Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  Cases like this make it very clear that, while we have a few plausible theories about ghosts, apparitions and such things, we lack any comprehensive theory that would explain them all. Even a belief in ‘spirits’ gets us no closer to an explanation of Mrs Hall’s peculiar experience.

  Frederick Myers, the man who was most responsible for creating the Society for Psychical Research, was keenly aware of this deficiency. From the age of twenty-six, when he took the famous ‘starlit walk’ with Henry Sidgwick, until his death thirty-two years later, he never ceased trying to fit all paranormal phenomena into a single pattern. The result of these efforts appeared two years after his death, in a work called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. The book is a masterpiece, probably the most comprehensive work ever written on the subject of the paranormal. Unfortunately, it is almost unknown to the general reader, largely on account of its off-putting title, which makes it sound as if it is full of accounts of seance rooms and messages from the dead. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an ambitious attempt to review the strange powers of the human mind; the question of ‘life after death’ is raised only towards the end.

  Because the book is so little known, and because its conclusions are so important, let us consider it in some detail. Myers begins by discussing clinical cases of what we would now call ‘multiple personality’. On 7 September 1824, a German epileptic named Sörgel murdered an old woodcutter in the forest, and chopped off his head and feet with his own axe. After this, he drank the man’s blood. Back in town, he talked quite openly about what he had done, explaining that drinking blood is a cure for epilepsy. Sörgel was already known as a ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ personality who developed criminal tendencies after his fits. A week later, by the time he appeared in front of the magistrate, he had reverted back to the Jekyll personality, quiet and polite, and without the slightest memory of the murder. He was found not guilty and sent to a lunatic asylum.

  Another case cited by Myers offers at least one interesting clue to this mystery of multiple personality. Louis Vivé was ten years old when he was sent to a children’s home in 1873, and was of a quiet, obedient disposition. Four years later, he had a terrifying encounter with a viper, which produced a state of shock. After this, he began having epileptic fits, and developed hysterical paralysis of the legs. He was sent to an asylum at Bonneval for observation, and for the next two months worked quietly at tailoring. Then he had a fit that lasted for two days, with violent convulsions and moods of ecstasy. When he woke up, the paralysis had vanished, and he was a changed person. He had no memory of anything that had happened since the viper attack. And he was violent, dishonest and badly behaved. The former Louis had been a teetotaller; the new one not only drank, but stole the wine of the other patients.

  After serving in the marines, and spending some time in jail for theft, Vivé was sent to the Rochefort asylum, where three doctors became fascinated by his case. Vivé now suffered from paralysis of the right side of his body, and from a speech defect that made him stutter badly. In spite of the speech defect he was a non-stop talker, and was inclined to preach atheism and violent revolution.

  The 1880s saw a revival of interest in the doctrines of Mesmer, including his belief that the ‘vital powers’ can be moved around the human body by means of magnets. Vivé’s doctors were interested in a variation of this doctrine — that various metals could get rid of paralysis. And when they tried stroking Vivé’s upper right arm with steel, it had the astonishing effect of promptly transferring the paralysis to the left side of his body. Immediately, the old, gentle Louis Vivé came back. He had no memory of the person he had become after the long epileptic attack.

  We have a clue that was unknown to Vivé’s doctors — that the left brain controls the right half of the body, and vice versa. So when the ‘criminal’ Vivé’s right side was paralysed, his left brain was affected, and the personality that expressed itself was the ‘right-brain Vivé’. The left brain is the speech hemisphere — hence the stuttering. A rough outline of Vivé’s problem becomes discernible. His early childhood had been difficult, with a drunken and violent mother; he became a timid and repressed personality. The ‘social I’, as we have seen, lives in the left brain. His right-brain self — the ‘intuitive’ Vivé — had no chance to express its aggressions or frustrations. The shock of the encounter with the viper caused the total withdrawal of the timid, left-brain self, and left the ‘other Vivé’ free to express itself. From then on, Vivé turned into a classic case of ‘multiple personality’.

  Myer’s account of the case (which gives the impression that he personally interviewed Louis Vivé) ends with an interesting footnote; he mentions that when a magnet was placed on Vivé’s head, he instantly became ‘normal’ again, except that his memory stopped short of the day before the encounter with the viper. It seems quite clear that ‘magnetism’ did work, and that modern science may be neglecting an interesting line of research.

  Myers goes on to discuss other examples of multiple personality. There was the celebrated case of a man called Ansel Bourne, who was standing on a street corner in Providence, Rhode Island, when he lost his memory. The next thing he knew was waking up in a strange room in a strange bed. It was two months later, and he was in Norristown, Pennsylvania. During that time, Bourne had gone to Norristown, rented a confectionery shop, and carried on business under the name of A. J. Brown. No one even suspected that he was a case of amnesia.

  Even stranger is the case of Clara Fowler, described by the psychiatrist Morton Prince, who called her Christine Beauchamp. When trying to cure Clara of severe depression, Prince placed her under hypnosis, and a completely new personality emerged, a bright, mischievous child who called herself Sally. And ‘Sally’ could ‘take over’ Clara when she felt inclined. She used to enjoy playing tricks, like going for a long walk in the country — ‘Sally’ was as strong as a mule — and then ‘abandoning’ the body and leaving the exhausted Clara to walk home. On one occasion, ‘Sally’ ‘borrowed’ Clara’s body for weeks, went off to another town and got a job as a waitress, then finally abandoned it and left Clara to make her own way back to Boston. Like Louis Vivé’s alter-ego, ‘Sally Beauchamp’ stuttered badly.

  But the case of Clara Fowler was more complicated than this. Under hypnosis, a third personality emerged, who was more adult and balanced than either Clara or ‘Sally’. So the ‘double brain’ explanation that seems to fit the case of Louis Vivé or Ansel Bourne no longer applies here. In his chapter on hypnosis, Myers seeks a new explanation. He describes a series of experiments carried out by Edmund Gurney, and later by Mrs Sidgwick, which revealed that most people could be hypnotised to two different ‘depths’ or levels, and that one subject could even be hypnotised through nine different depths. The subject would be placed under hypnosis and told some ‘fact’ — for example, that a local hotel had just been burnt down. Then he would be hypnotised more deeply, and told another ‘fact’ — that there had been a railway accident. Then down to a third ‘depth’, and yet another ‘fact’ — that the Emperor of Germany had been forced to cut short a state visit to Queen Victoria because a relative had died … When subsequently re-hypnotised, the subject would remember each ‘fact’ as he reached the correct level, but would have no memory of any of the others. Myers inferred that this could be an explanation of multiple personality — that we all have many layers or levels, and that a shock — like Louis Vivé’s viper — can produce an effect like hypnosis and plunge the patient to another level of personality. This explanation may or may not be correct, but it shows Myers’ determination to try to find a key to the mysteries of the unconscious mind.

  This emerges most clearly in his chapter on genius. He says: ‘Genius … should be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range … of faculties in some degree innate in all.’ (My italics.) This is what fascinates Myers; that such powers are not some kind of freak, but probably exist in all of us. He goes on to cite many stories of extraordinary
mental feats. A five-year-old boy, Benjamin Blyth, was out walking with his father, and asked him what time it was; his father said it was half past seven. A few minutes later the child said: ‘In that case, I have been alive …’, and named the exact number of seconds since his birth. When they got home, his father took a sheet of paper and worked it out. ‘You made a mistake — you were wrong by 172,800 seconds.’ ‘No I wasn’t,’ said the child, ‘you forgot the two leap years, 1820 and 1824.’ And Myers also speaks of Professor Truman Henry Safford who, at the age of ten, could perform multiplications in his head when the answer came to thirty-six figures, and the peasant boy Vito Mangiamele, who took half a minute to extract the cube root of 3,796,416.

  A modern case can illustrate more clearly what is at issue: the ‘calendar calculating twins’ John and Michael, ‘idiot savants’ who have spent most of their lives in a state mental hospital in America. They have been described by the psychiatrist Oliver Sacks.* Although the twins are mentally subnormal, with an IQ of only sixty, they can name the day of the week of any date in the past or future forty thousand years. Asked, let us say, about 6 March 1877, they shout almost instantly: ‘Tuesday.’ And they have no more difficulty about a date long before the Great Pyramid was built. Yet, oddly enough, the twins have the utmost difficulty with ordinary addition and subtraction, and do not appear to even understand multiplication and division. The opinion of most scientists who have studied them is that they have some simple formula. But Dr Sacks reached a quite different conclusion. He was present one day when a box of matches fell on the floor, and both twins said immediately: ‘A hundred and eleven.’ When Sacks counted the matches, there were, indeed, a hundred and eleven. The twins also murmured Thirty-seven’, and when Sacks asked them why, they explained that three thirty-sevens make a hundred and eleven. He asked them how they knew there were a hundred and eleven. ‘We saw it.’ So they had instantaneously counted the matches as they were falling. And they gave the same answer when Sacks asked how they had worked out that thirty-seven is a third of one hundred and eleven. It was as if they had seen one hundred and eleven ‘splitting’ into three parts.

  On another occasion, Sacks walked up behind them when they were repeating numbers to one another. One would say a six-figure number, and the other would savour it, then say another six-figure number. Sacks made a note of these numbers, and when he got home, studied them carefully. He discovered that they were all prime numbers — numbers that cannot be divided exactly by any other number (for example, five, seven and eleven).

  Now there is an interesting thing about prime numbers: there is no short cut to finding out whether some huge number is a prime, except by painstakingly dividing every other number into it. (Sacks used a book.)

  How were the twins doing it? They could not be calculating them — they had virtually no power of calculation. The next day, Sacks went to see them carrying his book on prime numbers. They were still playing the number game, and Sacks joined in, repeating an eight-figure prime. There was a half-minute pause while they looked at him in astonishment, then both broke into smiles, and began swapping eight-figure primes. An hour later they were swapping twenty-four-figure primes — although even an ‘electronic brain’ would take some time to work out whether such a huge figure is a prime or not.

  Sacks concluded that, in some extraordinary way, the twins were seeing these huge numbers instantaneously, just as they ‘saw’ the number of matches in the box. That is to say, they were somehow using the right side of the brain instead of the left, as the rest of us do for calculation. Yet the fact that they are not particularly intelligent seems to demonstrate that this is not some extraordinary form of genius. It is almost certainly a power which everyone possesses — potentially — but which the rest of us have somehow ‘suppressed’ through the development of ‘left-brain consciousness’.

  Myers knew nothing of the right and left hemispheres; he only knew that such powers spring from the unconscious mind — or, as he preferred to call it, the ‘subliminal mind’. This is not the modern ‘Unconscious’, derived from Freud and Jung. Myers’s ‘subliminal mind’ is not some kind of dustbin that contains repressions, neuroses and incestuous guilt feelings. It is the source of the flashes of intuition that we call genius. It could therefore be regarded as a kind of combination of the Unconscious mind of Freudian psychology and the ‘high self of the Kahunas, as described by Max Freedom Long. This view is concisely expressed by Aldous Huxley in a foreword he wrote for an American edition of Myers’s book: ‘Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with a cellar? Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath?’ Myers, he goes on to say, takes the view that the human soul has an attic above ordinary consciousness as well as a basement below it, and that Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death is ‘an immense store of information about the strange and often wonderful goings-on in the upper stories of man’s soul-house’. This is, in fact, precisely what makes Myers’s book so remarkable.

  What it all proves, according to Myers, is that our powers are far greater than we realise. If this argument sounds familiar, it is because we have already encountered it in Catherine Crowe’s Night Side of Nature. The difference is that while Mrs Crowe states her facts, and leaves the reader to take them or leave them, Myers wants to make the reader concede that they are facts. Mrs Crowe cites some vague experiment about a hypnotist engaging in a ‘battle of will’ with an animal. Myers actually took the trouble to make the journey to Le Havre, and witness experiments in which a certain Dr Gibert hypnotised a patient called Leonie from half a mile away, merely by willing her to fall into a trance. In fact, Leonie resisted; she told the psychologist Pierre Janet: ‘I know very well that M. Gibert tried to put me to sleep, but when I felt him I looked for some water and put my hands in cold water. I don’t want people to put me to sleep that way … it makes me look silly.’ And then he goes on to cite a successful experiment, in which — after Gibert had tried to put her to sleep at a distance — they all went and hid near Leonie’s house, and watched her walk out of the garden gate with her eyes closed, and walk towards Gibert’s house.

  In her little book Spiritualism and the Age We Live In, published in 1859 (just before her mental breakdown), Mrs Crowe had remarked:

  … there is a department of knowledge which, as far as we know, is not reducible to experimental science … I allude to the knowledge or science of ourselves. Of our bodies … we have, within a comparatively short space of time, learnt a great deal; but of ourselves as composite beings we know absolutely nothing. We have added nothing to the knowledge of the ancients; perhaps we have rather lost what they knew or suspected. Metaphysics gives us words without any distinct ideas, and Psychology is a name without a science …

  But a mere twenty years later, this was no longer true; psychology was quickly becoming a real science, and it was revealing some of those secrets about ‘ourselves’ that Catherine Crowe regarded as the most important of all kinds of knowledge. This explains the undercurrent of excitement and optimism that runs through Myers’s book. He was quite convinced — he says as much at the end — that man was at some crucial turning point in his history, and that this new ‘science of ourselves’ would transform human existence as completely as the science of Galileo and Newton had transformed it since the seventeenth century.

  What abnormal psychology teaches us, he argued, was that our minds are richer and stranger than we could imagine. Even Aldous Huxley’s image of a house with an upper storey fails to do justice to Myers’s vision of human personality. It is more like a skyscraper, with dozens of storeys above ground, and another dozen or so below. His experiments with different ‘layers’ of consciousness seemed to reveal that man has a whole series of ‘basements’ below his ‘everyday self’. And that in turn suggests that he also has a series of upper storeys above his everyday consciousness. Moreover, if we think of a case like that of Louis Vivé, we can see that his crimi
nal alter-ego was a more primitive, violent person than the polite, well-behaved Louis, and therefore a step in the direction of the cave-man. Which also suggests that his undeveloped higher levels are a step in the opposite direction — towards the god.

  For Myers, cases like the ones we discussed at the beginning of this chapter — the lady who saw her own ‘double’ standing by the sideboard and the schoolteacher who was continually standing ‘beside herself’ — were not psychological freaks or anomalies; they were evidence of some peculiar power we do not understand. He cites a typical case of a ‘phantasm of the living’ taken from the Society for Psychical Research’s ‘Census of Hallucinations’. On a Sunday afternoon in August 1889, a girl identified as ‘Miss KE’ changed her mind about going to church, and instead spent the afternoon in her uncle’s library, studying his genealogical chart. But her two sisters, who went to church, saw her walking up the aisle with a roll of paper (evidently the genealogical chart) under her arm. All three sisters wrote an account of this odd occurrence.

  The case is not as unusual as it sounds; there are well over a hundred like it in the ‘Census of Hallucinations’ and Phantasms of the Living. In most of them, it seems clear that the person who projected the ‘doppelgänger’ was thinking about the place where the ‘double’ was seen. In his autobiography Legends, the dramatist Strindberg describes how, when he was dangerously ill in Paris, he experienced a powerful longing to be back in Germany with his wife’s family. For a moment, he felt he was inside the house, and could see his mother-in-law playing the piano. Shortly afterwards, he received a letter from his mother-in-law asking ‘Are you all right? When I was playing the piano the other day I looked up and saw you standing there.’ It is important to note that Strindberg was seriously ill at the time, which suggests that the mechanism involved is much the same as in cases where people on the point of death have been seen by close relatives.