by Colin Wilson
It was in 1969 that my American literary agent wrote to ask me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’. I accepted because I needed the money; besides, I felt I probably knew as much about it as anybody. But I found it hard to take the commission seriously—I only had to re-read that passage in Ouspensky about Atlantis and Lemuria and The Temple of Satan to feel that I was going to have to write it with my tongue firmly wedged in my cheek. That winter—1969—I took the family to a small village in Majorca, where I was supposed to be a ‘visiting professor’ in the extramural department of an American college. There I met the writer Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess had given me severe headaches many years before, and I asked his advice on writing a book about the occult. He gave it in one word: ‘Don’t.’ And I have to admit that, if I had not already received half the advance, I would probably have taken his advice.
It is difficult to say at which point I began to change my mind, I think it was the day Joy read aloud to me a passage from Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand, in which he tells a story of how, just before the First World War, he and a group of brother officers went to see a famous palmist ‘as a lark’. What happened dismayed him. The palmist kept looking at hand after hand and saying: ‘I don’t understand it. I can see nothing. . .’ The explanation came a few months later when the war broke out, and the men whose palms had been ‘blank’ were killed . . .
Now it seems clear from Sitwell’s other works that he was not a ‘believer’ in the supernatural—in that respect he seems to have shared the attitude of his father, Sir George Sitwell, who once grabbed a ‘spirit’ that was walking around at a seance, and revealed it to be the medium in her underwear. And the more I studied this subject of the paranormal, the more I discovered that some of the most convincing witnesses were not spiritualists or occultists, but unbelievers who had had just one odd experience.
Charles Dickens is another example. In a letter of May 30, 1863, he decribes how, the previous Thursday, he had had a dream in which he saw a lady in red, who stood with her back towards him. He thought he recognised her as someone he knew, but when she turned round, saw that she was, in fact, a stranger. The lady remarked ‘I am Miss Napier’. And as he was dressing that morning, he thought: ‘What a preposterous thing to have such a distinct dream about nothing. And why Miss Napier?’
That same evening Dickens gave one of his famous public readings, and some friends walked into his dressing-room with the lady in red, who was introduced to him as Miss Napier . . .
This story raises perhaps the most difficult of all questions about the ‘supernatural’. It should be totally impossible to know about an event before it takes place, except as some kind of vague guess. Time is a one-way street, and the future has not yet happened. We may choose to believe in all kinds of strange things: spontaneous combustion, telepathy, out-of-the-body experiences, haunted houses, phantom hitch hikers . . . But each one of these might well have some more-or-less rational explanation. In the case of foreseeing an event that has not yet happened, there is no ‘rational’ explanation: it seems to defy the laws of reason. Yet, as I was soon to discover, there are hundreds of well-authenticated cases of people who have foreseen the future.
What fascinated me was that this was not really so remote from my interest in ‘outsiders’. Because what these cases seemed to prove beyond all doubt was that human beings possess strange powers of which they are normally unaware. And this is precisely the intuition that had excited so many of the great poets and musicians of the 19th century. In The Prelude, for example, Wordsworth decribes how, one moonlit evening, he borrowed a small boat he found moored on the edge of Lake Windermere, and how, as he rowed out into the middle of the lake, a huge black peak seemed to tower above him like a living creature. For days afterwards, he says: and his dreams were troubled by ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live’.
‘. . . . my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being’,
Is that mere ‘poetic imagination’? Or had he actually seen something that the rest of us do not see because our senses are too narrow and practical, in the same way that some people can see ghosts?
Here is an example that brings home the point even more clearly. Richard Church was a poet who was born in London in 1893, the son of a post office worker. Life was hard; his mother, whom he adored, destroyed her health by working as a schoolteacher to help support the family. Church himself suffered from such poor health that at one point he was sent away to spend some months in a convalescent home. He felt miserable and sick with longing for his mother. And then there came a strange experience that, in some ways, transformed the rest of his life. He describes how:
‘. . . one heavy morning, when the outside world was iron-bound with frost, I stood at a long French window in the playroom waiting to go down to breakfast. The sun was just risen beyond the ground, and stood above the lawns, his great red disk etched with naked twigs of the bushes. Under these bushes a gardener was chopping down a dead tree. I watched him. The axe flashed red, and fell. It rose again. The movement, steady and sure, fascinated me. Suddenly I realised that the sound of the blows did not synchronise with what I saw. The thud came when the axe was on an upstroke, ready for the next blow.
‘I disbelieved the evidence of my eyes. Then I thought my spectacles (those miracle workers) must have betrayed me; or that my illness had begun to affect my vision. I stared intently, screwing up the eye-muscles against any possible intrusion of light or irrelevant image. But the picture I saw and the sound I heard remained disparate.
‘Then, while I stared, knowledge came to me; the knowledge that follows a recognition of fact, of concrete experience, bringing with it a widening both of the universe and of the individual’s understanding of it. These moments are rare, and they are wholly vital. For a flash, the recogniser is a god, who can say ‘I am’, as Jehovah said in the Old Testament.
‘On that frosty winter morning, between getting up and going down to breakfast, in an antiseptic, varnished institution where the inmates and staff were so dehumanised that they were little more than parts of the mechanism of the place, leaving me in a murmurous solitude, day after day bemused and lonely, elated by the very dreariness of things, there I stood transfigured . . .
‘I had found that time and space are not absolute. Their power was not law. They were not even unanimous; they quarrelled with each other; and through their schism the human imagination, the hope, the faith, could slip, to further exploration where intuition had formerly hinted, but where logic and fatal common sense had denied.
‘I felt both power and exultation flooding my veins. The blood glowed warm within me, rising to my brain and pulsing there, like a crowd roaring some racial acclamation. I had found out the cheat of time and space; and if that were so, then other seemingly stable laws of nature might be questioned, to the advantage of this fettered and hoodwinked spirit, this hidden and oppressed self, locked in the dungeon of my body.
‘I looked again, and still the evidence wrote itself upon the frosty air, against the disk of the sun who had now risen an inch or two higher, like the minute-hand of a giant clock, jerking itself up toward the hour, invisibly visible in its motion. The beauty of this syncopation between sight and sound released me from so much, from the mass of daily life, the burden of the flesh and its strict locality, from the drag of earth.
‘That last was my most hated foe. The drag of earth, the weight that would pull me day and night, making every movement, even the smooth gestures which we throw in sleep, a labour too heavy to be borne; the putting on of clothes, the passage from chair to chair, the endless travel from one room to another, and that final torture, the treadmill of the tandem, during those Sunday rides behind my brother, as I tried to do my share of the pedalling, under the goad of his tongue, lashing me to it.
‘But now I was free. Since time and space were deceivers, openly contrad
icting each other, and at best offering a compromise in place of a law, I was at liberty to doubt further, to carry on my exploration of the horizons of freedom. Still conscious of the warm blood whispering in my veins, I looked down at my wrist and saw the transparent flesh, the bird-bones, the channels of blue beneath the skin. All this was substance as fragile as a plant. It could not possibly outweigh the solid earth under my feet, where I and the rest of duped mankind walked with such docility.
‘The sun had brightened to a liquid fire that dazzled my sight, reducing the woodman and his brief moment of revelation to a penumbral figure under the shadow of the bushes in the dead grey frost. I stared at the light, and the stuff of life within my body began to increase its speed of flow. I sensed, with a benignancy deeper and more assured than reason, that my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground; out of the tyranny of gravitation.
‘I exerted that will, visualising my hands and feet pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth. It was no surprise to me that I left the ground, and glided about the room (which was empty) some twelve or eighteen inches above the parquet floor. At first I was afraid of collapsing, of tumbling and hurting myself. But I had only to draw in a deep breath, and to command the air through the heavy portions of my anatomy, watching it flow and dilute the solid bone and flesh through the helpful chemistry of the blood, this new, released and knowledgeable blood, and I soared higher, half-way to the ceiling. This thoroughly frightened me, and I allowed myself to subside, coming to ground with a gentleness that was itself a sensuous delight.
‘I could not leave the matter there. I must put my discovery to the test again, and accordingly I drew in a deep breath and was just about to visualise that downward pressure of will upon body, when the door opened, and a nurse came in.
‘“Why, little boy?” she said. “Haven’t you heard the breakfast bell?”
‘Then she took a second glance at me, stooped and peered into my face, “Is anything wrong? Are you feeling poorly this morning?”
‘I was almost indignant, and disclaimed the suggestion that I might have a temperature, for that would mean going to bed in the large ward where a pail stood conspicuously in the middle, on a sheet of mackintosh; an improvisation which disgusted me.
‘I hurried away without replying, leaving the nurse looking after me with some inquiry in her manner. The corridor and staircase were empty, for everybody was at breakfast in the vast dining-room below. Here was another opportunity! I drew my breath again, I scorned the liars of time and space, I took the presence of Christ into my hollow, featherweight bones, and I floated down the staircase without touching either tread or baluster. Alighting outside the dining-room door, I entered and took my seat, content now to live incognito amongst these wingless mortals.’
This is surely one of the most remarkable passages ever written by a poet. His other references to the experience—in his autobiography Over the Bridge—make it clear that he is telling of something that actually happened; this is not some childish fantasy or daydream. Did he actually float through the air in a physical sense, as he seems to be claiming? Or was he having what is known as an ‘out-of-the-body experience’? His account seems to make it quite clear that it was his physical body that floated clear of the ground. And his case is far from unique. Dozens of children have been quite convinced that they have floated downstairs without touching the stairs. In her book The Decline and Fall of Science, the researcher Celia Green quotes a letter from a woman who claims to have had the experience as a 17-year-old schoolgirl:
‘Each girl took her turn lying on a long wooden table . . . with the others gathered tightly around her, so that there were no gaps . . . As one lay there, the girls chanted a rhyme—the actual words of which I have forgotten, but which referred to the person on the table as looking white, ill and then dead. It was spoken quite slowly and in unison so that its drone-like tone had great depth and was very penetrating.
‘Several girls took part before me without much success . . . Some . . . did admit to feeling a strange sensation . . . and it was this plus the declaration of a friend that encouraged me to try it.
‘I have absolutely no explanation why I was able to rise approximately three feet from the table surface. I was perfectly conscious that I was rising and might even have uttered an exclamation of surprise . . . The rapidity of the rise and indeed the fact that I had risen at all caused me to jerk my body out of the lying position, and with much commotion the girls cushioned my fall.’
I, on the other hand, do have a kind of explanation of what happened. It is quite clear that a sceptic would claim that it was all auto-suggestion: the low chanting, the suggestion that the person was becoming pale, then dead, would induce a certain mood like hypnosis. And, the sceptic would assert, this then produced the illusion of floating up into the air. My own explanation is that the ‘mood’ simply triggered some unknown power that we all possess, just as Richard Church’s mood of exultation somehow showed him how to float off the ground. And if this sounds absurd, then consider the well-authenticated case of Joseph of Copertino, the ‘flying monk’ whose feats of levitation were witnessed by dozens of famous men of learning, including the philosopher Leibniz. Born in Apulia, Italy, in 1603, Giuseppe Desa was—like Richard Church—a sickly boy; and, like Church, he was subject to sudden moods of ecstasy. He was one of those persons who feel dissatisfied with the sheer weight of the flesh that they have to carry around with them, and mortified it with fasting and flagellation. He became a priest at the age of 25. And one day when he was saying mass in his own church of St Gregory of Armenia, he uttered a cry and, in the upright position, flew with his hands outstretched to the cross above the altar. The nuns who were present thought he would catch fire on the candles, but moments later he flew back down into the church and began to dance and sing as he chanted the name of the Virgin. Later, when seeing the pope, he was again seized with ecstasy and rose into the air. And he continued to do so for the remainder of his life—he lived to be 60—witnessed by hundreds of people. He seems to have been a simple, happy soul, who did not resent the envy with which he was regarded by his fellow Franciscan monks, and who rose into the air like a balloon every time he was overwhelmed by sudden joy.
But if we want to understand more about these ‘hidden powers’, it is worth looking more closely at Richard Church’s experience. And the first thing that is important to note is that until he was 7, he was appallingly short-sighted. When this was finally noticed by the school doctor, he was taken along to an optician who tested his eyes. He was amazed when the optician dropped lenses into a frame on his nose, and the small letters on an illuminated card suddenly became clear. But this was nothing to his amazement when he first wore the glasses, and realised that he could suddenly see everything with incredible sharpness and clarity. For the first time he could see the pupils of his mother’s eyes, the hairs on his father’s moustache. When he stepped out onto the pavement, it ‘came up and hit me’, so he had to grab hold of his father:
‘The lamplight! I looked in wonder at the diminishing crystals of gas-flame strung down the hill. Clapham was hung with necklaces of light, and the horses pulling the glittering omnibuses struck the granite road with hooves of iron and ebony. I could see the skeletons inside the flesh and blood of the Saturday-night shoppers. The garments they wore were made of separate threads. In this new world sound as well as sight was changed. It took on hardness and definition, forcing itself upon my hearing, so that I was besieged simultaneously through the eye and through the ear.
‘How willingly I surrendered! I went out to meet this blazing and trumpeting invasion. I trembled with the excitement, and had to cling to mother’s arm to prevent myself being carried away in the flood as the pavements rushed at me, and people loomed up with their teeth like tusks, their lips luscious, their eyes bolting out of their heads, bearing down
on me as they threw out spears of conversation that whizzed loudly past my ears and bewildered my wits.
‘“Is it any different?” asked Jack . . .
‘“It makes things clearer,” I replied, knowing that I had no hope of telling him what was happening to me.’
If you can read this passage with indifference, then you are missing the point. It is about far more than a boy’s first pair of spectacles. To grasp its real significance, ask yourself the following question: was his new vision of the world more or less true than his old one of a few minutes earlier? The answer has to be: truer, for blurred vision is obviously less accurate than clear vision. And the implications of this reply are tremendous. For it means that the rest of us are normally blind to the reality around us.
How can this be? After all, few of us are as short-sighted as Church was, and, in these days of Social Security, no one need be without spectacles. Yet we are, in effect, just as short-sighted as the young Church, for we take the world for granted. We have a kind of robot inside us, who does things for us. You learn to read slowly and painfully, then the robot does it so fast that you are not even aware of ‘reading’ these words: they seem to be speaking to you from the page. The robot is typing this book. He drives my car and sometimes even gives lectures for me. But he also takes over all kinds of other things which I would prefer to do myself. I take my dogs for a walk on the cliffs, but they enjoy it much more than I do because their robot is less efficient. Mine makes me take too much ‘for granted’. He glances at something, says ‘Oh yes, we know all about that . . .’, and prevents me from really seeing it. It is just as if I spent my life wearing a dark pair of sun-glasses.