Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  Since that meeting in 1978, Joe Keeton has kept me abreast of his latest cases, and some of these have been very impressive. Yet until 1983, none of them could be regarded as watertight cases of reincarnation — or racial memory. And then, finally, two of his investigators — Andrew and Marguerite Selby — were able to produce documentary evidence for the existence of a ‘past incarnation’.

  The subject of the regression was a journalist, Ray Bryant, who works as a features writer for the Reading Evening Post. In 1980, he was asked to write a series on hypnotic regression. As a result of this series, he became interested in the subject, but found his own attempts at regression disappointing. However, he had become a member of a group, which met in London, and so he persevered. And during the twelfth hypnotic session, he heard himself describing an occasion when ‘he’ had fallen ill on a railway station. (Ray Bryant describes his sensations during these sessions as being like watching a television programme and simultaneously taking part in it.) It slowly emerged that ‘he’ was a farm labourer named Robert Sawyer, who had lived at Ongar, Essex, at the turn of the twentieth century. (Ray was born in 1938.) And for the next three sessions he described his life as a farm worker, questioned by all the other members of the group. Then Joe Keeton decided it was time to go further back. Ray Bryant was taken beyond Robert Sawyer’s birth. This time he became a soldier called Reuben. When asked his second name, he could only get out the first letters: ‘St …’ But it was clear that Reuben’s life had been rather more eventful than that of Robert Sawyer. He had been a sergeant in the 47th Lancashire Regiment of Foot, had been wounded in the Crimean war — where he saw Florence Nightingale — and eventually died in London — probably a suicide — in 1879, at the age of fifty-seven.

  Other details emerged. He had been wounded at the ‘Battle of the Quarries’ — of which no one in the group had heard. But a check with a reference book showed that this had actually taken place, in June 1855. (Even so, it is one of the more obscure battles of the war, which took place during the siege of Sevastopol — my own search through half a dozen books in my library has failed to find a reference to it.) He had left the army after twenty-one years’ service, in 1865, and had returned for a time to live in his home town, Ormskirk, Lancashire. His wife Mary — whom he had married when he was a corporal — had died, and he decided to follow his son — also called Reuben — to London. There he had worked as a boatman at Millwall Docks, but had been lonely and unhappy. His army career had been exceptionally happy; he loved being a soldier. Ending his life in a strange city, living alone in lodgings, depressed him — Ray Bryant said that the change that came over his personality when he changed from soldier to Thames boatman was pathetic. And he had died in 1865.

  The chances of learning anything about an ex-sergeant in the Crimean war seemed remote, but Andrew and Marguerite Selby, who lived in South Harrow, offered to undertake the task. Andrew Selby is a civil engineer who became interested in regression when he heard Joe Keeton broadcasting on LBC, asking for subjects who would agree to be hypnotised. But where did one begin? A good starting point seemed to be the Guildhall Library, in the City of London, and there they had an unbelievable stroke of luck. There was a book containing the casualty roll of the Crimean war, and looking under ‘St’ — the only letters of the surname Reuben had been able to pronounce — they found a Sergeant Reuben Stafford who had been wounded in the hand at the Battle of the Quarries. He had won medals, and had been promoted; the record gave the dates. Now they had the means to find out whether Reuben St … was Sergeant Reuben Stafford (later colour-sergeant). At this next regression, they asked Ray Bryant to go back to these dates and asked him what had happened. He was right every time.

  This was not the end of the research. The Selbys checked the Public Record Office in Kew and the General Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages in what used to be Somerset House (now St Catherine’s House). They found Reuben’s death certificate that showed that he died by drowning, and gave an address in Gravesend. Reuben had been very poor when he died, and they discovered that his grave was a ‘communal’ one in the cemetery at East Ham. Ray Bryant has recorded how deeply moved he felt as he stood on the spot where the records showed Reuben’s grave had been. Reuben’s bones had vanished long ago — in these communal burial plots, room was made for someone else after twenty years or so.

  In a case like this, the cryptomnesia theory is no longer tenable. Reuben ‘checked out’ both ways: the dates he gave proved to be accurate; the dates in the records produced the correct response from Reuben. It could be argued that Ray Bryant, under hypnosis, read the minds of his questioners and gave them the answers they knew to be correct; but that fails to explain Ray Bryant’s accurate knowledge about a Reuben St … who was wounded in the hand at the Battle of the Quarries before Sevastopol. (When Reuben was regressed to dates after this wound, be held his paralysed hand in a stiff and awkward manner; as soon as he was regressed further back, the paralysis disappeared.) There seems to be no way of explaining this case except to accept that Ray Bryant was Sergeant Reuben Stafford of Ormskirk in a previous existence, or that he was in some way in touch with the mind of Reuben Stafford. Andrew Selby is inclined to the ‘collective unconscious’ hypothesis; Ray Bryant, on the whole, prefers the simpler explanation of reincarnation.

  If he is correct, the implications are interesting. To begin with, we must also assume that after dying in the Thames in 1865, Reuben was reincarnated as a farm labourer named Robert Sawyer a few years later, and that he died before Ray Bryant was born in 1938. And if we can accept that Robert Sawyer and Reuben Stafford were real people, then it seems highly likely that four other earlier ‘incarnations’ who have appeared under hypnosis are also real: Wilfred Anderton, a coachman of the eighteenth century, a girl called Winifred, who died quite young, a housemaid named Elizabeth who rose to become a governess in the late-seventeenth century, and an unnamed character who does not appear to understand English, and who lived about a century earlier.

  This also raises in a new form the basic question of what, if anything, survives death. Clearly, not sexual differentiation, since Ray Bryant was both male and female in past incarnations. Then what is the basic ‘substratum’ of personality that was common to all seven people? When I fired this question at him, Ray Bryant admitted that he had no idea. But he felt that all the previous six incarnations had contributed something to what he is now. In Preston, where the 47th had its barracks (and where Ray Bryant was able to examine the regimental records), he had a strong feeling of déjà-vu. His knowledge of Reuben seemed to him to explain his recurrent nightmare of falling out of a boat, and the sense of peace he has always experienced in or beside water — whether river, sea, stream or pond. It seems, then, that something can be carried over from one ‘lifetime’ to another — and this, of course, seems to strengthen the possibility that something of the personality survives death. But it also implies that what survives death — ‘Myers’, ‘Gurney’, and so on — is not in itself permanent, but that it will in turn evolve to something else. This seems, in fact, to be one of the most consistent factors in all ‘spirit teachings’, from Kardec and Stainton Moses to Geraldine Cummins.

  Among Hindus and Buddhists, reincarnation is an article of religious faith. The ancient Celts believed in it; so did the Greeks. Various fathers of the Church — like St Jerome and Origen — regarded the doctrine with sympathy. But it was condemned outright by the Second Council of Constantinople — convened by the Emperor Justinian — and from then on became a Christian heresy. In a pamphlet on reincarnation published by the Catholic Truth Society, Father J. H. Crehan, SJ, sums up: ‘… for a Catholic, it should be clear that our faith has no room for theories of reincarnation’. (It may or may not be significant that Ian Wilson is a Catholic convert.)

  But it would probably be fair to say that the main reason reincarnation has made so little headway in the West in our own time is that most people feel it to be a licence for fantasy. The force
of the objection can be seen in a case I have discussed at length elsewhere: that of Dr Arthur Guirdham.* Dr Guirdham, who was senior consultant in psychiatry for the Bath medical area, had always been fascinated by the thirteenth-century heretical sect called the Cathars — ‘pure ones’. They believed that God is not all-powerful, that evil is an independent force, perhaps as strong as good, and that the realm of matter belongs to the devil. The Church persecuted them, and in 1244 most of them were massacred at Montségur, near Toulouse. In Toulouse and other places in the area, Guirdham had powerful feelings of déjà vu. He had also suffered most of his adult life from a nightmare in which he was lying down when he was approached by a tall man; he often woke up screaming.

  In 1962, Guirdham saw a patient whom he calls Mrs Smith, who had often had a similar nightmare. Both their nightmares ceased after she became his patient. What she did not tell him immediately was that she had recognised him as a person who had recurred in her dreams for many years. These dreams — about her existence as a girl in thirteenth-century France — had started after a series of peculiar attacks of unconsciousness. And in her dreams, she saw a young Cathar priest called Roger de Grisolles, who had come to her parents’ cottage one night during a snowstorm, and with whom she had a love affair. When her parents threw her out, she went to live with Roger in his house. Her dream-memories of this house became increasingly detailed. The idyll came to an end with a murder. She was not sure who was murdered, but she knew that someone called Pierre de Mazerolles was involved. Roger died in prison, and she herself was later burned alive at Montségur. She recognised Guirdham as ‘Roger’.

  It took ‘Mrs Smith’ a year to work up the courage to tell Guirdham about her dreams. He was thunderstruck. ‘Mrs Smith’ knew absolutely nothing about Catharism. But he knew that the persecution and massacre of the Cathars had started after a man called Pierre de Mazerolles had organised the murder of inquisitors sent to Toulouse by the pope. Guirdham began to investigate the details ‘Mrs Smith’ remembered about the Cathars. Some of the details sounded unlikely: for example, that Cathar priests wore green or blue. She made a note of this in 1944; in 1965 the French scholar Jean Duvernoy discovered that some Cathar priests did dress in green or blue. She had dreamed of sugar sawed from a loaf and used as a medicinal remedy; in 1969, the scholar Rene Nelli discovered that sugar was imported from the Arab countries in ‘loaves’ and was regarded as a universal remedy. ‘Mrs Smith’ ’s detailed description of Cathar rituals and beliefs were again confirmed by the scholars.

  So far, the story sounds plausible enough to anyone who has an open mind about reincarnation. ‘Mrs Smith’ ’s discovery that Dr Guirdham had been her lover in a previous existence sounds like a typical example of Freud’s ‘transference phenomenon’ (when the patient falls in love with the doctor), and the coincidence of the two coming together again in the twentieth century is a little hard to swallow. But the confirmation of the details about Catharism by scholars seems to clinch the story. If Hudson’s ‘subjective mind’ was really responsible for all these phenomena, then its powers must be even wider than Hudson thought.

  I wrote about Guirdham in my book The Occult, and went to stay with him at his home near Bath. This certainly dissipated my suspicion that he might have invented Mrs Smith, for although I did not meet her, it was quite plain that Guirdham is a perfectly normal, honest, well-balanced individual, not a crank, and his wife Mary, who confirmed the details of his book, seemed the epitome of commonsense. He showed me his correspondence with various scholars, and it became clear that he had left an enormous amount of evidence out of his book, simply for fear of confusing the reader.

  But what worried me, even at that stage, were the later developments of his Cathar involvement. He showed me the manuscript of a book called We Are One Another, which begins with his meeting with a woman he calls Clare Mills, an attractive, bustling open-air girl, who asked him one day if the words Raymond and Albigensian meant anything to him — they kept ‘repeating in her head’. Albigenses was another name for Cathars, and Raymond was the name of the counts of Toulouse. All this was before he had written his book about ‘Mrs Smith’, The Cathars and Reincarnation, so she had no way of knowing about his interest in the subject. ‘Clare Mills’ had also had dreams of being burned, and the names involved made it clear that she was also dreaming about the Cathar persecution. She dreamed of being made to walk half naked towards a huge bonfire, and of being struck on the back by a burning torch — she had a strange birthmark there which looked like a series of hard blisters. Guirdham concluded that she was another Cathar with whom he had been acquainted in a previous existence. But this was not all. The mother of a dead girl showed Guirdham a notebook her daughter had kept at the age of seven; it was full of Cathar names and sketches … Guirdham came to believe that the mother and daughter had both been Cathars. Other acquaintances became involved in the strange story, so that there was no alternative to the belief that Guirdham was studying a case of ‘group reincarnation’ (a doctrine preached by ‘Myers’ to Geraldine Cummins, we may recall).

  More was to come. In The Lake and the Castle, Guirdham explains how he became convinced that this same group of people had been involved together in an earlier epoch, as members of the reincarnationist Celtic church; they had also suffered martyrdom … And, as if feeling that a reader who can swallow a gnat can swallow a camel, Guirdham goes on to tell how this same group had also been involved together in Roman Britain in the fourth century and in the Napoleonic era.

  I have been a friend of Arthur Guirdham ever since those days in the early 1970s, and have often stayed in his home. He is the godfather of my daughter. So I believe I know him fairly well. I have taken ‘Clare Mills’ out to dinner (with the Guirdhams) and she confirmed everything he said. I have no reason to believe he is a Svengali who can persuade his patients to cooperate in his fantasies about previous lives, or that his books are inventions written to gain notoriety. Clearly, he believes every word in them. Moreover, he is far too intelligent to allow his fantasy to run away with him. Ian Wilson points out that if Guirdham had stopped after recounting the ‘Mrs Smith’ case, and perhaps written a psychiatric study of ‘Mrs Smith’, his claims would probably have met with serious attention. He knows as well as anyone that this ‘group reincarnation’, and all the previous lives as Celts and Romans (not to mention Guirdham’s own life as an ancient Greek of the thirteenth century BC, described in The Island), make his story totally unacceptable to most readers. Presumably he would protest, like Sir William Crookes: ‘I didn’t say it was possible — I said it was true.’

  Father Crehan’s view of the case is that Guirdham, ‘Mrs Smith’, ‘Clare Mills’ and the rest were telepathic, and that they somehow ‘pooled’ their fantasies and the results of their reading. Guirdham’s account of his relation with ‘Mrs Smith’ makes this quite impossible — she had been making detailed notes about the Cathars eighteen years before she met him. So we are left with only two possible solutions: either that Guirdham is a self-deceiver on a heroic scale, or that the concept of ‘group reincarnation’ is basically true.

  Fortunately, it is of no immediate consequence to this argument whether it is true or not. The picture that emerges from case histories of reincarnation seems quite clear and consistent, and it fits the general pattern of arguments for ‘survival’ without contradiction. We have noted, for example, that Mary Roff knew about her parents’ attempt to communicate with her through a medium, and was able to quote the words she had written at the seance. Mediumship actually seems to be a form of temporary ‘possession’. Mary and Lurancy Vennum apparently came to an agreement about the possession of Lurancy Vennum’s body for a few months. After it was all over, Mary still ‘dropped in’ periodically.

  The picture that emerges is of ‘disembodied’ entities who can, under the right circumstances, enter or leave a human body exactly as a driver can enter or leave a car. In the case of Jasbir Lal Jat, it looks as if Sobha Ram found the abandone
d car while the engine was still warm, and slipped into the driving seat. The idea seems an affront to commonsense, but the evidence is there to support it.

  On the whole, the ‘facts’, as they emerge from various cases, seem to support Steiner’s view of reincarnation as an evolutionary experience, as set forth in the eight volumes of Karmic Relationships. There is only one major point of contradiction; Steiner seemed to feel that the process of reincarnation takes anything from a hundred to a thousand years. But Steiner’s own views evolved over the years; there are some major differences between Theosophy (1904) and An Outline of Occult Science six years later. Steiner never claimed to be infallible; like all mystics, he tried to describe his ‘glimpses’ as he received them.

  Steiner’s importance lies in the impressive consistency of his teachings, and on his insistence that it is a mistake to try to take ‘spiritualism’ too literally. ‘The Spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ He never ceased to emphasise that ‘the spirit world is woven out of the substance of which human thought consists.’ What he seems to be saying is that man is somehow quite mistaken to assume that he is ‘imprisoned’ in a material world, and in allowing this to induce a certain basic passivity towards his own life. He loves to emphasise the immense latent creative powers of the human mind. So although his attitude towards Spiritualism often seems hostile, he is fundamentally reaffirming what Myers says in Human Personality — and what Catherine Crowe had said before him: that human beings possess enormous hidden powers they never even suspect. The point is underlined by a passage that expresses the essence of Steiner’s thought:

  Your present surroundings are, in a sense, your creation, in that you are mentally so unemancipated; your nerves and senses convey to you your own perception of life. If you were capable of focusing your ego or daily consciousness within your deeper mind, if in short you trained yourself to pass into a thought compound from which form, as the senses convey it, were absent, the material world would vanish.