Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  In mediaeval Europe, wolves were the commonest and most dangerous beasts of prey, and the sexual obsessions that drove Isobel Gowdie caused sexually frustrated peasants to identify with wolves. But the most curious question is how far their obsession caused actual physical changes. William Seabrook has a remarkable description of how a Russian emigrée woman meditated on hexagram 49 from the I Ching, whose meaning is associated with an animal’s fur, and with moulting. She imagined herself to be a wolf in the snow, then began to make baying noises, and slaver at the mouth. When one of the witnesses attempted to wake her up, she leapt at his throat and tried to bite it. In the case of Gilles Garnier, executed as a werewolf in 1574, he seems to have carried out the attacks on children either in the shape of a man or a wolf. The charge, drawn up at Dôle, alleged that he had seized a 12-year-old girl and killed her in a vineyard with his hands and teeth, then dragged her along the ground—with his teeth—into the wood at La Serre, where he ate most of her. He so enjoyed it that he took some home for his wife. (This does not indicate that she was also a loup-garou; three hundred years later, in the same area, a peasant named Martin Dumollard made a habit of murdering girls that he lured into lonely places, and taking their clothes to his wife. He would say, ‘I’ve murdered another girl,’ and then go off with a spade. She seems to have regarded these activities as a sign of mild eccentricity.) Garnier killed a 12-year-old boy in a wood, and was about to eat the flesh (‘although it was a Friday’) when he was interrupted by some men. They testified that he was in human form, and Gamier agreed. But he insisted that he was in the shape of a wolf when he strangled a 10-year-old boy and tore off the leg with his fangs; he does not explain how a wolf could strangle anybody. He also attacked another 10-year-old girl—again wearing his wolf-shape—but was forced to flee when interrupted; she died of her wounds. On this occasion, the peasants who interrupted Garnier saw him as a wolf, but nevertheless thought they recognised Garnier’s face. He was sentenced to be burned alive.

  The rational explanation is that Stubbe and Garnier confessed to a great deal of nonsense under torture, and this is possible. But it is surely more significant that the great majority of werewolf reports date from the same period as the witchcraft trials in Europe, and that many ‘werewolves’, like the Gandillons, confessed to being witches. Our study of witchcraft has left no doubt that the majority of cases were miscarriages of justice, but that ‘real witchcraft’ undoubtedly existed in Europe, and that many witches had ‘intercourse’ with spirits they believed to be demons. We have also considered many cases of African witchcraft in which the sorcery undoubtedly worked, and even one in which a Catholic priest vouched that a man changed himself into a cassowary.

  In cases of vampirism, it seems a reasonable assumption that the vampire is a ‘hungry ghost’ or earthbound spirit; in cases of lycanthropy, it seems clear that individuals with a taste for sorcery or witchcraft have attempted to invoke spirits in order to change into a wolf. In effect, such individuals were inviting the spirits to possess them.

  And, as in the case of vampirism, there seem to be powerful sexual undertones. In discussing werewolves in The Occult, I have pointed out that many modern sex killers—for example, the child-murderer Albert Fish and the necrophile Ed Gein—have behaved very much like the traditional idea of the werewolf. If Fish and Gein had been ‘witches’, it is easy to imagine them performing rituals to invoke spirits until they genuinely felt they had been transformed into beasts of prey. But how far would this cause actual physical changes? In the Gandillon case, we note that the 16-year-old victim, Benoit Bidel, said that the ‘wolf had human hands, while in the Gamier case, Gamier confessed to strangling a young boy. And peasants who interupted Gamier as he was attacking a 10-year-old girl said they thought they recognised his face. It certainly sounds as if the ‘wolf remained in many respects human—rather like the upright beast into which Lon Chaney is transformed in the film of The Wolf Man.

  In his classic work Man into Wolf, the Jungian psychologist Robert Eisler suggests that early man had to transform himself from a herbivorous ape into a carnivore struggling for supremacy with other carnivores, and that in the course of this battle, he deliberately acquired something of the ferocity of the wild animal. In his novel Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse writes of a quiet, scholarly man who likes to imagine himself transformed into a wolf of the steppes, and who writes in a poem about attacking a girl:

  The lovely creature I would so treasure,

  And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,

  I would drink of her red blood full measure,

  Then howl till the night went by.

  We should also bear in mind Allen Kardec’s remark that spirits are able to ‘possess’ those whose affinities they share, and that many sex killers—from the 19th century American mass murderer H. H. Holmes to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper—have believed themselves possessed by the Devil. Is it not conceivable that lychanthropy, like vampirism, should be understood as a special case of ‘demoniacal possession’?

  As we have seen in the chapter on witchcraft, the occult tradition recognises another type of spirit, the nature spirit or ‘elemental’—the psychic Geoffrey Hodson described the ‘huge, crimson, bat-like thing’ that he saw in the Lake District.

  Like the vampire and the werewolf, the elemental can be found in all mythologies of the world. The name obviously implies that such entities are connected with the ‘four elements’ of the ancient philosophers—earth, air, fire and water—(respectively gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and undines). And since we now know that there are ninety-two natural elements, it would seem that we can at least dismiss this notion without fear of being accused of scientific materialism.

  On the other hand, the Cambridge don Tom Lethbridge (whom we met in an earlier chapter; see Pp. 210ff) was convinced that there was some scientific foundation for the belief in elementals. When Lethbridge was eighteen, he and his mother had gone for a walk in the Great Wood near Wokingham, and, at a certain spot, had both experienced a sense of deep depression. A few days later they heard that the body of a suicide had been discovered a short distance from where they were standing.

  Forty two years later, after he had retired to an old house in Devon, Lethbridge and his wife Mina went out one Sunday afternoon to collect seaweed for the garden from nearby Ladram Bay. It was a grey, damp day in January, and almost as soon as they walked on to the beach, both felt as if they had ‘stepped into a kind of blanket, or fog, of depression and . . . fear.’ Mina came hurrying back from the other end of the beach, saying: ‘I can’t stand this place any longer. There’s something frightful here.’

  The following Sunday they returned to Ladram beach. Again they encountered the same ‘fog of depression’ at the same place. He noted that it was close to a spot where a tiny stream ran down from the cliff. When they went to the spot where Mina had experienced the depression the previous week, it was overwhelming, ‘so strong as to make me feel almost giddy’. He likened it to being in bed with a high temperature when one is full of drugs. They went to the cliff top and Tom began to make a sketch while Mina wandered off. As she stood on the edge of the cliff, she experienced a sensation as if someone was urging her to jump.

  Back at home, Tom thought he saw a clue. Lethbridge was an excellent dowser, so good that he often used it in his archaeological work. On one occasion, as an experiment, he had allowed a friend to blindfold him then lead him over ground that contained volcanic dykes; his dowsing-rod had located every one of them. Dowsing, he was convinced, was some kind of response to the electrical field of water. (If he had known about split-brain physiology, he might have carried his speculations further and suggested that it is the right hemisphere that responds.) But suppose this ‘field’ could record emotions? Lethbridge was not, apparently, aware of Sir Oliver Lodge’s ‘tape recording’ theory of ghosts (see page 211), but the theory he came to formulate was in many ways similar: that when strong emotions occur in certain places, they are some
how recorded, and can be ‘picked up’ later by someone who is sensitive to such things. This, he thought, explained the feeling of depression in the Great Wood; the emotions of the man who had committed suicide lingered like a bad smell.

  In the case of Mina’s urge to jump from the cliff, Lethbridge speculated that someone had intended to commit suicide by jumping from the same spot, and that she was somehow responding to the ‘recording’ of his depression. At this stage, Lethbridge did not assume that the man had actually jumped; he might have gone home, had a large whisky, and felt better. But he discovered later that a man had, in fact, committed suicide from the place where Mina was standing.

  In his book Ghost and Divining Rod, Lethbridge speculates on how the classical belief in nymphs came about. Suppose a youth sits down on the bank of a stream, and falls into a vivid sexual daydream in which he imagines a girl, unaware of his presence, taking off her clothes and bathing. His excitement is so strong that his mental image of the naked girl is ‘recorded’ on the electrostatic field of the water. Some time later, a casual passer-by, thinking of nothing in particular (and therefore in a receptive state), catches a glimpse of a naked girl in the stream, and a moment later, she vanishes. He naturally supposes that she is a supernatural being who has made herself invisible when she sensed that she was being watched . . . Lethbridge coined the name ‘naiad field’ for the ‘recording’ medium of the water.

  The Great Wood near Wokingham was not particularly damp, and this led Lethbridge to suggest that woods possess their own kind of electrical field, for which he coined the term ‘dryad field’, after the Greek word for a wood nymph. He went on the suggest that open places—like moors or deserts—and mountainous areas might have their own type of electrostatic field, and that this could account for similar tales of ‘spectral beings’ seen there. Lethbridge coined the word ‘ghouls’ for the kind of unpleasant feeling he experienced in the Great Wood, and applied the word ‘ghost’ to actual appearances—like the man in hunting kit he had seen in his friend’s rooms in Cambridge.

  But even Lethbridge had to admit that his neat scientific theory of ‘elemental fields’ failed to explain some of his own experiences. In 1924 he had visited the island of Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry. He had climbed a hill to look at the ruins of an 8th-century monastery when he noted a heap of rubbish halfway down the cliff face. As he made his way down towards it, he was overtaken by an odd conviction that someone wanted to push him over the cliff, and the feeling was so strong that he changed his mind and went back. According to his later theory, he had experienced a ‘ghoul’ like the one that made Mina feel she ought to jump from the cliff. But shortly afterwards, as he walked down the hill in front of the monastery, he experienced a sensation that there was someone behind him, and he was suddenly flung flat on his face by a blow. When he sat up, he was alone on the hillside. Clearly, this was not a ‘ghoul’, a tape recording of negative emotions. A telegraph operator on the mainland told him that the lighthouse on the island had been haunted since a shipwreck. But Lethbridge thought that whatever had knocked him on his face was some kind of poltergeist.

  In Ghost and Ghoul (where he tells the story), Lethbridge goes on to speculate about the nature of the poltergeist. He discusses the notion that poltergeists take their energy from disturbed adolescents, and adds that ‘many still think that the mind of the individual concerned is linked with that of some sub-human personality’. But he then goes on to talk about psychokinesis, and ends by suggesting that his experience on Skellig Michael could be explained in terms of some person who saw the shipwreck, and whose shock had created some kind of delayed psychokinetic effect. He fails to explain where the ‘poltergeist’ had obtained the energy to knock him down. Or rather, he throws off casually the suggestion that the energy was somehow connected with the ancient religious site.

  We are in a position to recognise that Lethbridge was closer to the truth when he suggested that the poltergeist is ‘some sub-human personality’. His ‘elemental field’ hypothesis is a bold and interesting attempt to create a scientific theory that can explain ‘ghosts and ghouls’. But Lethbridge lacked the actual experience of poltergeists that led Guy Playfair to recognise that, in many cases at least, they are ‘spirits’. If he had, he would have recognised that his ‘tape recording’ theory of ghosts simply fails to cover the facts.

  Elsewhere in Ghost and Ghoul, Lethbridge goes on the discuss the most familiar type of elemental known to folklore, the ‘sith’ or fairy, and he records with amusement that a Scotsman of his acquaintance, an old boatman named John M. Robertson, was a firm believer in the sith. When Lethbridge and some Cambridge friends were on the Shiant Islands, in the Hebrides, one them placed his coat and his lunch beside a rock on a hilltop. When he went back, they had vanished. The rest of the party laughed and said that a gull had probably taken them. But while a gull might well help itself to someone’s lunch, it would certainly ignore a coat. His friend was so certain that no one could have taken them without being seen that he declared they had been removed by some supernatural agency. John M. Robertson agreed, declaring that the sith were the culprits. Lethbridge’s later experience on Skellig Michael led him to wonder whether Robertson might not be closer to the truth than the sceptical young men from Cambridge, and that his friend’s coat might have been taken by some kind of poltergeist, like the one that knocked him down on Skellig Michael. But he remained adamant that the fairies described to him by various Scottish and Irish countrymen were some form of ‘mental projection’—a euphemism for hallucination.

  Three decades earlier, the poet W.B.Yeats had arrived at a different conclusion. Yeats’s early poems are full of fairies, but at the time Yeats was convinced that this was wishful thinking. What changed his mind was a collaboration with his friend—and patroness—Lady Augusta Gregory. In the summer of 1897, Yeats had been staying with Lady Gregory at her home, Coole Park, and the two of them began collecting fairy stories from the local peasantry. Yeats’s acquaintance with the extraordinary Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, had already convinced him of the existence of ‘spirits’. Now the sheer factuality of so many descriptions of fairies—many of them eye-witness accounts—convinced him that they could not be dismissed as products of the ‘folk imagination’.

  G.K. Chesterton, who met Yeats a few years later, was impressed by his insistence on the factual reality of fairies. ‘He was the real original rationalist who said that the fairies stand to reason. He staggered the materialists by attacking their abstract materialism with a completely concrete mysticism: ‘Imagination!’ he would say with withering contempt: ‘There wasn’t much imagination when Farmer Hogan was dragged out of bed and thrashed like a sack of potatoes—that they did, they had ‘um out;’ the Irish accent warming with scorn; ‘they had ‘um out and thumped ‘um; and that’s not the sort of thing that a man wants to imagine.”

  Chesterton goes on to make a point of basic importance: ‘It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants, who have borne witness a thousand times to such things; it is the farmers who see the fairies. It is the agricultural labourer who calls a spade a spade who also calls a spirit a spirit; it is the woodcutter with no axe to grind . . . who will say he saw a man hang on the gallows, and afterwards hang round it as a ghost.’

  A few years later, Yeats was to encourage the orientalist W.Y.Evans Wentz—best known for his translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead—to study the folklore of the fairies: the result was Wentz’s first book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), a bulky and scholarly volume, based upon his own extensive fieldwork. Yeats’s friend, the poet ‘AE’ (George Russell) contributed an anonymous piece to the book (under the title ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testimony’) in which he describes his own fairy sightings with the factuality and precision of an anthropologist describing primitive tribes: shining beings, opalescent beings, water beings, wood beings, lower elementals . . . ‘The first of [the fairies
] I saw I remember very clearly . . . there was first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary lightness, joyousness or ecstasy.’

  Wentz concludes that the factual and scientific evidence for the existence of fairies is overwhelming. ‘There are hundreds of proven cases of phenomena . . .’

  But AE’s fairies were essentially ‘visions’, and could therefore be classified with unicorns or centaurs. Nine years after Wentz’s book appeared, the British public was intrigued to learn of new scientific evidence which seemed to place belief in ‘the little people’ on an altogether more solid foundation.

  The story began on a Saturday afternoon in July 1917, when an engineer named Arthur Wright, went into the dark room to develop a photograph taken earlier in the day by his 16-year-old daughter Elsie. As the plate began to develop, Wright saw vague white shapes appearing—he took them for birds. But when the picture became clear, he was startled to see that they were fairies. The picture showed a serious-faced little girl—Elsie’s cousin Frances Griffiths, aged 11—standing behind a bush, her chin propped on her hand. And in front of her, dancing on top of the bush, were four neat little female figures with wings and diaphanous garments, one of them playing a pan-pipe. ‘What on earth are they?’ said Arthur Wright to his daughter, who was standing behind him. ‘Fairies,’ she said, matter-of-factly.