by Colin Wilson
The Nature of Healing, published seven years after A Theory of Disease, goes a great deal further—which is obviously why Wilson Knight had recommended it to me. He is concerned with the gift of healing, such as was possessed by Rasputin; you might say that he is in the field of Christian Science. He has obviously reached a watershed, and I could easily trace the route by which he arrived at it. Everybody must have noticed the way that certain people are totally preoccupied with themselves, in a feverish, unhealthy way, and that such people seem unable to draw upon their full powers; they seem to be cut off from their inner resources; whereas people who exude calm and serenity—and health—are often curiously un-egoistic. In fact, they often possess the power to heal. (Think of Matthew Arnold's line about Wordsworth's healing power—connected with his awareness of 'unknown modes of being', of things outside himself.) In A Theory of Disease, Guirdham is preoccupied with working out the implications of these observations. In The Nature of Healing, he goes on to consider the way that negro 'medicine men' can cause death by laying a curse on someone, and how aborigines may wilt away and die because someone has 'pointed the bone' at them. Any psychologist would accept this, and would say that it is purely psychological. But if this is so, then how far is all disease purely psychological? And if we accept that purely psychological forces are involved in disease, can we discount the possibility of such forces being 'projected' by a medicine man in order to cause disease? Is it not possible that such forces are as real, if as invisible, as germs?
In The Nature of Healing, Guirdham also touches on reincarnation; describing a nurse with unusual healing powers, he comments that she knew the layout of Hampton Court long before she went there, so that visiting it was like going home; she was convinced that she had had some intense experience of happiness in the garden at Hampton Court in 1660. 'She knew the London of Charles the Second better than that of today,' and as a child, she made drawings of Norman architecture, with the same odd sense of familiarity. Guirdham ads: 'I am convinced that the power of healing which she undoubtedly possessed involves the capacity to disperse oneself through time.'
These two books made it clear to me that Guirdham was not a crank—or perhaps just given to wishful thinking. There is a feeling of clarity, balance, fair-mindedness, about them. He had obviously come a long way, and come very slowly; he mentions that in the past he had been completely skeptical about the possibility of 'healing' except by purely physical (or natural) forces.At about the time I was reading these books, an old friend, Tom Greenwell, came to stay with us; he works on the Yorkshire Post, and he brought with him a pamphlet called Catharism: The Mediaeval Resurgence of Primitive Christianity, by Arthur Guirdham. This, I felt, was beginning to look more like synchronicity than coincidence. The Cathars and Reincarnation begins by describing how Guirdham kept stumbling upon references to Catharism all over the place. One day, he was discussing a village, and tried to recall the name of its pub; later the same day, he took a book on the Pyrenees out of the public library—and came across the name of the village and its pub in it. I felt that the pamphlet on the Cathars—and the fact that Tom Greenwell had met Guirdham at the time when he was contributing medical articles to the Yorkshire Post—dearly indicated that I ought to write to him. I did so, saying how much I had enjoyed the book, but that I felt he had deliberately thrown away the possibility of a best-seller. A few days later, I got a friendly letter back, in which he said that he had deliberately played down the sensational elements—which is what I had suspected.
I wrote a section about him in The Occult, as well as an article for the back page of Man, Myth and Magic. By that time, we had finally met. In the spring of 1971, he drove down to the west country to visit relatives, and came to stay overnight. The final paragraph of my article on him read: 'Earlier this year, he came down to stay with us. My mental picture of him had varied between the image of a keen-eyed psychiatrist, and of an absent-minded mystic. He was neither of these things: a gentle, intelligent man with the natural kindness that all good doctors have. Throughout the first evening, while we talked mostly about psychology, I felt that there was an element about him that I could not place. Later on, it came to me: there was something priestly about him, something akin to Father Brown, or one of those mediaeval priors described by Rabelais.'
This, I think, is a fairly good description. He is white haired, rather squarely built—he points out in the healing book that many healers are—with a calm, rather soothing voice. He reminded me of another old medical friend, Kenneth Walker, who had been a pupil of Gurdjieff s. He had his wife Mary with him, and she struck me as an ideal sort of person for a doctor's wife: calm, good tempered, practical and thoroughly efficient. She and Joy seemed to have a certain amount in common; writers, like doctors, tend to become objects of fixation for people who imagine they hold the solution to all their problems. Their wives have to learn to put up with this, and to adopt a philosophical attitude, particularly to female admirers; you can read in their eyes a kind of mild, patient irony. In a way, Mary Guirdham convinced me more than her husband that Arthur Guirdham wasn't over-credulous or over-inventive. She struck me as so balanced and intelligent that I couldn't believe she would aid and abet any kind of self-deception.
We talked, as I have said, mainly about psychology. I was writing New Pathways in Psychology, and I was struck by the similarity of Maslow's views and Arthur Guirdham's. Translated into Maslow's language, you could say that Arthur Guirdham believed that disease was due to blockage of creative energies—that is, blockage of self-actualization. But then, in a way, Guirdham went further than Maslow. When Maslow died, he was looking into this question of the varieties of self-actualization—what Robert Leftwich might call the structure of the superconscious. Maslow was concerned only with learning to express creative energy: i.e. to evolve. Arthur Guirdham seemed to be implying that evolution of consciousness may involve us in the realm of 'strange powers'. All the same, it was not the 'strange powers' we talked about that evening, but the psychotherapy of men like Maslow and Viktor Frankl. I was particularly fascinated by a story told by Robert Ardrey about two scientists, Rubinstein and Best, who had discovered that planarion worms are subject to boredom and 'life failure' if made to repeat a task over and over again. But by making the task so difficult that the worms have to make an enormous effort to learn it, they were able to make the worms repeat it hundreds of times without boredom. Somehow, the worms came to attach meaning to the task when they had to really summon their vitality to learn it, and this meaning stayed permanently, un-eroded by repetition. Clearly, the question of disease and health is closely connected with the question of meaning and boredom. Disease is basically the outcome of life-failure.
Arthur disclaimed any healing powers of his own, and any 'psychic' ability. He was, he said, just a catalyst, the sort of person who seems to bring out 'strange powers' in other people. But he certainly possesses a degree of natural, if not supernatural, healing power. I had developed a rather odd pain at the back of my skull. There was a slight ache in the muscles of the right rear-side of my neck, and a sharp pain at the back of the head in moments of excitement, such as sexual orgasm. Arthur stood behind my chair, and gently massaged the muscles of the neck and shoulders for a few minutes; after this, the stiffness vanished, and stayed away for about a week. There was a definitely soothing feeling as he pressed the muscles.
My ten-year-old daughter took an immediate and warm liking to him—so much so that she asked him if he would mind being her godfather. She'd been looking out for a godfather for some time, ever since we'd called on the godfather of her brother Damon—the Blake scholar Foster Damon—at Annisquam, Mass. Arthur seemed agreeable; he is now Sally's godfather...
The only other thing I recollect about his two-day visit is that he talked a great deal about the south of France, and places he'd visited; he also produced some bottles of an odd sweet champagne from the Languedoc. I don't particularly like travel, and traveler's tales usually bore me; but
there was something about his description of small French villages in the Midi—the heat and the laziness and the local wines—that fascinated me. It was obvious that he loved the area—that, in a way, he was obsessed by it.
Later in the year, I visited the Guirdhams at their home near Bath—we were driving back from the north of England. We were only staying overnight, so there wasn't time for a great deal of talk; but he told me that he was working on an even more remarkable story than that of Mrs Smith—a record of a whole group of reincarnations. He let me see some of the manuscript. As I read the first page, I began to feel—no, not excited; that would be the wrong word; a kind of satisfaction, as when something turns out very much to your liking. This manuscript—which I have with me now as I write—was clearer and more straightforward than the earlier book on reincarnation. And it raised and answered most of the questions—and doubts—that had occurred to me as I read the earlier book. He says on the first page:
'I am naturally of a skeptical and cautious nature, and am known in my family as Doubting Thomas. I am astonished that the phenomena I have encountered have been revealed to me of all people. I have occupied myself in discovering the significance of names and messages produced in dreams, visions, in states of clairaudience and dictated by discarnate entities. Because of the unusual origin of my data I have to stress all the more carefully that I was for forty years a run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. In the National Health Service I was the Senior Consultant in my clinical area. I hold a scientific degree, as well as being a doctor of medicine. It is all the more necessary to make these points since I claim that this, my own story, is, of its kind, the most remarkable I have encountered.'
And in the first chapter, he makes an observation that aroused my interest: that most of the cases of reincarnation he has come across were rather healthy, active people with 'more than average energy'; not, as you might expect, 'sick sensitives'. This is certainly what I would have predicted, on the basis of the psychology I have developed in New Pathways. Knowledge of previous existences is certainly not necessary to our everyday survival; all we need is a narrow, commonplace consciousness. Flashes of this kind of knowledge would only come, like 'peak experiences', to very healthy people, with energy to spare.
I was also intrigued by something he says about Miss Mills, an acquaintance who asked him one day whether the words 'Raymond' and 'Albigensians' meant anything to him. (They kept recurring in her head.) Miss Mills mentioned childhood dreams—following an illness—of running away from a castle, and of being led towards a stake with heaped faggots. She commented that, as a child, the rest of the family had enjoyed the spectacle of a building on fire, while she had been hysterical. I recall similar feelings in my own childhood. There was a weekly serial on at the local cinema, with a character called the Eagle—a Lone Ranger type who always found himself in some dangerous situation at the end of every episode. But one day, he was trapped in a burning church; and I was so horrified that I couldn't bear to ever watch him again. Not long after The Occult came out, a friend asked me if he could bring someone along to meet me, a woman who ran a nursing home in Cornwall, and who was interested in occult matters. We spent an interesting evening talking about all kinds of things; but at one point, she suddenly told me that she was certain I had been a monk in a previous existence, and had been burned to death...
In many respects, Arthur Guirdham's account of his experiences with Miss Mills parallels that of his experiences with Mrs Smith. Miss Mills would wake up in the night with names in her head—names like Montserver, Braida, Cisilia; these he was able to identify, through his knowledge of the siege of Montsegur and the burning of the heretics two days after its surrender. After a while, she would find notes written on a notepad she kept by her bed, scrawled in a hand resembling her own. One said: 'Raymond de Perella. Sun—No. Treasure—No. Books—Yes.' Arthur Guirdham interpreted this as a reference to questions about Montsegur. It had been suggested that Montsegur had been the site of a sun-worship temple; Miss Mills's 'instructor' was apparently denying this. As to the treasure of Montsegur, this is another question debated by historians. Four 'parfaits' (the highest Cathar grade) were lowered from the walls of the citadel just before its surrender, carrying unspecified 'treasure'. It has been suggested that this was money, or even the Holy Grail. Miss Mills's instructor was asserting that the 'treasure' consisted of Cathar sacred books.
In his eighth chapter, Guirdham has an interesting and important discussion of a basic doctrinal point: reincarnation. He comments that many of the biblical quotations dictated to Miss Mills were from St Paul—which, he says, is natural enough, since St Paul is the 'supreme interpreter of Christianity from the occult point of view'—an observation that had certainly never occurred to me. Paul lays emphasis on the difference between the corporeal body and the spiritual body. Guirdham says: 'His outlook tied up directly with modern conceptions of etheric and astral bodies and the like. Orthodox Christians may jib at the idea that early Christianity was characterized by psychic communication and spiritist phenomena. What was to be revealed later to Miss Mills indicated clearly that primitive Christianity was of this nature.' He goes on to state that the verse from Corinthians I (Chapter 15, verse 45) '... the first Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit' is specifically Cathar, although orthodox Christians tend to accept it without really asking what it means. 'This particular verse implies that a living soul is in man from the Beginning... Man is born with his full psychic complement. This is an essential feature of the doctrine of reincarnation. After death, the psyche does not pass into any such state of cosmic somnolence as is represented by limbo. It embarks on a process of reincarnation. 'The last Adam was made a quickening spirit' refers to our ultimate development in being emancipated from matter. To the Cathars, this was the raison d'etre of our existence. They recognized that there was every gradation between matter conceived of as inert spirit, and, at the other extreme, as so spiritualized that Christ could appear on earth and reveal the true nature of his spiritualized body to the disciples at the Transfiguration.'
But I must move on to the central point of this strange book. The adjective 'strange' is an understatement. It is either a piece of sheer nuttiness, or one of the most important books ever written. For its central assertion is that a whole group of Cathars from Montsegur have been reincarnated in England in the twentieth century. Miss Mills was only the first. And although she began by having to ask Guirdham whether Raymond and Albigensian meant anything to him, she ended by actually seeing Braida de Montserver, a 'Parfaite' (i.e. a kind of female priest) who was burned; Braida began to pay her nightly visits, and instruct her in the history, philosophy and healing techniques of Catharism. Later, she was visited by two male Cathars, Guilhabert de Gastres, and a bishop, Bertrand de Marty. And here, we might say, the plot thickens. Miss Mills became convinced that Bertrand de Marty was her father—that is to say, that her own twentieth-century father had been a reincarnation of Marty.
In October 1971, Miss Mills was contacted by a friend from the Midlands, whom Guirdham calls simply 'Betty'. Betty's husband had died of a heart attack, and she was badly shaken. She decided to take a holiday abroad—in the Pyrenees. Guirdham was asked to supply names of places worth visiting, Inevitably, many were associated with Catharism. Betty went to the Pyrenees, and apparently found the experience profoundly satisfying. And on her return to England, she began to mention names of thirteenth-century Cathars that soon convinced Miss Mills that here was yet another character from Montsegur, reincarnated in twentieth-century England. Unfortunately, before this exciting new development could be studied, Betty died of a stroke. Her mother, Jane, began sorting through her papers, and found references to various names—Braida, Isarn, and so on. She also discovered drawings made by Betty as a child—during a serious illness at the age of seven. These drawings, mostly of a crude, matchstick variety, contain references to people present at the siege of Montsegur, and are full of Cathar references.
They seemed to trigger off some reaction—or buried memory—in Jane, who now herself began 'recalling' her own life in the thirteenth century in snatches.
Another person enters the story—an old schoolfriend of Miss Mills named Kathleen. She enquired after Betty—whom she had also known—and on being told she was dead,described a dream in which she had seen Betty in a wood with a man dressed in dark blue with a chain around his waist... This man was actually Guirdham's earlier incarnation, Roger Isarn; Guirdham goes into the evidence for this with his usual scholarly precision. It becomes clear that Kathleen is another of the group of reincarnated .