by Colin Wilson
One of his most impressive pieces of evidence for the hysteria theory is a lengthy account of the famous case of ‘Achille’, described by the psychiatrist Pierre Janet. Achille, a moderately successful businessman, came from a peasant background, and married early. In the winter of 1890, when he was 33, Achille returned from a business trip in a depressed condition, then suddenly went dumb. One day, he sent for his wife and child, embraced them despairingly, then went into a cataleptic state for two days. When he woke up he was suffering from delusions; he seemed to think he was in Hell, and that demons were burning him and cutting him in pieces. The room, he said, was full of imps, and he was possessed by a devil. After a number of suicide attempts, he was sent to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under the care of the famous physician Charcot. The latter placed Janet in charge of the case.
Janet watched with interest as Achille displayed all the signs of demoniacal possession, as described in the Middle Ages: in a deep voice he cursed God, then in a shrill voice protested that the Devil had forced him to do it.
At first all Janet’s efforts to communicate were a failure; Achille refused to listen to him and resisted all attempts to hypnotise him. Janet saw a possible solution when he observed that Achille was extremely ‘absent-minded’—he compares him to someone searching for an umbrella which he holds in his hand. While Achille was raving, Janet quietly inserted a pencil in his hand, then tried ordering him, in a whisper, to make writing movements. The pencil wrote: ‘I won’t.’ ‘Who are you?’ asked Janet, and the pencil wrote: ‘The Devil.’ ‘I shan’t believe you,’ Janet replied, ‘unless you can give me proof. Can you make Achille raise his left arm without knowing it?’ ‘Of course. . .’—and Achille raised his arm. ‘Why are you doing that?’ Janet asked Achille in his normal voice, and Achille looked at his raised arm with astonishment.
The demon went on to demonstrate his powers by making Achille dance, stick out his tongue and kiss a piece of paper. Finally, Janet asked him if he could put Achille into a deep sleep. Moments later, Achille was in a trance. And now Janet was able to question him about the cause of his illness, and quickly learned that Achille had been unfaithful to his wife while away on his business trip, and that deep and intense guilt had caused the depression and other symptoms. Now he was able to induce hallucinations, Janet made Achille believe that his wife was in the room, and had forgiven him for his infidelity. (It is not quite clear from Janet’s account whether the wife actually came to the hospital.) After this, Achille’s psychological problems soon cleared up.
This is certainly a remarkable case. Yet as a refutation of the ‘spirit’ view, it is obviously open to one serious objection. If Kardec is correct, it is obvious that people suffering from nervous traumas or states of intense guilt and misery are more likely to become ‘obsessed’ by spirits than normal healthy persons. Kardec would point out that Achille may have been genuinely ‘obsessed’ by a mischievous spirit, and that as soon as Janet had made him feel that he was forgiven, the spirit was ‘driven out’.
The same view of ‘possession’ was expressed by Carl Wickland, a Los Angeles doctor: in his book Thirty Years Among the Dead, he argues that a great deal of mental illness is caused by a kind of mental invasion by ‘homeless spirits’.
Wickland, born in Leiden (Sweden) in 1861, had emigrated to Chicago, where he gained his medical degree; he became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, and a medical adviser to the Los Angeles branch of the National Psychological Institute. It seems likely that he decided to burn his boats and publish his book because, at 63, he was on the verge of retirement anyway, and ridicule would make no difference.
It all began, he explained, with a patient whom he calls Mrs Bl-, who began to practise automatic writing, and who soon began to have fits of derangement in which she used vile language and claimed she was an actress; she had to be committed to an asylum. Another woman, ‘an artist and lady of refinement’, became convinced that she was a damned soul and knelt in the mud to pray at the top of her voice. Another woman, who owned a millinery shop, posed in her window in her nightclothes, declaring that she was Napoleon, and had to be removed by the police.
Now at this time—in the mid-1890s—the main theory of mental illness was that it could be explained in purely physical terms; many a head physician in a mental home was appointed because he had a working knowledge of brain anatomy. Freud himself was an early convert to this theory (known as organicism), his professor, Dr Theodore Meynert, being one of his chief advocates—he later turned his back on Freud when the latter returned from Paris espousing a new ‘psychological’ explanation of neurosis based on the idea of the unconscious mind. In America, the favourite theory of mental illness was that it was due to poisons in the system due to such causes as infected tonsils or decayed teeth. But Wickland was intrigued by the case of a youth called Frank James who, after a fall from a motor-cycle at the age of ten, changed from an affectionate, obedient boy to a juvenile delinquent who spent many terms in reformatories and jails. Declared hopelessly insane, he succeeded in escaping from the criminal asylum, and during his recapture was hit on the head with a club. On awakening, he had once again reverted to his earlier personality—gentle and good-natured.
This convinced Wickland of the inadequacy of the ‘toxaemia’ theory. And while he was still a medical student, the accident of marrying a woman who proved to be an excellent ‘medium’ soon provided him with evidence of an alternative theory. One day, Wickland was dissecting a leg in the medical school, and, on his return home, was alarmed when his wife Anna seemed to be about to faint. He placed his hand on her shoulder, and was startled when she drew herself up and said threateningly: ‘What do you mean by cutting me?’ After a few questions, it became clear that he was speaking to the spirit of the owner of the leg he had been dissecting. Wickland guided Anna to a chair, and the spirit objected that he had no right to touch him. When Wickland replied that he was touching his wife, it retorted: ‘What are you talking about? I am no woman—I’m a man.’ Eventually, Wickland reasoned it into recognising that it was dead, and that dissecting its old body would do it no harm. When it asked for a chew of tobacco or a pipe, Wickland had to explain that his wife was a non-smoker. (The next day he observed that the teeth of the corpse were heavily stained with tobacco.) More detailed explanation finally convinced the man that he was dead, and he left.
This showed Wickland that a ‘ghost’ may believe that it is still alive—particularly if death came unexpectedly. He also encountered a case that seemed to demonstrate that spirits did not need to manifest themselves through a ‘medium’. When he was alone one day, dissecting a female corpse, he thought he heard a distant voice shout: ‘Don’t murder me!’ A newspaper on the floor made a rustling noise, as if it was being crushed. Some days later, at a seance, a spirit who gave her name as Minnie Morgan claimed that it was she had shouted ‘Don’t murder me!’ and crushed the newspaper. Minnie also had to be convinced that she was no longer alive.
At seances, entities who spoke through his wife later explained to Wickland that such ‘homeless spirits’—those who are unaware that they are dead—are attracted by the warmth of the ‘human aura’—a kind of energy-sphere which is supposed to surround the human body—and, under certain circumstances, may attach themselves to its owner as a kind of mental parasite. In effect, such spirits are in a state of sleep, in which dreams and reality are confused, and—as in sleep—the dreamer is unaware that he is dreaming.
In her introduction to a new edition of Oesterreich’s Possession, the paranormal investigator Anita Gregory has some harsh words to say about Wickland and his Thirty Years Among the Dead, She points out that there is a basic sameness about all his cases—he always has to convince a spirit that it is dead—and his account of how the spirits of Madame Blavatsky and Mary Baker Eddy expressed contrition for their false doctrines is almost laughable. Yet anyone who then turns to Wickland’s book will have to admit that these objec
tions are less important than they sound. For the central issue is of Wickland’s honesty. Unless we decide to take the view that he was a liar and self-deceiver on a practically unimaginable scale—which seems unlikely—then it seems clear that his evidence is in total agreement with Kardec’s views on possession. Even Anita Gregory has to admit that Oesterreich’s rationalism is often crude and unconvincing, and that he deals with subtleties by ignoring them.
Perhaps the most obvious example of Oesterreich’s failure to allow facts to speak for themselves is in his account of one of the most famous of all cases of ‘possession’, that of ‘the Watseka wonder’, a girl called Lurancy Vennum. In July 1877, 13-year-old Lurancy, of Watseka, Illinois, had a fit, after which she became prone to trances. In these trances she became a medium, and a number of disagreeable personalities manifested themselves through her. On February 11, 1878, placed under hypnosis by a local doctor, Lurancy stated that there was a spirit in the room called Mary Roff, and a Mrs Roff who was also present exclaimed: ‘That’s my daughter’. Mary had died at the age of 18, twelve years earlier. Lurancy then stated that Mary was going to be allowed to take over her body for the next three months.
The next day, Lurancy claimed to be Mary Roff. She asked to be taken back to the Roffs’ home, and on the way there recognised their previous home, in which they had lived while she was alive, and which was unknown to Lurancy. She also recognised Mary Roff’s sister, who was standing at the window. And during the next few weeks, ‘Mary’ showed a precise and detailed knowledge of the Roff household and of Mary’s past, recognising old acquaintances and toys and recalling long-forgotten incidents. On May 21, the day she had declared she had to leave, she took a tearful farewell of her family, and on the way home ‘became’ Lurancy again. The case was investigated by Richard Hodgson, one of the most sceptical members of the Society for Psychical Research, who was convinced of its genuineness.
Readers of Hodgson’s account of the ‘Watseka wonder’ will find it very hard to find loopholes; Mary provided such detailed proof of her knowledge of her early years, and of the family background—recognising unhesitatingly anyone Mary had known—that the notion of trickery or delusion becomes untenable; it is perhaps the single most convincing case of ‘possession’ in the history of psychical research. But Oesterreich merely quotes William James’s summary of the case—from Principles of Psychology—making no attempt to analyse it, and passing on quickly to other matters—in spite of the fact that James himself had spoken of ‘the plausibility of the spiritualistic interpretation of the phenomenon’. And Anita Gregory concludes her own introduction by admitting that she is unable to declare that all the people in Oesterreich’s book are frauds, dupes, lunatics and psychopaths, and ends: ‘So I shall conclude . . . that the phenomena described by Oesterreich are very much in need of an explanation.’
Oesterreich’s pièce de résistance is a long account of the famous case of the ‘Devils of Loudun’, which, in 1952, was made the subject of a full-length study by Aldous Huxley. In 1633, Urbain Grandier, the parish priest of the small French town of Loudun, was charged with bewitching the nuns in a local convent and causing them to be possessed by demons, so that they screamed blasphemies and obscenities, and writhed about on the floor displaying their private parts. Grandier had become notorious for his immoralities—he had impregnated two of his penitents and seduced many others—and had made many enemies. Inquisitors claimed to find ‘devil’s marks’ on his body, and in a trial that was a travesty of justice, he was found guilty and sentenced to be burned alive. Even under torture, and later at the stake, Grandier maintained his innocence. His death made no difference, and the nuns continued to be possessed by ‘demons’ for many years after.
Oesterreich, like Aldous Huxley, takes the view that all this could be explained simply in terms of hysteria, (a view I must admit that I shared at the time I wrote The Occult) while another authority, Rossell Hope Robbins, goes even further in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, and attributes the manifestations to outright imposture. But a careful reading of Huxley’s own book makes either of these explanations seem implausible. It is easy to see how sex-starved nuns could deceive themselves into believing that they were possessed by devils—the Mother Superior of the convent, Soeur Jeanne des Anges, admits in her autobiography that she made no real attempt to combat the possession because she enjoyed the sexual stirrings aroused in her by the demons. But it is far more difficult to understand what then happened to the exorcists themselves. Fr. Lactance, who had superintended the torture, became ‘possessed’ and died insane within a month; five years later, Fr. Tranquille died of exhaustion after months of battling against the ‘invaders’ of his psyche, and was amazed to witness his body writhing on the ground and hear himself uttering blasphemies which he was powerless to prevent. Fr. Lucas, another of Grandier’s persecutors, met the same fate. The ‘witch pricker’, Dr Mannouri, also died in delirium. Fr. Jean-Joseph Surin, a genuinely saintly man, who was called to Loudun to try and exorcise the nuns after Grandier’s execution, himself fell victim to the ‘devils’, and became periodically insane for twenty-five years. It is difficult to believe that ordinary hysteria could produce such results. Surin described in a letter how the ‘alien spirit’ was united to his own, ‘constituting a second me, as though I had two souls . . .’ Considering these facts, the sceptical Anita Gregory admits that ‘one is probably not justified in assuming that . . . the Loudun pandemonium [was] necessarily nothing but collective delusion.’ And bearing in mind Kardec’s comment that ‘a spirit does not enter into a body as you enter into a house . . . he assimilates himself to a [person] who has the same defects and the same qualities as himself, the hypothesis that the Loudun ‘pandemonium’ was caused by Wickland’s earth-bound spirits seems, on the whole, more plausible than religious hysteria.
It is difficult to draw a clear dividing line between ‘possession’ and poltergeist manifestations. The most widely held current view, as we have seen, is that they are a form of ‘spontaneous psychokinesis’ (mind over matter) caused by the unconscious mind of an emotionally disturbed adolescent, but this theory fails to explain how the unconscious mind can cause heavy objects to fly through the air—in laboratory experiments, ‘psychics’ have so far failed to move any object larger than a compass needle. According to Kardec’s ‘informants’, poltergeists are earthbound spirits who are, under certain conditions, able to draw energy from the living, and to make use of negative energies ‘exuded’ by the emotionally disturbed and the sexually frustrated.
The Loudun case seems to provide support for this view, Soeur Jeanne’s autobiography makes it clear that her own sexual frustrations alone could have provided a host of ‘entities’ with the necessary energy. And by the time a dozen or so nuns were writhing on the floor and making suggestions that caused even decadent aristocrats to blush, the convent must have been awash with sexual energy. Most cases of possession in nunneries seem to involve the same feverish sexuality. Two decades before the Loudun case, 14-year-old Madeleine de Demandolx de la Palud was seduced by her confessor, Fr. Louis Gaufridi, twenty years her senior; the liaison was broken up, and she was sent to a nunnery at Aix-en-Provence. Two years later, Madeleine began to see devils, and smashed a crucifix. Her hysteria soon spread to the other nuns; Madeleine accused Gaufridi not only of seducing her, but of introducing her to various diabolic practices. Gaufridi was asked to try and exorcise the demons, and, when he failed, was put in prison.
At his trial, Madeleine declared that her allegations were all imaginings, after which she began to move her hips back and forth in a ‘lascivious manner’. The judge chose to disbelieve her disclaimer, and Gaufridi was tortured until he ‘confessed’, then was burned at the stake.
It is important to realise that fornication among the clergy was a commonplace in the 17th century, and that seduction of nuns by their confessors was far from rare. In 1625, an orphan named Madeleine Bavent was seduced by a Franciscan priest, appro
priately called Bonnetemps. In the following year she entered a convent at Louviers run by Fr. Pierre David, who secretly belonged to the Illuminati—a sect who believed that the Holy Spirit could do no harm, and that therefore sex was perfectly acceptable among priests. Fr. David apparently insisted that Madeleine should strip to the waist as he administered communion; other nuns, she later claimed, strolled around naked. She claimed that she and Fr David never engaged in actual intercourse—only mutual masturbation—and that when Fr. David died in 1628, his successor Fr. Mathurin Picard continued to caress her genitals during confession.
It was after Fr. Picard’s death in 1642 (when Madeleine was 35) that the nuns began to manifest the usual signs of possession, writhing on the ground, contorting their bodies, and making howling noises like animals, as they alleged they were being ravished by demons. Fourteen of the 52 nuns exhibited these symptoms, and all put the blame on Madeleine.
Madeleine then told the full story of Fr. David, Fr. Picard, and the latter’s assistant Fr. Boulle. She claimed that Fr. Picard and Fr. Boulle had indulged in various ‘magical’ acts involving communion wafers and menstrual blood, and eventually in ‘sabbats’, in which a Black Mass was recited. The priests had draped their erections with consecrated wafers with a hole cut in the middle and ‘thus arrayed gave themselves to the women present’—Madeleine being favoured five or six times.
Madeleine was accused of being a witch and discharged from the order; the corpse of Fr. Picard was dug up, excommunicated, and tossed on to a refuse heap. This led the priest’s brother to create a scandal, and the result was a trial that ended with Fr. Boulle being tortured and burned alive, together with another priest called Duval. Madeleine, confined in a convent and brutally treated, made several suicide attempts, and finally died at the age of 40. The Louviers nuns were all dispersed to other convents,