Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Where psychometry is concerned, the power of ‘eidetic vision’ is even more important, as Denton recognised. Modern research has revealed that between 8 and 20 per cent of all children may possess eidetic vision—the power to conjure up an image so powerfully that it looks like a film projection. One test involves the use of ‘random dot stereograms’. Two sheets of paper contain apparently random patterns of ten thousand dots, but when these are superimposed, a picture emerges. Many children can look at one pattern, then move their eyes to the other sheet, and see the two patterns combining into a picture. This is obviously a right-brain function—it is the right brain that recognizes patterns and shapes—and again the inference is that we gradually lose it as the left brain becomes more powerful, to ‘cope’ with reality. But if this is correct, then all human beings possess a latent power to ‘photograph’ what they are looking at, and to project the photograph later in all its detail. As we have seen in the cases cited by Denton, this ‘projection’ is a deliberate act of will and imagination. But Hudson’s artist friend was able to project purely imaginary scenes on his canvas. And this, again, would be perfectly natural. If we have the latent power to ‘hold’ mental photographs and keep them in some memory-file, then there is no reason why the imagination should not combine them, or simply invent its own mental photographs.

  The psychologist C.G. Jung also recognized this power, which he called ‘active imagination’, and he believed that anyone could develop it with sufficient effort. Jung made the discovery accidentally. In 1913, after his break with Freud, Jung was experiencing severe mental problems that made him fear insanity. Sitting at his desk one day, he says, ‘I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.’ There followed a waking dream in which Jung found himself in an underground cave, guarded by a mummified dwarf, and saw the body of a blond youth with a wound in his head float past on a stream.

  In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung goes on to describe his deliberate development of techniques to enter this realm of ‘waking dreams’:

  ‘In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom. The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand feet; the next time I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space. First came the image of a crater, and I had a feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard, and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people, and listened attentively to what they told me . . .’

  Here we can see clearly that Jung had entered a hypnagogic realm in which he remained wide-awake whilst at the same time encountering the strange creations of that ‘other self inside us. It is, admittedly, difficult for most of us to accept the notion of such an ability; but we should bear in mind that a dog would find it quite impossible to conceive the mental state of a child reading a book, with half his consciousness in the ‘real world’ and the other half in a world of fantasy. Jung’s ‘active imagination’ is only a single step beyond this ability that every educated person possesses.

  And now at last we are in a position to understand those detailed descriptions of ‘other worlds’ that we find in Swedenborg and Denton. A good psychometer possesses the power to ‘read’ objects in the way that a bloodhound can recognize scents. When this reading becomes second nature, it is accompanied by images—images that are sometimes so detailed and real that they amount to eidetic visions. When Mrs Denton described Cicero’s villa, or when Sherman Denton described the theatre in ancient Pompeii, they were using active imagination as a tool to amplify their readings. But when they tried to ‘psychometrize’ Mars or Jupiter, there were no psychometric impressions to amplify, and the subjective mind—which, according to Van Dusen, is an incorrigible performer that hates to admit defeat—produced elaborate waking dreams.

  This tendency of the unconscious to spin its own webs of fantasy certainly complicates the question of psychometry. But, unlike Swedenborg and Denton, we are at least aware of the problem; and this is already an important step toward solving it.

  And what of those pioneers of the paranormal, Joseph Rodes Buchanan and William Denton? Sadly, it must be recorded that neither of them achieved the place in intellectual history that they undoubtedly deserve. Denton, the younger of the two, died in 1883, at the age of sixty, and was thereafter virtually forgotten. Buchanan fared slightly better. His Manual of Psychometry came out in 1885, and gained him new readers and followers. But by that time, his original ‘nerve aura’ theory of psychometry had been expanded to a point that most serious investigators found totally unacceptable.

  The experiment that placed him beyond the limits of science was suggested by his interest in the new art of photography (for we are now retracing our steps to the 1850s). He tried handing photographs—suitably covered—to the psychometer, to see what impressions they produced. And with good psychometers like his wife he received convincing and accurate descriptions of the sitter. But this experiment ought not to have worked, since a photograph is mechanically produced, and therefore—unless its subject happened to have held it in his hands—should carry no personal ‘vibrations’. Yet it did work. Buchanan concluded that ‘there was not, in such cases, any emanation from the person described, and the picture was merely the presentation of an idea to be grasped by the intuitive perception which is independent of vision’. [My italics].

  Clearly, this innocent-sounding statement either conceals a total breakdown of logic, or represents a revolutionary new theory of the nature of psychometry. According to Buchanan, it was a new theory. ‘Hence’, he declares, ‘it became apparent that the object for psychometry was in such cases merely an index [he means an indication] leading the mind to the object represented, and need not be a picture, a relic, or anything associated in any way with the person or thing to be explored.’

  If this ‘intuitive perception which is independent of vision’ could work on a photograph, it ought to work just as well on a mere name. Buchanan tried it ‘I wrote the name of a friend and placed it in the hands of a good psychometer, who had no difficulty, notwithstanding her doubts of so novel a proceeding . . . in giving as good a description of Dr N. as if he had made the description from an autograph.’

  Buchanan was carried away by wild enthusiasm. ‘Psychometry’, he declared, ‘is the earthly IRRADIATION OF OMNISCIENCE and it will be known hereafter to penetrate all things.’ And he went on to ask his sensitives to psychometrize the names of all kinds of famous people: Homer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jesus, Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha and St Paul. A later volume called Primitive Christianity even contains a re-edited version of the Gospel of St John.

  And if a psychometrist can gather information from the past, then why not from the future? By 1884, the whole world was talking about the Moslem revolt in the Sudan, led by a religious fanatic called the Mahdi. General Gordon had been sent to try to subdue him. Buchanan wrote the name ‘Mahdi’ on a sheet of paper, and asked a number of his students to try their powers on it. They produced impressions of a tropical country, a bloody war, men in Arab dress, and a leader of deep religious convictions—all of which might have been expected if they were unconsciously reading Buchanan’s mind. What is rather more surprising is that many of their predictions for the future were accurate. Buchanan admired the Mahdi and disliked the British, so any predictions based on his subconscious hopes would involve victory for the Mahdi and defeat for the British. In fact, most of his students predicted that the Mahdi would ultimately be unsuccessful. When Buchanan asked ‘Is he about to capture a city?’ (meaning Khartoum) the reply was: ‘He is preparing for an attack, but will be repulsed.’ In fact, the Mahdi did attack Khartoum, and was repulsed. Later, Buchanan again a
sked his wife about the war, and she predicted another attack with terrible bloodshed; within two days, the Mahdi had stormed Khartoum and murdered all the defenders, including Gordon. She went on to prophesy that the war would not continue in the summer, and that the British would withdraw their troops; both things happened as she had said. The prediction that ‘the war will be disastrous’ for the Mahdi was also fulfilled; success made him fat and lazy; after the fall of Khartoum he withdrew into his harem for a prolonged debauch and died a few months later.

  None of this surprised Buchanan; if, after all, psychometry was the ‘irradiation of omniscience’, the future should present no more problems than the past. Buchanan pointed out, reasonably, that there have been many well-authenticated cases of precognition—he devotes a whole appendix of his Manual to the remarkable story of the French author Jacques Cazotte who, at a dinner party just before the French Revolution, accurately foretold the fate of almost everyone sitting at the table: Chamfort would open his veins with a razor, Condorcet would take poison to avoid the guillotine, and a notorious atheist named La Harpe would become a Christian. La Harpe was so derisive that he went home and wrote it all down. But in due course, it all happened exactly as Cazotte had said—even to La Harpe becoming a monk. I shall discuss this more fully in Chapter 13.

  As far as contemporary science was concerned, all this was enough to place Buchanan beyond the pale. Even the American Society for Psychical Research—formed in the same year that the Manual was published—found nothing of interest in Buchanan’s latest theories. Yet it is worth remarking, in passing, that some of Buchanan’s own prophecies were surprisingly accurate. In 1859, he published in the Louisville Journal a prediction that America would experience six years of calamity; the Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865. In 1885, he predicted a ‘period of calamity thirty years hence’—twenty-nine years before the Great War. He also remarked that there would probably be an ‘elemental convulsion’ on the Pacific side of America, and that ‘I would prefer not to reside in San Francisco at that time’. At the time Buchanan was writing, the only Californian earthquake in which there had been fatalities (40 dead) had occurred in 1868, and it involved six major cities. Buchanan had been dead six years when the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed 28,000 houses and killed 700 people.

  He also had a prophecy concerning himself: that in the coming century he would be remembered as the ‘herald of the coming illumination’, and that a statue would be erected to him. This prophecy has not so far been fulfilled; but there is still time.

  1. For a longer account of both cases see chapters 4 and 7.

  1. Dream and Reality, Chapter 7.

  1. See Antisocial or Criminal Acts and Hypnosis by Paul J. Reiter; also my own Written in Blood (1990).

  4

  The Coming of the Spirits

  THE ECLIPSE OF Buchanan, Denton and Hudson cannot be blamed entirely on Sigmund Freud. Equally decisive was the rise of the movement called Spiritualism, which swept across Europe and America in the 1850s, even reaching the most far-flung outposts of the Russian empire. This had its starting point in a series of extraordinary events that occurred in the home of the Fox family, in Hydesville, New York, which we shall examine in a moment. But long before anyone outside New York had heard of the Fox family, a book about ‘spirits’ was creating a sensation on the other side of the Atlantic. It was called The Night Side of Nature, and its authoress was an Edinburgh housewife named Catherine Crowe, who had already achieved a modest success with novels like Susan Hopley and Lily Dawson. The Night Side of Nature—subtitled ‘Ghosts and Ghost Seers’—made her a celebrity, and went on to become one of the most influential books of the 19th century.

  Regrettably, Mrs Crowe did not enjoy her success for long. In 1859, she produced a treatise called ‘Spiritualism and the Age We Live In’—which, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, evinced ‘a morbid and despondent turn of mind’, and soon after this she went insane—a fate her contemporaries must have felt she had invited by her interest in such macabre subjects. She recovered, but wrote little between then and her death in 1876. The Night Side of Nature remained as popular as ever, and was still on sale on railway bookstalls (price two shillings) at the turn of the century.

  The author of the piece in the Dictionary of National Biography was clearly not a believer in ghosts and ghost seers; for while he admits that the book is ‘one of the best collections of supernatural stories in our language’, he then attacks Mrs Crowe for being ‘extremely credulous and uncritical’. The reproach is unfair; the book would not have become so influential if it had been merely a collection of ghost stories. What the Victorians liked about it was its air of sturdy commonsense, and its attempts to treat the phenomena with detachment. It would be more than thirty years before scientific investigators approached the supernatural in a spirit of systematic research. But Mrs Crowe did her best, citing letters and documents and offering names of witnesses and dates.

  The book that inspired The Night Side of Nature was another nineteenth-century bestseller called The Seeress of Prevorst. It was written by Dr Justinus A.C. Kerner, a rich and eccentric doctor who was also a well-known poet and song-writer. In 1826, the 40-year-old Kerner was practising in Weinsberg, near Heilbronn, when he was consulted by the relatives of a woman called Friederike Hauffe, who was dying of a wasting disease. She had lost all her teeth and looked like a walking skeleton.

  It seemed that marriage was responsible for her sad condition. Ever since childhood she had fallen into trances, seen visions, and conversed with invisible spirits. She could also accurately predict the future. When she was nineteen, she had married a cousin, and gone into depression; at twenty, her first child was born, and she began to develop hysterical symptoms. Every evening, she fell into a trance in which she saw spirits of the dead.

  Kerner was at first inclined to be sceptical about her visions and spirits—he put them down to hysteria. Yet he found Friederike Hauffe a fascinating case for study. She claimed to be able to see into the human body, and certainly had a remarkably precise knowledge of the nervous system. She could read with her stomach—Kerner tested her by making her lie down with her eyes closed, and laid documents on her bare midriff; she read them perfectly. She could make geometrical drawings at great speed, even in the dark, and could draw perfect circles that looked as if they had been drawn by compasses. She claimed that her spirit often left her body and hovered above it.

  Kerner tried ordinary medicines on her, but they had no effect. Friederike told him that if he placed her in a ‘magnetic trance’ the spirits would instruct him on how to treat her, but he was reluctant to accept this advice. Eventually, he decided that he might as well try the effects of mesmerism.

  Friederike reacted well to ‘magnetism’, passing easily into a trance. But Kerner remained sceptical about the things she said in this condition. Then, one day, a remarkable experience changed his mind. Friederike declared that she was being haunted by an unpleasant man with a squint. From her description, Kerner recognised him as a man who had died a few years earlier. It seemed, according to Friederike, that the man was suffering from a guilty conscience. He had been involved in embezzlement and, after his death, another man had been blamed. Now he wanted to clear the man’s name, for the sake of his widow. This could be done by means of a certain document, which would be found in a chest. The spirit ‘showed’ Friederike the room where the document was to be found, and a man who was working there. Her description was so good that Kerner was able to identify him as a certain Judge Heyd. In her ‘vision’, Friederike had seen Judge Heyd sitting in a certain place in this room, and the chest containing the document on the table. The document was apparently not in its proper numerical order, which is why it had not been found.

  When Kerner told him about his patient’s vision, Judge Heyd was astounded; he had been sitting in the position described on that particular day (Christmas Day), and the chest, contrary to regulations, had been left open on
the table. When they searched, the document turned up where Friederike had said it would. The widow of the man who had been wrongly accused was able to obtain redress.

  From now on, Kerner believed in Friederike’s supernatural powers, and took whatever she said seriously. She told him that we are surrounded by spirits all the time, and that she was able to see them. These spirits often try to attract our attention in various ways: knocking, movement of objects, throwing of sand. And by way of convincing him, Friederike persuaded one of the spirits to make rapping noises, to make gravel and ash fall from the air, and to make a stool float up into the air. Kerner watched with amazement as the stool rose gently, then floated down again.

  Friederike provided him with further proof of the accuracy of her visions when she succeeded in putting an end to a haunting. Kerner heard about a house where the ghost of an old man was frightening the inhabitants. He brought one of them, a woman, along to see Friederike; the seeress went into a trance and explained that the ghost was that of a man called Bellon, who was an ‘earth-bound spirit’ as a result of defrauding two orphans. Kerner made enquiries, but no one had ever heard of a man called Bellon. But since the ghost claimed that he had been Burgomeister, it seemed probable that some record existed. He claimed he had been Burgomeister in the year 1700, and had died at the age of 79 Armed with this information, Kerner asked the present mayor to check the legal documents; they soon found that in the year 1700, a man called Bellon had been Burgomeister and director of the local orphanage. He had died in 1740 at the age of 79. After ‘confessing’, the spirit took its departure.

  While Friederike was in Kerner’s house, there were constant poltergeist phenomena: knocks and raps, noises like the rattling of chains, gravel thrown through the window, and a knitting needle that flew through the air and landed in a glass of water. When Friederike was visited by a spirit one night her sister heard her say: ‘Open it yourself, then saw a book on the table open itself. A poltergeist tugged her boots off her feet as she lay on the bed, and threw a lampshade across the room. In the Kerners’ bedroom, a table was thrown across the room. The poltergeist threw a stool at a maidservant who went into Friederike’s room while she lay asleep. It extinguished a night-light and made a candle glow.