Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  This was an excellent beginning. Denton admitted that, as far as his memory served him, it was a very accurate description. ‘This piece of rock had taken in the pictures of the turbid Missouri that swept past it, the hill that hung over it, and the country in general around it, and, to the eye of the psychometer, they became apparently as plainly visible as to a spectator on the spot’.

  His wife, Elizabeth Denton, also proved to be a good psychometer. When he handed her a piece of quartz from Panama, she received an impression of a huge insect, with antennae nearly a foot long, resting its head against a quartz rock, and could see a snake coiled in the wiry grass. She remarked that the country seemed much warmer than North America, with tropical vegetation.

  These experiments were encouraging. But the result of the next was spectacular. He handed his sister a fragment of volcanic lava from Kilauea, on Hawaii, wrapped in paper. Mrs Cridge had an impression of an ocean, with ships sailing on it, and could tell that it was an island. Then she saw ‘an ocean of fire pouring over a precipice and boiling as it pours. I see it flow into the ocean, and the water boils intensely’. The vision was so real that it shattered her nerves, and the feeling of fear remained for the next hour. Denton knew that the piece of lava had, in fact, been ejected in the eruption of 1840, so the vision of ships was probably accurate.

  At this point, Denton took a precaution which reveals that he was a genuine scientist, determined to rule out all possibility of auto-suggestion. He tried wrapping several specimens in separate sheets of paper, then mixing them up, so he had no idea which was which. Then he handed his wife one of them. She had a vision of a volcano, with molten lava flowing down its side. ‘The specimen must be lava’, said Mrs Denton, and she was right.

  Denton’s precaution seems to us merely common sense. But we have to bear in mind that, in 1853, telepathy was virtually unknown. The word itself was not even invented until 1882 (by F.W.H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research). Before that, most psychic faculties were bundled vaguely together under the general heading of ‘clairvoyance’, which included the ability to see ghosts, glimpse what was happening elsewhere, and foretell the future. Once the Society for Psychical Research began to investigate telepathy, it became clear that it is probably the commonest of psychic faculties. (Most married couples, for example, have had experiences of starting to say the same thing at the same time.) Professor Gilbert Murray, a determined rationalist, was so good at it that he treated it as a party game, leaving the room while the company thought up a subject from life or literature, then coming back in and telling them what they had decided upon. (‘Jane Eyre at school standing on a stool and being called a liar by Mr Brocklehurst . . . ‘) By 1949, telepathy was so widely accepted, even by scientists, that Sir Alister Hardy could say, in his presidential address to the zoological section of the British Association: ‘I believe that no one who examines the evidence with an unbiased mind can reject it’—a statement that would have brought catcalls half a century earlier.

  When we consider many of Buchanan’s experiments, we often feel that the results could be explained by telepathy—particularly when the psychometer is his own wife. With Denton, this is ruled out from the early experiments, since he usually took the precaution of making sure that he himself had no idea what was wrapped in the paper.

  Denton was understandably elated. ‘From the first dawn of light upon this infant globe, when round its cradle the steamy curtains hung, to this moment, Nature has been busy photographing every moment’. It was—and is—a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. We now know that matter and energy are the same thing; matter is frozen energy. Energy from space—light, heat, cosmic rays—falls upon us in a continuous cosmic hail, knocking electrons from the surface of everything it strikes. Light falling on a sheet of metal ‘evaporates’ electrons as sunlight evaporates a sheet of water, producing the ‘photo-electric effect’, an electric current. So there can be no doubt that everything that happens in daylight is ‘photographed’ by the surrounding objects. But the ‘film’ is double- and treble- and multiple-exposed, so that even if it could be developed, it would be useless. In a science fiction novel, Before the Dawn (1934), the mathematician E. T. Bell invented a ‘light decoder’ that could sort out the various exposures and then ‘play back’ the resulting record of the ages like a film projector; since then, the invention of the computer has made the notion rather more plausible, since sorting out the exposures would be largely a matter of computer analysis. But the human brain is thousands of times more complex than any computer; so the assumption of Buchanan and Denton—that the mind has its own inbuilt decoder—is easier to accept today than it was in 1860.

  Denton went to considerable lengths to rule out self-deception. For example, he would try the same specimen on the psychometer more than once, with an interval of weeks in-between, to see whether it produced the same impressions. From a fragment of bone obtained from a piece of limestone, Elizabeth Denton’s first impression was:

  ‘. . . a long, smooth beach . . . On that beach are quadrupeds of some kind. One is large, heavy, thick-skinned, dark coloured and thick necked; the flesh is not fibrous, but soft. Its head is broad, and horns rise up from its nose. I see another with a long neck and a head nearly as large as a sheep’s, but in appearance like that of a snake, though it is a quadruped.’

  This sounds like a plesiosaur, the species to which the fabled Loch Ness monster is supposed to belong. She was impressed by rocks covered with bright green moss.

  Denton tried the same specimen on her a month later, making sure she had no idea of what it was (although this time, he took no precaution against telepathy.) Again she saw water, with water weeds that looked like moss; but this time she saw birdlike creatures with membranous wings in the shallow water. We know that pterodactyls fed on fish, so it seems conceivable they spent part of their time in the water, like seagulls.

  On other occasions, Denton himself had no idea of what the psychometrist was examining; he would cover the table-top with various minerals and fossils, and the psychometrist would pick up one of them with closed eyes. When she described in detail a scene under the sea, the specimen proved to be a piece of Silurian coral. A tiny fragment of a mastodon’s tooth, so small that it could not be recognized, immediately produced an impression of ‘a perfect monster with heavy legs, unwieldy head, and very large body’. Various fragments of limestone produced magnificent and detailed descriptions of prehistoric landscapes. A small fragment of chamois horn produced a fine description of the Alps. A fossil from Cuba brought a description of a tropical island with some accurate geographical details. A piece of Indian pottery brought an immediate image of Red Indians. Fragments of meteorites—tried on several psychometrists—always brought visions of empty space, sometimes of the earth seen from a great height. A pebble from a glacier produced an immediate impression of being frozen in a great depth of ice. A fragment of rock from Table Rock, Niagara, brought an impression of looking down from a mountain into a ‘deep hole’ with something boiling up from it—the psychometrist thought it was a hot spring with steam, although she could hear the noise of a torrent, and see the Niagara River. Later in the experiment she recognized that ‘the water makes that smoke; it looks like a rain-cloud or mist’. A fragment of stalactite brought a picture of ‘pieces of rock hanging down; they look like icicles.’

  When Denton tried his wife with a piece of hornstone brought from the Mount of Olives, the result was a description of a dry land with low rocky hills, ‘so poor . . . they could not raise enough to eat’, and horses, sheep and goats. She then went on to describe a large church, and a city with a wall and iron gates. Finally, by inference, she guessed she was looking at Jerusalem.

  On a later occasion, Denton took the same fragment out of a box of mixed specimens without knowing what it was. Again, there followed a description of a walled city and a barren landscape, with the comment: ‘I think the Bible might have been written here’. It was only whe
n she had finished that Denton looked more closely at the rock and identified it as the hornstone he had used previously.

  As the psychics became more skilled, they began to be able to distinguish different periods in the history of the specimens. One of these cases is among the most impressive Denton recorded. He handed his sister a fragment of mosaic pavement that had been dug up in 1760 and brought to England. It came from the villa of the Roman orator Cicero. Denton was hoping for a description of Cicero—or at least, of some ancient Romans. Instead, Mrs Cridge began by describing a prehistoric forest with a beast like a mastodon. Denton asked her to come forward to more modern times. Now she saw a country house standing in its own grounds, and an old man in knee-breeches and a swallow-tailed coat. This sounds like the house to which the fragment had been brought in 1760.

  Denton decided to try it on his wife. She immediately sensed that her sister-in-law had already psychometrised it. Then she described a garden with a cascade which she felt to be landscaped (’there is human influence about this’). She went on to describe a sick-room scene in the house. All this was rather disappointing.

  Some days later, Denton decided to try her again. This time she immediately saw a distinctly Roman scene, with a large building with pillars and steps leading up to it. In a room with uncomfortable furniture (‘if furniture it can be called’) the walls were hung with crimson velvet. She saw lines of helmeted soldiers, then a ‘fleshy man with a broad face and blue eyes’. He wore a ‘dress like a gown’ (presumably a toga). ‘He is majestic, yet has a good deal of geniality about him too. He regards himself as superior, and withdraws from others . . . It seems to me that he has something to do with those troops . . .’

  Cicero had been a successful military commander at one point in his career; but he was tall and thin. Denton concluded that the man might have been Cicero, and ended his notes on the experiment ‘. . . at all events, we have a description in harmony with the time and people of the days of Cicero’.

  By the time he came to republish the book—with an additional two volumes—in 1888, he had made an important discovery. The previous owner of Cicero’s house had been the dictator Sulla, and his wife’s description was altogether closer to what we know of Sulla (who died in 78 BC). He was one of the few Roman dictators who succeeded in dying in his bed. While some of his measures were ruthless and unpopular, he was known as a convivial man who was fond of his friends. His soldiers called him ‘lucky Sulla’. Mrs Denton had apparently focused on Sulla rather than Cicero—an indication (like Mrs Cridge’s 18th-century garden) that Denton’s expectations had little or no influence on the psychometers. (In fact, most modern paragnosts would say that if they want to receive telepathic impressions, then they have to focus on the person whose mind they want to read; if they want psychometric impressions, they concentrate on the object.)

  When Denton handed his wife a fragment of the Porcelain Tower, near Peking, he knew nothing whatever about it, except that it came from a place called the Porcelain Tower in China. His wife described a place like a temple, with massive walls and large urns; she saw a bell-shaped roof and a spire. After writing down her description, Denton checked in the Iconographic Encyclopedia to find out what the Porcelain Tower was used for (for all he knew, it was simply a monument like the leaning tower of Pisa). He discovered that it was a temple, with walls twelve feet thick.

  If we can make the assumption that Denton’s own knowledge of the objects had no telepathic influence on the psychometrist, then the experiments he describes in the first volume of The Soul of Things are stunningly impressive. Again and again they were able to pin down the place from which the object came. A piece of a limestone slab from Nineveh brought an impression of a vast temple; a Greek coin (kept unseen) brought a detailed description of the mint; a piece of curtain from the House of Representatives brought a large council chamber, and an impression of some members talking glibly and superficially; a piece of sandstone from Melrose Abbey in Scotland brought a description of an abbey with arched doorways, Gothic windows and an aisle. Three months later, Mrs Denton was handed the fragment a second time—with no knowledge that she had handled it before. Again she saw arches and a ‘place of worship’, but this time with some conference going on there. ‘These people are ignorant and bigoted’. A check with an encyclopedia revealed that Melrose Abbey was ‘usually involved in the rancorous events of border feud and international war’. (‘Ignorant and bigoted’ is an admirable description of the Scottish religious temperament of earlier centuries.) A piece of mosaic from a Roman bath brought a detailed description of a Roman bath, with an atmosphere of ‘gaiety and voluptuousness’.

  A piece of mosaic from Pompeii brought an interesting description of an ancient town with narrow streets, and a populace in the grip of war fever; Denton had hoped for some mention of the destruction of Pompeii. But a piece of volcanic rock from Pompeii brought far more satisfying results. It was the size of a small bean, and the psychometer was not allowed to see it. (Denton does not explain how he did this, but presumably it was wrapped in paper or cloth.) Mrs Denton saw coloured figures on a wall—frescoes—and observed that the building overlooked the sea. Out of the window, she could look towards the mountain-top, and see smoke and cinders rising up in a column. The black cloud of dust was spreading across the countryside. From a situation higher up the mountain she was able to observe the eruption. ‘I feel the influence of human terror that I cannot describe.’ The land below finally became a desert of cinders. Watching crowds fleeing from Pompeii (in fact, most of the population escaped before the final catastrophe) she is surprised that it resembles a modern town more than she had expected.

  One interesting observation was that the volcano had also vomited water. In fact, Pompeii was engulfed by a kind of mud, not by molten lava. Bodies found encased in the hardened material were unscorched. A description of the eruption by Pliny the Younger describes a tree-like column of smoke rising from the volcano, then spreading out like branches—or a mushroom-cloud—which then descended and covered the town. Elizabeth Denton’s description was startlingly close.

  Almost a decade later, Denton returned to the subject of Pompeii. By now, his son Sherman was in his mid-teens; he had been practising psychometry since he was a child, and was in some ways more sensitive than his mother. The tests Denton conducted occupy more than fifty pages of his second volume, and they provide a remarkably rich and complex picture of life in Pompeii.

  Sherman’s first session—with a piece of plaster from the ‘House of Sallust’—immediately brought one remarkable ‘hit’. Over a doorway, Sherman ‘saw’ a painting of two winged children drawing a cart with another winged child riding in it. Denton later discovered an engraving of the painting in a book on Pompeii (which, he insists, neither he nor Sherman saw before the test), and he reproduces it in his text.

  When Sherman spoke of wide streets, Denton was dubious; most streets in Pompeii were hardly six feet across. But he later discovered that the House of Sallust was not in the residential section, but on a square, in an area with wide streets. Sherman described a Pompeian boat with a prow like a swan’s head and neck. Denton found engravings from nearby Herculaneum (also engulfed in the eruption) of the cheniscus, a birdlike head and neck attached to the prow of Roman vessels.

  Sherman also comments: ‘The labouring people seem to hate the rich. Where there is a number of them together, the rich pass them quickly, and seem to regard them as a man would a snake.’ Denton makes no attempt to verify this statement. But from a modern book, Pompeii and Herculaneum (1960) by Marcel Brion, we learn that the walls of Pompeii contained such graffiti as ‘This city is too rich’ and ‘I propose a share-out of the public wealth among the inhabitants’. The attitude of the rich must have added fuel to this feeling of social injustice; in the hall of the House of Vedius Siricus there was an inscription, Salve Lucrum—‘Hail, Profit!’ It also, comments Brion, meant ‘Welcome to money’, addressed as a welcome to other moneyed people who
came to the house. The Pompeians, it becomes clear, took money-making very seriously indeed. In her earlier examination of a fragment from Pompeii, Mrs Denton had commented on the difference she sensed between the Pompeians and the ancient Egyptians: that for the Egyptians, religion was inherent in their way of life, while for the Pompeians, it was largely a matter of forms and observances. But the wealthy had statues of Mercury in their houses to bring luck to their business and ward off evil spirits that might harm it. ‘Hail, profit!’

  Another of Sherman’s comments was that women seemed to play a prominent part in the life of Pompeii; Brion remarks that in Pompeii the women took a hand in business; even a rich woman advertised that she had shops to let.

  Sherman’s description of a theatrical performance makes it sound more like a circus with clowns and acrobats, and makes no mention of the kind of things a modern reader would expect—comedies by Plautus, Statius and Terence, Greek tragedies and so on. Denton remarks that his son’s description of acrobats and comics sounds very modern. But Marcel Brion comments that the favourite form of dramatic entertainment at this time was the atellanae, popular farces that took their name from their town of origin, Atella; originally intended to relax the audience after performance of tragedies, they became so popular that they were performed on their own. Brion says of these performances: ‘They might be compared to music-hall numbers of a rather low level, interspersed with dancing, clowning, obscenities, feats of skill and athletic exhibitions, the whole ending with a procession of nude girls.’ Apart from the nude girls (which Denton would no doubt have censored out) this is a fairly accurate summary of Sherman Denton’s lengthy description of a theatrical performance in Pompeii.

  The descriptions of Pompeii are certainly the highlight of Denton’s second volume; but there are other impressive things. By this time, Denton had become aware of the possibility of mind-reading, although he was inclined to discount it simply because he had noticed that his own expectations failed to influence the ‘visions’ of the psychometrist. But he devised one interesting experiment to show that the visions could be just as accurate when all possibility of mind-reading had been excluded. He had made the interesting discovery that the psychometer could look at a map, then close his eyes and experience a sensation of flying through the air until he came to the place he had seen. This faculty is known as ‘travelling clairvoyance’, and has been the subject of a great deal of modern research (for example, at Stanford University in the mid-1970s where, under laboratory conditions, the psychic Ingo Swann was able to demonstrate his ability to travel mentally to other places and describe accurately what was happening there). They chose at random the island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden, and Mrs Denton was first asked to describe it. She stated that it was a rocky island, ‘almost a rock in the sea’, with one coast high and mountainous and the other—the inhabited coast—low. There seemed to be two types of people. Those inland, the natives, were poor, and ‘there seems to be a wandering disposition about them’. Near the coast the people were ‘yellowish’ and engaged more in business. All this proved (from an encyclopedia article on Socotra) to be remarkably accurate. The geographical description is precise. The population consisted of two types—the original inhabitants, Bedouins, who lived inland and who were nomadic, and Arab traders and agriculturalists who lived near the coast.