Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.’ (Many stories confirm that Crowley himself possessed this power: for example he could make a perfectly sane and normal man drop on all fours and begin barking and whining like a dog.*)

  Markides’ remarkable book The Magus of Strovolos makes it clear that Daskalos is a magus in the most precise sense of the word. Daskalos, who lives in Nicosia, is widely known among Cypriots as a healer, and it was to learn more about his healing powers that Markides visited him in 1978. It soon became apparent that Daskalos is far more than a healer: that as a teacher, he deserves to be classified with Steiner and Gurdjieff. When Markides visited him Daskalos looked like what he was — a tall, mild civil servant in his mid-sixties. He explained to Markides that most of his healing was carried out in an ‘out-of-the-body’ state (which he calls exomatosis) with the aid of invisible helpers. Markides talked to a peasant whom Daskalos had just cured of a long-standing spinal injury and received from Daskalos permission to study him with the aim of writing a book about his powers.

  One of Markides’ first experiences of these powers was strikingly dramatic. A friend asked if Daskalos could see three Jewish women, two of whom had just come from Israel. The daughter of one of the women was suffering severe psychological problems. D
askalos lost no time in establishing his credentials as a psychic: he told the daughter that she was wearing a star of David over her heart, which was correct. The girl — who was called Hadas — then explained the problem: she was possessed by demons who would not allow her to rest. Her aunt declared this was sheer imagination. But after asking the girl to close her eyes and studying her for some time, Daskalos declared that she was possessed by the spirits of two Nazis, husband and wife, who had died in the bombardment of Hamburg and who hated Jews. They had already sent four other Jewish women into asylums and had succeeded in taking possession of the girl ‘when their vibrations and yours were on the same frequency’.