by Неизвестный
He had his first experience of possession by Evil Spirit during the Burmese campaign. The small force of men with whom he traveled as chaplain had halted for the night in a small clearing. All was quiet and tranquil. But Hearty woke up at about 2:00 A.M. with a strong feeling that other human beings were moving near or around their encampment. He tried to fall asleep again, but the idea would not go away.
He finally sat up and listened for a few minutes. He crawled over to the commander of the unit, woke him up, and told him of his fears. It was not the first time Hearty had had these experiences. And he had always been right. The commander waited a while, talked with the posted sentinels, and finally decided to send a mortar barrage in the direction Hearty indicated. After five minutes, when there was no answering fire, they settled down to watch for the rest of the night.
In the faint light of the new day, scouts were sent out. One was back in minutes. The mortar barrage had found its target. Their night barrage had taken a Japanese hospital unit by surprise. When Hearty and the others arrived, all Japanese personnel, except for one soldier, were dead; the sole survivor was unconscious. Hearty's unit commander wanted him for questioning. He was brought back to the encampment, and his wounds were tended. When he regained consciousness several hours later, the unit commander knew he would not live very long. He had the poor fellow interrogated by his intelligence officers.
Late that afternoon Hearty went over to talk with the prisoner. He wished to find out if he was a Christian, possibly a Roman Catholic. If he were, Hearty wished to give him the last rites of the Church.
It was at the time of the short Burmese dusk that Hearty approached him. Hearty wore battle fatigues like all the members of his unit. He wore no sign or badge indicating that he was a chaplain. As Hearty approached, the prisoner's eyes flickered and then opened wide; he was looking straight up at the overhanging foliage and at the sky. Hearty expected a look of fear mixed with hate to appear in his eyes. But what he saw there was neither fear nor hate. It was some other emotion he could not recognize: inimical, yes but with an added trait he could not grasp immediately.
Still interpreting all this as a natural reaction to the sight of an enemy uniform, he drew nearer. The dying man grew more and more agitated; his limbs and torso shook; his eyes rolled around in their sockets; even his short-cropped hair seemed to stand up on his scalp. For all the world, he was like a helpless animal bristling in defense.
Hearty stopped and waited.
He had begun to perceive a very unaccustomed “mental” message. He had approached Japanese prisoners before and he knew their mentality. Hearty did not speak Japanese, but the language difference between him and them created no barrier for mental communication; that communication was not by words, verbal or mental. This dying man's mentality had some curious trait in it which Hearty was perceiving for the first time in his life in a human being.
Years before, when he and his father with some local hunters had cornered a fox that had been devastating the chickens in the farms around their home on the Severn, Hearty had killed the fox. As he took aim and was about to pull the trigger, his eyes had caught the direct glare of the defiant, snarling animal. Now, in the jungle clearing, looking at that prisoner, he had a similar feeling.
Still thinking that he had been misunderstood, Hearty pulled a small crucifix from his breast pocket and held it up so that the dying man could see it. The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. By this time, one of the intelligence officers who spoke fluent Japanese had joined Hearty. He and Hearty heard strange guttural sounds coming from the man's throat.
“My God! Padre, he's cursing your cross,” the officer said. But already Hearty was “receiving.” His mind became full of a strange perturbation; and the wordless message was clear: Go away. Take yourself and all you signify away from us. You serve what we hate.
“Ask him a question for me, Captain,” Hearty said to the officer. “Ask him why does he hate the cross.”
The officer had no sooner put the question than the prisoner started to rise. His right hand flashed up to the bandages covering his chest wounds, tearing them off in a convulsive movement.
“Himiko! Himiko!” was as much as Hearty could catch of his shout before the man fell back. The intelligence officer could not understand the curious word, but thought it must be a name of some sort. In a matter of seconds, the prisoner's eyes opened with the sightless stare of the dead. Blood flowed for a few moments from his wounds; then it stopped.
It was not until later that Hearty found out what Himiko meant. But, in the jungle, he had a dawning realization that the man who had just died had been dedicated to some spiritual power from which his hate of the cross had come. Obscurely, without fine lines or definitions, Hearty understood the raw elements of possession.
At the end of the war, in 1946, Hearty volunteered for a vacant chaplaincy in occupied Japan. He was posted to the city of Kyoto and settled into his new quarters in April of that year.
Untouched by war and deliberately preserved from bombing by the Allies, Kyoto had been the imperial capital of Japan until 1868. It was the one city of Japan that had been laid out geometrically in rectangular shape, every street running north-south or east-west. In Japan of the postwar period, Kyoto sank deeper and deeper into its traditional past while attracting radical politicians and thinkers. Its Buddhist and Shinto shrines were magnificent, and Hearty spent his spare time visiting them all.
It was during a conversation in 1947 with a teacher named Obata at the Ryukoku, the Buddhist school, that he learned about Himiko. Himiko had been, it appeared, a shaman queen in very ancient times, and a modern sect still existed that worshiped her as a devil-goddess. They believed she lived and ruled from among the snow-covered mountains behind Kyoto.
Hearty and Obata became good friends. Obata had graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938. His chosen field was mysticism; his thesis had been a comparative study of Dervish knowledge and Buddhist enlightenment. With the facts he had researched about the dance and rhythms of Dervishes and his own native knowledge of Buddhism, Obata gave Hearty a systematic perception of a type of human knowledge not based on scientifically controlled and verified facts.
Hearty's scientific background began to fall into a new perspective. He started to realize the meaning of mysticism in his own religion. And very soon, also, he began to see that whatever psychic abilities he had should be carefully distinguished from spirit and the supernatural. For this was the central lesson of Buddhist and Dervish beliefs and practices.
(Here was the distinction that Carl V. had never really understood, indeed had lost almost from the start of his parapsychological career. If any one factor in Carl's mental makeup had helped preponderantly to his being possessed, this failure was it. Failing in this vital distinction, Carl inevitably took spirit, or soul, and psychic activity as one and the same thing. Any change produced in the psyche was taken by him as a change in spirit; and any illusion imposed on the psyche was taken as an ultimate truth of the soul.)
With Obata, Hearty explored the basic ideas of telepathy and telekinesis as well as bilocation; all these had been current coin over one thousand years before the words “parapsychology” and “extrasensory perception” had been breathed on a Western campus.
Obata used simple expressions and some current terms to instruct Hearty. Hearty's psyche, he said, was a “screen” on which some powerful psychic sender could flash images. Hearty had, however, a “censor bond,” a faculty with which he could make his psyche opaque to the psychic probe of any “mind reader.”
Obata assessed Hearty as a “receiver.” And, concluding one of their discussions on the subject, he added, “Be thankful.” He would only grin good-humoredly in the Japanese fashion when Hearty asked why he should be thankful that he could not also “send” messages or move objects by telekinesis.
Hearty got only one clue, though a very dramatic one, as to why it was better thus. Once on their way home from an early-morning walk,
the two men passed by the edge of the Geon, Kyoto's renowned geisha district. Obata pointed this out to Hearty, and they stopped a moment. Without any forewarning, Obata suddenly fell forward on his face and rolled over. He was up in a flash, his eyes narrowed with apprehension.
“Hearty-San, they don't like me to be with you here. Hurry.” He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead where he had struck the pavement.
Hearty was too dazed by the bizarre experience to say anything. But as Obata left him at the gate to his quarters, he said to Hearty, again with good humor, but with a faintly grim note: “You see, my friend, it's better you be only receiver. But watch. They know you already. And they know always for future time.”
Only by reflecting on this incident did Hearty begin to understand why it was better not to be able to “send” messages or move objects at a distance. To have those abilities apparently laid one open in some mysterious way to assault by others—human beings or spirits—who enjoyed similar powers. To be on the same plane as they was somehow to be vulnerable to them.
By the time Hearty's enlistment as chaplain came to an end in 1949, the Himiko incident in the jungle as well as Obata's fall near the Geon had receded in his memory. He had already applied for and received permission to transfer himself to the United States. A bishop on the East Coast was more than willing to accept Hearty into his diocese.
Hearty had been living and working in Newark, New Jersey, for two years when the bishop called him and asked him to assist the diocesan exorcist. There would be nothing to it, the bishop assured him. Hearty had nerves of steel, and the bishop felt anyway that nine-tenths of all these things “are simply bad nerves or bad faith or both.”
The exorcism proved to be neither bad nerves nor bad faith. As far as Hearty could see, the exorcee—in this case, a middle-aged man—was afflicted with some peculiar disturbance and anguish that ceased once the exorcism rite was completed. He reported back to the bishop, adding a request to be included in future exorcisms. The bishop remonstrated; no one, absolutely no one, wants any truck with these matters. “Well, I do. And I don't know why. But I do,” had been Hearty's answer.
In the next six years Hearty was assistant at more than 17 exorcisms.
When the diocesan exorcist died unexpectedly after a long and exhausting exorcism, Hearty was clearly the strongest and most experienced man to replace him. When he was approached by the bishop, he did not hesitate for a moment.
In that same year he took his one and only holiday vacation: two weeks in his native Wales. He wandered once again around the countryside he had loved, visited the cottages of the ordinary people, ate great meals of bacon, potatoes, buttermilk, cheese, and oatcakes. He spent evenings reminiscing with old friends around open fires and tasting the fire in cwrw, the Welsh national liquor.
For the next six years or so after his return from Wales, Hearty served as an assistant priest with several assignments in the diocese. He remained diocesan exorcist. In 1963 the bishop offered Hearty his own parish. Hearty took this rather important occasion to sit down for a long and serious conversation with his bishop. With six years as exorcist behind him, as well as broad day-to-day experience with normal parish problems, Hearty had begun to see a subtle but already pervasive change.
There was, he said to the bishop, a new situation rapidly developing which the Church had not yet recognized. It concerned a new direction of psychology and psychiatry; but it seemed to Hearty that it also involved popular devotion and piety. Several times when putting candidates for exorcism through psychological and psychiatric tests he had found the experts talking of parapsychology. They seemed to look forward to some future date when all religious phenomena would be easily and understandably taken as the products of the human psyche as the psyche somehow passed through hitherto unknown altered states of consciousness. It bothered him a good deal, he told the bishop, because the new study, parapsychology, tended to displace religion altogether and to empty it of its significance.
There was a sabbatical coming to Hearty. If it was all right with his bishop, he could take a two-year sabbatical and do some private research on the subject. He would, of course, maintain his activity as diocesan exorcist; for anything of that nature he would return home, he said. The bishop gave his consent and promised Hearty the necessary financial support. Only later did Hearty tell him of his intention to follow courses at a university.
Hearty thus came to study on the campus where Carl V. had already made his name. At that point in his life, by the time Hearty started to attend Carl's lectures, he had developed a very strong instinct in matters concerning diabolism. He knew almost immediately that Carl V. was in trouble. How deeply he could not make out in the beginning. But after three semesters and various conversations with Carl and his group, Hearty was convinced that Carl was heading for serious disturbance and possibly was already well into the first stages of diabolic possession.
In the last few months of his stay at the university, Hearty was somewhat puzzled by Carl's effect on him. On the one hand, Carl took no pains to hide from him and the others that he regarded Hearty's clerical profession a definite hindrance to Hearty's full potential as a parapsychologist. On the other hand, time and time again Hearty “received” subtle “messages” from Carl, messages that were appeals for help.
The process of receiving “messages” always followed a pattern. The “messages” came as little chunks of knowledge suddenly appearing in Hearty's consciousness, always preceded by a short blank period when, it seemed to Hearty, his mind stopped thinking but he remained conscious. Immediately after that, he knew something without knowing what he knew. And then there was a sudden realization of what he knew; images appeared for what he knew; and after that he attached words to the images.
Hearty finally realized that, if part of Carl was already under the domination of an evil spirit, nevertheless another part of him was still free and as yet unpossessed. It was this profound part of Carl's being that was appealing for help. In a somewhat disconcerting moment, Hearty realized that Carl must be aware that he, Hearty, knew of the possession.
It was quite a while before Hearty got used to the idea of such a fission in a human personality with whom he was in contact several times a week. But Hearty had already learned enough over the years to realize that evil spirits do not always know everything-they do not necessarily know accurately even what they already possess. He had more than once taken hope from that very fact.
The last three “messages” Carl sent him occurred at some distance apart both in terms of time and space. One came to him on the day of his farewell to Carl at the end of his studies. When he looked back at the office building where he had just left Carl, the message came loud and clear for Hearty's psyche: “Help me! Come when I am just about to be completely taken.” Hearty dropped into the college chapel and said some prayers. He had to believe and trust that he would arrive in time for that moment when Carl was about to be “completely taken.”
The next message came to him one morning in Newark in late 1972: Carl was about to take some final step; he needed now to be pulled back, but he was helpless. Left to himself, he had to go on and perform the final act of submission to the spirit that had taken possession of him. Hearty came as fast as he could to the university campus, but he missed Carl both at the campus and at the airport.
The last message came to him at the end of July that same year. He knew Carl was home in Philadelphia and that he needed him. Again Hearty set out without delay in order to get to Carl. Hearty lost no time in beginning the examinations and study that were needed in advance of any expected exorcism.
His first undertaking was to acquaint himself with Carl's life and to test the validity of Carl's supposed psychic powers. He spoke with all those who had known Carl intimately. He tracked down both Olde and Wanola P. in different parts of the country. They both came to see Hearty; and Olde in particular was an enormous help. Carl's mother, now divorced from his father and remarried, lived in Mal
ta. But his father and two brothers gave Hearty all the help they could.
The best parapsychologist Carl knew, a Swiss-born German, was in New York for a lecture series. Carl and Hearty spent three weeks there; and the parapsychologist completed his examination of Carl between his lecture commitments. His verdict on Carl: positive. That is, the man possessed extraordinary extrasensory powers, but he was suffering from some deep trauma which was out of the parapsychologist's reach. Neither hypnosis nor pharmacological treatment was of any avail.
Hearty and Carl returned to Philadelphia, but Hearty was not yet satisfied. He distrusted parapsychologists.
While maintaining a home base in his own diocese in Newark, he went to New York several times with Carl. After a thorough physical examination, Carl was put in the hands of two psychiatrists who put him through a battery of tests. In substance, their verdict was the same as that of the parapsychologist: Carl V. was normal and sane by any standard acceptable to their profession. He had suffered, they said, from a good deal of nervous tension during the previous summer. But they could uncover no abnormality.
One of them urged Carl to return to Aquileia and finish the rite he had gone there to perform. Hearty vetoed this suggestion.
The other suggested mildly that Carl “go easy on the religion bit” for a couple of years, to give himself a chance to recuperate lost ground and gain self-confidence. As Hearty was leaving his office, the second psychiatrist became a little more expansive. He felt a lot of people were crazy on account of religion, he said. All that guilt. “Get him to go out and lay broads, Father. That'll do the trick.”
“God bless such salutary broads, Doctor,” Hearty said, tipping his hat as he left.