by Неизвестный
As Carl had continued over the months searching for his alpha layer by means of high-gate astral excursions, levitation of his inert body began to occur, but only in association with the ancient Roman incarnation for which he was now purposely searching. His body lifted off the couch ever so slightly; it remained suspended in midair without touching the couch, and returned by itself to the surface of the couch as Carl returned to normalcy. There was no regularity to the occurrence of this phenomenon of levitation, except as it was associated with his chance excursions to Roman Italy, and there were never any side effects apparent in Carl's physical well-being.
The videotape made on this particular occasion shows Carl lying motionless on the couch. Donna and Bill are sitting at the foot of the couch; both have an intent look most of the time. But the same changes pass over their faces as over the others around the couch-Albert and Norman sitting at the head of the couch, Keith and Charlie at the far side, and the two technicians attending the monitoring machines. If one did not know better, one would be tempted to say that all present were brothers and sisters. For the intensity of the emotions portrayed on their faces produced such a similarity in looks that it is as though an invisible wash painted on them mysteriously had made all one family.
With Carl's passage beyond high-gate, everyone leaned forward, eyes wide open, faces drawn, completely absorbed in and concentrating on Carl's face and words. As Carl's body, still supine, rose slightly from the couch, all sat back in their chairs, a gaze of awe and reverence sweeping across their faces.
Albert's voice took up the interrogations. “Who are you?”
There is a small pause. Then Carl answered. “Peter, a Roman citizen.”
“Where do you live?”
“In Aquileia.”
“What day is it?”
“The feast of Lord Neptune.”
“What are you about today?”
“We are celebrating the mystery of salvation.”
“Who is with you?”
“Those of the sacrament.”
“What sacrament?”
“The sacrament.”
“Why here?”
“This is where the Tortoise confronts the Rooster.”
“Where?”
“In the secret oratory.”
“How do you celebrate the mystery?”
“We adore the Tortoise. We curse the Rooster.”
“Why?”
“The Rooster has corrupted the salvation.”
“How?”
There was no answer from Carl, but the expression on his face changed several times. What looked like indignation, pain, anger, fear, joy skimmed across his features. His pulse and heartbeat quickened. Albert waited for five minutes, then tried again.
“Where are you now and what is happening?”
“Beside the Rooster facing the Tortoise.”
For the first time Carl's body stirred-ever so slightly, still in levitation. Donna noticed it immediately. She glanced at Norman, who shook his head: no need for alarm, he was indicating. Carl's body then began to vibrate all over. The look on his face was one of effort.
Albert reflected a moment, then made up his mind.
“Are you continuing with the rite of the sacrament?”
Carl made no answer. He was going limp and quiet. His pulse and heartbeat were back to normal. His body lowered gently, imperceptibly back onto the couch. He was returning to high-gate obviously, and the session had to be almost over.
When this much was clear, they all acted out their parts. The monitoring machines and recorders were turned off. As usual, everyone stood up then and filed out. Norman, the last out the door, paused to switch off the light, then stepped outside and gently pulled the door to.
He had closed it and was about to join the others when his nerves were jangled. They all heard laughter, a sardonic cackle, a peal of mockery and vicious amusement coming from the audition room.
They looked at each other incredulously, fully persuaded that it could not be so, that there must be some explanation. The tone of the laughter was so outrageously out of keeping with their mood of reverence and gratitude that everyone grimaced with disgust and a little grain of fear.
As the last notes of derision and sneering amusement died away, Albert turned the handle of the door and opened it. They all looked at the blackness of the open doorway. Donna, nearest to Albert, craned over his shoulder. There was no sound, no light. Dimly, Albert made out Carl's inert form. He was still asleep. Albert shrugged his shoulders in puzzlement and pulled the door closed quietly.
Donna said nothing. But while the door was open, she had noticed a strange smell in the room. She looked at Albert, then finally asked him if she was crazy or if anyone else had smelled it, too.
No need to be alarmed, Albert told her. He and Norman had noticed the smell after several experiments and had discussed it with Carl. They did not understand it yet. But that, he said, was why they were scientists—to find out what happened and why it happened.
Donna still has a clear memory of that smell. It was not unpleasant. It was strange. Neither of any animal nor of any plant nor of any chemical she had ever known. A deep sense memory of it remained with her for many weeks.
Between this moment and Carl's exorcism one year later, Donna was to experience that smell again and again. Part of her later distress came from the fact that, by the time of the exorcism, she had come to like it.
From the data of the sessions two things became obvious: Carl's former incarnation had been localized at some special place in the Italian town of Aquileia; and the high point each year in that former life had been the feast of the ancient Roman god, Neptune. This feast day in modern calendars would be July 23. They resolved, therefore, to be in Aquileia on July 23 of the following year.
During the intervening months between the All Souls session and their July trip, Carl took to wearing the two emblems of Neptune, the dolphin and the trident, on a chain around his neck. He also became more abstracted than ever before from his physical surroundings and spent a great deal of time listening repeatedly to the recordings of his trances. He tried on several occasions to write about it all, but he never got beyond a few paragraphs. The word spoken to him in his teenage vision, “Wait!” seemed to be his watchword.
Meanwhile, he made one further advance in his psychic accomplishment. He claimed several times to have acquired a new power: to be able to be in two places at the same time because, he said, of a psychic “double” he could project forcefully into visible reality some hundred miles from where he was.
During these months Carl's directions for the personal life of his associates got much more dogmatic and absolutist in tone. They were always given in gentle terms. It was merely that, as one of them remarked, Carl no longer gave them any alternatives. There was no “either/or.” They all had to be “purified,” Carl said. They must be cleansed of any stains attaching to their minds and wills, stains which came from previously accepted lies about Jesus and Christianity.
Most of his followers found the regimen Carl established for them to be a healthy one. They slept better, studied with deeper concentration, and ceased to be disturbed and distracted by inconsequential matters.
Now and again, some of them felt that they were abdicating some secret part of their being. Some felt vaguely disturbed, but it was hard to pin that disturbance down. And, anyway, the whole venture with Carl was exciting and new, and promised to lead them beyond the matter-of-fact horizons of ordinary daily existence.
Carl put no difficulty in their way when Christmas 1972 came; and they all went to their own homes to celebrate. But when Easter approached, he insisted that they spend it with him.
They did not attend any church or religious service. Instead, on Easter Saturday evening they all met beneath the ridge overlooking Carl's favorite walk. From there they watched the sun go down while Carl maintained a running commentary on “true spirit.”
He had chosen as his subject the eterni
ty of spirit. And, using the symbols of the tortoise for spirit's eternity and of the rooster for the rising and setting sun of man's intellect, he preached vehemently against “the mental corruption that destroyed the beauty of God's word.” The sun, he said, would rise on the morrow and set on the morrow. So with every human resurrection. It was a constant rising and falling. Only spirit remained forever, like the ocean, like the tortoise, like the sky, like man's will. There was much in the same strain, all very mystical and exultant.
Afterward, he left them and returned to his office. Nobody dared go with him. He was in one of those “states” which they all venerated.
On July 15, their plans as carefully mapped out as possible, the small group left the campus by car for the airport.
About an hour after their departure, Hearty arrived at the psychology department. He was looking for Carl. No, he told Carl's secretary, he had no prior appointment with the professor, but he had a vitally important message for him and his companions.
It took some time before he learned the news of Carl's departure and about the proposed visit to Aquileia. He sped by cab after Carl's party to the airport, but arrived as the plane taxied for takeoff.
Hearty looked for some time into the evening sky as it swallowed up Carl's plane. He could only guess at Carl's condition of mind. But he knew rather exactly how the whole Aquileia venture would end. He was not guessing.
FATHER HARTNEY F.
When Hartney F. was born in Wales in 1905, his parents had been living there for almost 18 years. He was a late child. His mother was Welsh, his father, an Englishman from Northumberland.
Hartney's hometown, which he called Casnewydd-ar-Wysg but which is shown on English maps as Newport, stands on the banks of the river Usk in Monmouthshire. He was baptized in St. Woolos parish church.
When Hearty was one and a half years old, his father, a general medical practitioner of the old school, came into a substantial inheritance from his father. Up to that point, the family had struggled to make ends meet. Now, with the sudden affluence, his father gave up his city dispensary and practice. The family moved out of the town to a small village near the confluence of the Usk and Severn Rivers.
There, Hartney spent the next twelve and a half years. His father maintained a small private practice. At their home on the Severn, his first ideas and emotions were formed by his mother and aided by the ambient of Welsh tradition in which the neighborhood—its people, history, monuments, and communal life—were bathed. At the age of six he was sent to grammar school. His daily language was Welsh, but his father tutored him in English from the age of seven.
Up to that time his mother, an ardent Welsh nationalist, steeped in Welsh history and literature, would not allow any English to be spoken in her child's presence. Only after he was fourteen did she consent to send him to a British public school, where he acquired a thorough grounding in English and developed a deep interest in science. But his English never quite lost the Welsh lilt and cadence.
His parents were Methodists and worshiped each Sunday at the little stone chapel in their village. Between his mother's fixation with the Welsh soul or spirit, the attractiveness and beauty of their hymn-singing Methodism, and his immersion in the folklore of village and country, Hartney's mentality was early on soaked in that peculiarity of all Celtic peoples which the Welsh developed to a very particular degree.
The best name for that peculiarity is style, style, as distinct and different from all other humanly valued qualities or powers, and not encompassed by or to be equated with intelligence, cunning, artistry, money, land, blood.
The soul of the Celt has a particular universality of its own: all of life and the world is interpreted in terms of light and shadow. But that innate generalism of their souls has never enabled Celts to achieve military conquest, imperial possessions, huge wealth, or cultural predominance. Early in their history, they were confined to the extremities of France (Brittany), of England (in Wales and Scotland), and in Ireland as the outermost tip of the European continent, dominated by Romans, Vandals, Franks, English, Normans, Danes, and others.
Celts developed the only power that remained: verbal expression and a corresponding mercurial agility of spirit. Oralism, not mentalism, is the mark of the Celt. The aspect of their peculiar style that became most noteworthy and most celebrated was their remarkable verbal expression of emotion.
At that one thing the Celts excelled. The Irish turned their style to express the Celtic twilight: the two dusks of birth and death. The Scots concentrated on the play of light and shadow, never clearly happy, never undoubtedly sad. The Bretons took refuge in the shadow as a covert for their perseverance.
But the Welsh took up the light in style and developed the distinct colors of their singing into a Pindarism all their own; and the clarity and brilliance of their language became a more powerful factor of identity than their nationalism or their religion. They maintained the Celtic shadow as a secret background in which to treasure their emotions. The great presumption of “Welshism” was that the visible and material world was merely a clothing or garment thrown over the living heart of sublime and beautiful reality.
It was this peculiarly Welsh style of thought, feeling, and expression that deeply characterized Hartney through the various stages of a life spent far from his native Wales.
Hartney's psychic powers were part and parcel of this “Welshism.” Among his fellow countrymen there was no prurient curiosity as to his psychic ability—“Half of the people I knew had it, the other half presumed they had it,” Hartney remarked once. Nor was there any mystery attached to it. Consequently, he did not grow up with a feeling of being abnormal or out of the ordinary. And the security he enjoyed was a distinct advantage.
Only when he went to public school and thence to Cambridge did he realize that his psychic power was a rarity and usually regarded as an untrustworthy abnormality. The English, permissive though they might be about their own emotions and peculiarities, tend to regard emotions or psychic abilities in non-English people as evidence of primitive conditions.
Hartney's latent psychic perception was mellowed at an early age by three prime, never-forgotten influences: the folklore of his people, the physical countryside, and his family's Methodism.
Before he knew one rule of English grammar or how to use a test tube, Hartney's memory was filled with the deep stuff of Welsh folklore that placed him in a living continuity with the “spirit” or “soul” of the land and the people. His mind was filled with the names of romantic Welsh princes such as Rhun ab Owain, Llewellyn, Owain Glyn Dwr, and of poets such as the fifteenth-century Tudur Aled. His mother recited the odes of the sixth-century Taliesin and Aneirin. And his speech was modeled after the metrical forms of the Welsh Middle Ages, the cywydd and englyn. He learned to avoid mentioning the year 1536 (when the infamous Act of Union abolished Welsh national independence).
The Welsh countryside that grew to be a part of Hearty's inner man was and still is of a special kind. There was a living magic about its whitewashed houses, its stone chapels, the intimate play of light on running water, the aloneness of mountain and valley, the perpetuity of pastureland, the merciless maw of mines where men grew black and sick working beneath the earth but returned to sing in chapel and go home to their wives and children. As Owen M. Edwards wrote, “The spirit of Wales is born in the mountain farmhouse, in the cottage by the brook, in the coal miner's home.”
This entire complex of nature's face and men's haunts was taken as a living thing. Years later, in the jungles of Burma and in postwar Japan, when waves of nostalgia hit him now and then for the Vale of Usk, Bala Lake, the Swallow Falls, Llyn Idwal, or for the north beach of Tenby Bay, where he spent all the summer vacations of his childhood and youth, Hearty saw himself once again in the long straw-thatched, small-windowed cottages, smelling the flitches of bacon hanging from the kitchen rafters, and eating hot “shot”—ground oatcake and milk. Such a memory was as mystical as a poem about the Vale of Av
alon and as faery as the cuckoo's song in Merion.
Methodism was the third great developing influence on Hartney. The meaning of Methodism was holiness. Not that the chapel was holy, or the singing sacred. (The minister, indeed, used to preach that it was the adjoining graveyard that made the chapel holy, not vice versa). But it was holiness in expression: the hymnal. Worship of God and Christ, performed according to rule and with the characteristic Methodist regularity and rhythm. This expression was holy because it was believed to be a conversation with the spirit of Christ and God. And more than once in his early youth, as Hartney stood between his parents during the soaring phrases of the chanting, the gabled roof of the chapel would no longer be a thick shield against the sky. It was for him a sacred mountaintop opening on to Heaven through which the angels of song descended from God to men and ascended back to God.
The extent of Hartney's psychic power became clear to him at a young age. He could and did receive clear—often literally accurate—inner intimations of what other people, near him and far away from him, were thinking and—on rare occasions—what they were suffering. It was thus in a Burmese jungle clearing late in 1943 that he knew the exact hour when both his parents died in the German blitz of London.
In 1924 Hartney chose to follow lectures in physics at Cambridge. While at the university, he became interested in Roman Catholicism. When he graduated in 1929, he had already been received into the Roman Catholic Church and had his mind made up to become a priest.
Ordained in 1936, he served in a succession of parishes in the London area, until he joined the British Army as a chaplain in 1941. Shortly afterward, his unit left for India and within a few months of his arrival there was sent into the Burmese jungles to harass the Japanese forces. During this part of his career Hartney was nicknamed “Battling Hearty” by his men. The shortened form, Hearty, stuck to him ever after.