Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  All these prophecies proved to be accurate. De la Harpe himself became a monk, and his account of the evening was found after his death in 1803. A scholar named Walter Borman went into the whole matter in the early 20th century and found abundant evidence for Cazotte’s prophecy in journals and letters of the time. (Harpe’s own ‘account’ could, of course, have been a forgery; it was published as part of a new edition of Le Diable Amoureux in 1871, edited by Gerard de Nerval.) Moreover, the Baroness d’Oberkirch described in her autobiography (1852) how a group of people in her salon discussed Cazotte’s prophecy before it was fulfilled, and how a medium who had been brought along by the Marquis de Puységur (the discoverer of hypnotism) had then made some even more astonishing prophecies about people who were present, all of which proved accurate. Oddly enough, Cazotte failed to foretell his own death on the guillotine in 1792; but it is generally accepted that ‘prophets’ are unable to foretell their own future.

  The whole subject of precognition raises a fundamental question: of whether, in some sense, the future has already taken place—in other words, whether our lives are totally predetermined. In a book called Beyond the Occult, I suggested that the answer to that question is: probably yes.

  ‘As I now look out of the window I can see the wind blowing washing on the line and also swaying the syringa bush. To me, the next movement of the bush or the clothes seems purely a matter of chance; in fact, they are just as predetermined as the movements of the stars—as the weathermen could tell you. What is true is that human beings introduce an element of genuine chance into the picture; my wife may decide to water the garden instead of hanging out the washing. But the bushes, although alive, can introduce little chance into the picture. Moreover, even free will can be described in terms of statistics. The sociologist Durkheim was surprised to discover that it is possible to predict the suicide rate with considerable precision. This seems to imply that, with sufficiently detailed knowledge, we could predict exactly who will kill himself next year.’

  The mathematician Laplace took a similar view. He wrote a classic book on the movements of the heavenly bodies, and remarked that if a human being had sufficient knowledge of the present state of every particle of matter in the universe, he could go on to predict the whole future of the universe.

  Understandably, we find such a notion disturbing, for it seems to suggest that we are merely cogs in a gigantic machine. I go on to suggest that this negative attitude is absurd, because we accept spatial ‘predetermination’ every day without concern—on the contrary, I would be very worried if I didn’t know whether the next bus would take me to Piccadilly or Pontefract. What is more, I realise that spatial predetermination makes no difference to my free will; I can choose whether to go north, south, east or west.

  Yet there is a paradox in all this. In Man and Time, J. B. Priestley quotes a case from Dr Louisa Rhine. A young mother had a dream in which she was camping with some friends on the bank of a creek. She took her baby with her to the edge of the water, intending to wash some clothes. Then she remembered that she had left the soap in the tent, and went back to fetch it. When she returned, the baby was lying face down in the creek, and when she pulled him out, she discovered he was dead.

  In fact, that summer she went camping with some friends, and they set up their tents on the bank of a creek. She was just about to do some washing when she remembered that she had forgotten the soap. At that point she remembered her dream. So instead of leaving the baby behind, she tucked him under her arm and took him back with her to the tent.

  If we assume that her dream was a genuine premonition, then it saved her from disaster, and changed her future.

  Brian Inglis quotes another interesting example in his book The Power of Dreams. A girl woke up in bed one morning, and, before she opened her eyes, had a strong impression that she was in the bed of a male colleague. He was not a man in whom she had taken any particular interest, and, in fact, he had a girlfriend and she was in love with someone else. When she opened her eyes, the feeling vanished.

  That evening, at some official university function, she and the male colleague got bored, and slipped out to a nearby pub. Eventually they ended up in a ‘necking situation’ in a car, and he pressed her to return home with him. She was about to agree when she recollected her odd ‘dream’ of that morning, and changed her mind. It struck her later that she might have averted disaster: in those days of inadequate contraception, she might have ended up pregnant, faced with a shotgun wedding or single parentage and the loss of her job. She concluded that the ‘dream’ had been intended as a warning.

  Many other stories could be cited to make the same point: that premonitions can change the future. One man (cited in Arthur Osborn’s The Future is Now) had a premonition that a car would come round a corner on the wrong side of the road; in fact, as he approached the corner later in the day he recalled his premonition and pulled over to the other side of the road. Seconds later, the car came round the corner at high speed.

  The conclusion would seem to be that the future is not predetermined as far as human beings are concerned—at least, not rigidly predetermined. We can affect it with our decisions.

  At the time I was writing Beyond the Occult I was unaware of the discoveries of ‘Chaos Theory’, developed by scientists and mathematicians like Benoit Mandelbrot, Mitchell Feigenbaum, Kenneth Wilson and Edward Lorenz. Chaos theory flatly contradicts Laplace. Edward Lorenz was responsible for the original discovery in 1961, after devising a computer programme that would simulate the weather for some months ahead. In re-running a part of the programme, he decided to save space by cutting down some decimals from six figures to three, assuming that the difference of one part in a thousand was unimportant. In fact, this tiny difference caused an increasing change in the weather pattern of the future. He summarised his discovery by saying that an event as small as a butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia could alter the long-term weather pattern. This means, in practice, that no matter how sophisticated our computers, the weather pattern cannot be accurately forecast for more than a day or so ahead. Beyond that, it begins to diverge more and more widely from the forecast.

  Benoit Mandelbrot cast this discovery in mathematical form (to which he gave the name of ‘fractals’.) He began by considering the question of how long is a coastline. It sounds simple enough—you merely have to trace the outline of a map with a small measuring device involving a wheel. But a map is a simplification of reality. A larger, more accurate map would give a larger figure, since it would trace all kinds of small details not included in the smaller map. In fact, every small part of the coastline would have its own extra details, and these details in turn would have their own details and so on until you had reduced the coastline to the atomic scale, and it would be impossible to get more detailed,

  But if a rough coastline is generated by a computer, this ‘atomic’ limit is never reached. Imagine a giant magnifying glass, capable of infinite magnification, getting closer and closer to a coastline generated by a computer programme. The coastline would go on getting more detailed forever. And the million-millionth magnification would still look oddly similar to the first. It is, in effect, like a decimal that can go on forever without repeating itself.

  Mandelbrot’s fractals also apply to the weather; its possibilities for variation are infinite. And so, scientifically speaking, chaos theory disproves the notion that everything that happens is predetermined. The picture of the universe I suggested in Beyond the Occult is something like a giant clock, proceeding inevitably along its predestined course. Human beings can introduce small variations, but on such a minute scale that they are as important as tiny floating grains of dust in Big Ben. According to chaos theory, these grains of dust, like the butterfly’s wings, can cause virtually infinite changes. If chaos theory is correct, the future is infinitely undetermined.

  And yet, just as the whole idea of precognition contradicts our commonsense view of reality—that what has not yet happen
ed cannot be known—so the actuality of precognition contradicts chaos theory. Ten days before the Titanic was due to sail, in April 1912, a man named J. Connon Middleton dreamed twice of a sinking ocean liner. Since he was due to sail on the Titanic, he was understandably worried, and greatly relieved when the conference he was due to attend was cancelled. A marine engineer named Colin MacDonald also had premonitions of disaster and declined to sign on the Titanic; the man who accepted the job was drowned when the Titanic sank on April 14, 1912.

  Chaos theory states that it would be impossible to predict the weather ten days in advance. So even if we suppose some ‘super-ESP’ that could gain access to the relevant information—about icebergs in the Atlantic, the strength of the Titanic’s hull, etc—it would still be impossible to have an accurate premonition of the disaster.

  In fact, a novel called The Wreck of the Titan, published in 1898, fourteen years before the disaster, predicts the catastrophe with uncanny accuracy: the Titan, like the Titanic, was on her maiden voyage from Southampton. It was 70,000 tons; the Titanic was 66,000. Both were triple-screw vessels capable of 25 knots. The Titan had 24 lifeboats, the Titanic 20. Its author, Morgan Robertson, was a ‘semi-automatic’ writer, who felt that some other writer took over when he wrote. If The Wreck of the Titan was not a genuine piece of precognition, then it was a highly convincing example of synchronicity.

  In short, it seems that we are as far as ever from some ‘scientific’ explanation of the time mystery. All that seems obvious is that there is some sense in which our perceptions are independent of time, and that human beings therefore possess more freedom than they realise.

  14

  Vampires, Werewolves and Elementals

  IN A BOOK CALLED The Paranormal, the psychologist Stan Gooch has described how, at the age of 26, he attended a seance in Coventry with a friend, and spontaneously fell into a trance condition. ‘And then suddenly it seemed to me that a great wind was rushing through the room. In my ears was the deafening sound of roaring waters . . . As I felt myself swept away I became unconscious.’ When he woke up, he learned that several ‘spirits’ had spoken through him. Gooch had discovered that he was a ‘medium’.

  It was during this period—Gooch reveals in a later book called Creatures from Inner Space—that he had his first experience of a ‘psychic invasion’. He was lying in bed one Saturday morning with his eyes closed when he felt a movement on the pillow beside his head, as if someone had gently pressed a hand against it. The movement continued for some time; but when he opened his eyes, he was alone.

  Twenty years later, lying half awake in the early morning, he became aware that someone else was in bed with him. He felt that it was a composite of various girls he had known. ‘On this first occasion my conscious interest in the situation got the better of me, and the succubus gradually faded away. On subsequent occasions, however, the presence of the entity was maintained, until finally we actually made love.’ He notes that, ‘From some points of view the sex is actually more satisfying than that with a real woman, because in the paranormal encounter archetypal elements are both involved and invoked.’

  Oddly enough, Gooch does not believe that his succubus (or female demon) was real; he thinks such entities are creations of the human mind. He cites cases of hypnotised subjects who have been able to see and touch hallucinations suggested by the hypnotist, and a book called The Story of Ruth, by Dr Morton Schatzman, describing how a girl whose father had tried to rape her as a child began to have hallucinations of her father and believe that he was in the room with her. He seems to believe that his succubus was a similar hallucination. Yet this view seems to be contradicted by other cases he cites in the book.

  The first of these concerns a policeman, Martin Pryer, who had always been ‘psychic’. At one point he decided to try practising the control of hypnagogic imagery—the imagery we experience on the verge of sleep—and soon began to have alarming experiences. On one occasion, some strange entity began to cling to his back like a limpet, and held on until he staggered across the room and switched on the light. On another occasion, he thought that a former girlfriend was outside the window, and when he asked what she was doing, she replied: ‘You sent for me.’ Then some female entity seemed to seize him from behind, clinging on to his back; he sensed that it wanted him to make love to her ‘in a crude and violent manner.’ After some minutes it faded away.

  Gooch goes on to describe the experiences of an actress friend called Sandy, who was also ‘psychic’. One night, she woke up and felt that the spotlight in the corner of her ceiling had changed into an eye that was watching her. Then she felt an entity—she felt it was male—lying on top of her and trying to make love to her. ‘One part of her was quite willing for the lovemaking to proceed, but another part of her knew that she wanted it to stop.’ The entity became heavier and another force seemed to be dragging her down through the mattress. She made an effort to imagine that she was pulling herself up through the mattress, and the pressure suddenly vanished. But when she went into the bathroom, she discovered that her mouth was rimmed with dark streaks, and when she opened it, proved to be full of dried blood. There was no sign of a nosebleed or any other injury that could account for the blood.

  We have already encountered Guy Playfair’s case of ‘Marcia’, the Brazilian schoolteacher who had experiences with an ‘incubus’ after picking up a statue of the sea goddess Yemanjá on the beach (Chapter 9, page 265). Such cases make it difficult to accept Gooch’s view that these entities are some kind of hypnotic hallucination. He seems to have arrived at that conclusion because his ‘succubus’ was a blend of previous girlfriends. But on the ‘earthbound spirit’ hypothesis put forward by Carl Wickland (Chapter 11), it seems more likely that the entity put these ideas into his mind—that is, into his imagination. He says: ‘In short, this entity, though possessing physical and even psychological attributes familiar to me, was none the less essentially its own independent self.’ And he agrees that the ‘archetypal elements’ were, to some extent, ‘invoked’—that is, that he himself was conjuring them up. Sandy was able to free herself from the ‘psychic invasion’ by imagining that she was pulling herself back up through the mattress, indicating that the entity was controlling her imagination, not her body,

  We also note that these ‘psychic invasions’ occurred when all three subjects—Gooch, Martin Pryer and Sandy—were either asleep or hovering between sleep and waking, and therefore in a trance condition akin to mediumship.

  The ‘succubus’ (or incubus) was, as the Rev. Montague Summers states in his book The Vampire, an early version of that mythical creature the vampire or blood-drinker. And the various accounts of possession we have considered seem to lead naturally to the question: was the vampire real, or is it—as most sensible people assume—just a myth?

  The vampire as depicted in stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is a kind of walking corpse that drinks blood. Stoker based his character on a real historical personage: Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), King of Wallachia (1456–77) was, as his nickname implies, a man of sadistic temperament whose greatest pleasure was to impale his ‘enemies’ (which meant anyone against whom he had a grudge) on pointed stakes; the stake—driven into the ground—was inserted into the anus (or, in the case of women, the vagina), and the victim was allowed to slowly impale himself under his own weight—Vlad often had the point blunted to make the agony last longer. In his own time he was known as Dracula, which means son of a dragon (or of the devil). It is estimated that Dracula had about 100,000 people impaled during the course of his lifetime. When he conquered Brasov, in Transylvania, he had all its inhabitants impaled on poles, then gave a feast among the corpses. When one nobleman held his nose at the stench, Vlad sent for a specially long pole and had him impaled. When he was a prisoner in Hungary, Vlad was kept supplied with birds, rats and toads, which he impaled on small stakes. A brave and fearless warrior, he was finally killed in battle—or possibly assassinated by his own soldiers—a
nd his head sent to Constantinople. Four hundred and twenty years later, in 1897, he was immortalised by Bram Stoker as the sinister Count Dracula, no longer a sadistic maniac, but a drinker of blood . . .1

  But how did the legend of the blood-drinking vampire begin? The story first reached Europe soon after 1718, when Charles VI, Emperor of Austria, drove the Turks out of Eastern Europe, which they had dominated for the past four centuries, marching in and out of Transylvania, Wallachia and Hungary and even conquering Constantinople (1453). Don John of Austria defeated them at the great sea battle of Lepanto (1571), but it was their failure to capture Vienna after a siege in 1683 that caused the break-up of the Ottoman empire. During the earlier stages of this war between Europe and Turkey, Vlad the Impaler struck blow after blow against the Turks, until they killed and beheaded him in 1477. When the Turks were finally defeated, two hundred and forty-one years later, their conquerors were intrigued to hear strange stories about dead people who could cause death to the living. Such stories had been known to travellers in Greece down the centuries. There the vampire was known as the vrykolakas, and on January 1, 1701, a French botanist named Pitton de Tornefort had visited the island of Mykonos and been present at a gruesome scene of dissection. An unnamed peasant, of sullen and quarrelsome disposition, was murdered in the fields by persons unknown. Two days after burial, his ghost was reported to be wandering around at night, overturning furniture and ‘playing a thousand roguish tricks’. Ten days after his burial, a mass was said to ‘drive out the demon’ that was believed to be in the corpse, after which the body was disinterred, and the local butcher given the task of tearing out the heart. His knowledge of anatomy seemed to be defective, and he tore open the stomach and rummaged around in the intestines, causing such a vile stench that incense had to be burned. In the smoke-filled church, people began shouting ‘Vrykolakas’ and alleging that some of the smoke poured out of the corpse itself.