by Colin Wilson
Oesterreich’s pièce de résistance is a long account of the famous case of the “devils of Loudun”, which, in 1952, was made the subject of a full-length study by Aldous Huxley. In 1633 Urbain Grandier, the parish priest of the small French town of Loudun, was charged with bewitching the nuns in a local convent and causing them to be possessed by demons, so that they screamed blasphemies and obscenities and writhed about on the floor displaying their private parts. Grandier had become notorious for his immoralities – he had impregnated two of his penitents and seduced many others – and had made many enemies. Inquisitors claimed to find “devil’s marks” on his body, and in a trial that was a travesty of justice, he was found guilty and sentenced to be burned alive. Even under torture, and later at the stake, Grandier maintained his innocence. His death made no difference, and the nuns continued to be possessed by “demons” for many years.
Oesterreich, like Aldous Huxley, takes the view that all this could be explained simply in terms of hysteria, while another authority, Rossell Hope Robbins, goes even further in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology and attributes the manifestations to outright imposture. But a careful reading of Huxley’s own book makes either of these explanations seem implausible. It is easy to see how sex-starved nuns could deceive themselves into believing that they were possessed by devils – the Mother Superior of the convent, Sister Jeanne des Anges, admits in her autobiography that she made no real attempt to combat the possession because she enjoyed the sexual stirrings aroused in her by the demons.
But it is far more difficult to understand what then happened to the exorcists themselves. Brother Lactance, who had overseen the torture, became “possessed” and died insane within a month; five years later Brother Tranquille died of exhaustion after months of battling against the “invaders” of his psyche, and was amazed to witness his body writhing on the ground and hear himself uttering blasphemies that he was powerless to prevent. Brother Lucas, another of Grandier’s persecutors, met the same fate. The “witch pricker”, Dr Mannouri, also died in delirium. Brother Jean-Joseph Surin, a genuinely saintly man, who was called to Loudun to try and exorcise the nuns after Grandier’s execution, himself fell victim to the “devils” and became periodically insane for twenty-five years.
It is difficult to believe that ordinary hysteria could produce such results. Surin described in a letter how the “alien spirit” was united to his own, “constituting a second me, as though I had two souls”. Considering these facts, the skeptical Anita Gregory admits that “one is probably not justified in assuming that . . . the Loudun pandemonium [was] necessarily nothing but collective delusion”. And bearing in mind Kardec’s comment that “a spirit does not enter into a body as you enter into a house . . . he assimilates himself to a [person] who has the same defects and the same qualities as himself”, the hypothesis that the Loudun “pandemonium” was caused by Wickland’s earthbound spirits seems, on the whole, more plausible than the religious-hysteria theory.
It is difficult to draw a clear dividing line between “possession” and poltergeist manifestations. Poltergeists are “noisy ghosts” who cause objects to fly through the air, and scientific observation of dozens of cases has established their reality beyond all doubt. The most widely held current view is that they are a form of ‘spontaneous psychokinesis” (mind over matter) caused by the unconscious mind of an emotionally disturbed adolescent, but this theory fails to explain how the unconscious mind can cause heavy objects to fly through the air. (In labouratory experiments, “psychics” have so far failed to move any object larger than a compass needle.) According to Kardec’s “informants”, poltergeists are earthbound spirits who are, under certain conditions, able to draw energy from the living and make use of negative energies “exuded” by the emotionally disturbed and the sexually frustrated.
In the Amherst case of 1878, poltergeist phenomena began to occur in the home of an unmarried girl named Esther Cox, who lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, Daniel Teed. After an attempt at abduction and rape, Esther’s boyfriend had hastily left the area, and Esther was deeply upset. A few days later, rustling noises – sounding like a mouse – came from a box under her bed; a few nights after that, following a hysterical fit, Esther’s body began to swell like a balloon. There were then two loud bangs, and she ceased swelling and fell asleep. All of this was repeated a few days later; the bedclothes also flew off the bed, and the pillow inflated. As the family stood around the bed, there was a scratching noise above it, and an invisible hand or claw traced on the plaster the words: Esther, you are mine to kill. At a later stage of the manifestation, Esther turned into a human magnet – knives stuck to her – and some iron spokes in her lap became too hot to touch. When spontaneous fires broke out, Esther was accused of causing them and sentenced to four months in jail. By the time she was released, the manifestations had ceased.
Ten years later, in 1889, a farm in Quebec province run by a man named George Dagg became the scene of equally bizarre poltergeist manifestations: milk pans overturned, small fires started, windows smashed, and water poured on the floor. In this case, the “focus” (or the person who seemed to be causing it) was a young girl named Dinah McLean, an orphan. The poltergeist often attacked Dinah, making her scream; like Esther Cox, she also seemed to be able to hear it, although no one else could. Later, it began to talk in a gruff voice, uttering violent obscenities and alleging that it was the Devil. But after some dialogue with George Dagg – during which it admitted to causing the fires and throwing stones – it declared its willingness to leave the following Sunday. Crowds of neighbours gathered, and the poltergeist talked freely, seeming to have an intimate knowledge of their lives. (The Fox poltergeist had also been able to supply all kinds of personal information to the neighbours.) It also alleged that it was not the “Devil” of the previous day but an angel sent by God; but it proceeded to contradict itself and then lost its temper and used foul language. Finally, it declared that it would leave the following morning after taking leave of the village children. The next morning, the children rushed in from the yard to say that they had just seen a beautiful man in white, who had picked up two of them – Mary and Johnny – in his arms and declared that Johnny was a fine little fellow, then put them down and ascended into the sky. After this, the manifestations ceased.
In both these cases, the poltergeist masqueraded as some kind of demonic entity but was clearly nothing of the sort – an observation that seems to suggest that poltergeists, like the devils of Loudun, are probably also “earthbound spirits”.
Another investigator who came to believe that “possession” was due to spirits was Max Freedom Long, an American schoolmaster who arrived in Hawaii in 1917, at the age of twenty-seven, and began to make a study of its native “magicians”, the kahunas or “keepers of the secret” – the last representatives of the ancient Huna religion. According to Huna belief, Long discovered, man has three “selves”: the “low self”, the “middle self”, and the “high self”. The low self is basically emotional and corresponds roughly to Freud’s unconscious mind. The middle self is our ordinary, everyday consciousness. The high self might be called the superconscious mind and can foresee the future. After death, the three selves may become separated, and it is the low self that sometimes becomes a poltergeist, and the middle self may become a “ghost”. In his book describing these investigations – offputtingly entitled The Secret Science Behind Miracles – Long also discusses the phenomenon of multiple personality and expresses the view that this is often due to “possession”, either by a low self or a middle self or a combination of the two. He describes the case of a California girl with a secondary personality that took over the body for years at a time. When doctors tried to amalgamate the two under hypnosis, a third personality appeared, who told them that the girl should be left as she was, with two spirits sharing the body. This third personality warned that if they persisted, it would withdraw and leave them with a corpse; Long believed t
his third person to be the girl’s “high self”.
Two more eminent American investigators came to accept the possibility of “possession”. The philosopher William James was converted from his early skepticism to a belief in “spirits” through the medium-ship of Mrs Leonore Piper, whose “control”, Phinuit, was able to tell him all kinds of things that he could not possibly have learned by normal means. James was to agree that if a medium could be “possessed” by a spirit, then it was possible that other people might be and that this could explain cases of “demoniacal possession”.
James’s close friend, Professor James Hyslop, was another skeptic who was “converted” by Mrs Piper. But he had a more practical reason for becoming convinced of the reality of “possession”. When Hyslop was president of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1907, he was visited by a goldsmith named Frederick Thompson, who believed that he had become “possessed” by the spirit of a painter named Robert Swain Gifford, whom he had met on a few occasions. After Gifford’s death, Thompson had begun to hear Gifford’s voice urging him to draw and paint – something he had never done before – and although he had no artistic training, Thompson began to paint in Gifford’s style. What convinced Hyslop was that Thompson painted accurate pictures of places that he had never seen but that Gifford had. Some of these proved to be identical to Gifford’s final sketches – which Thompson had never seen – and when Hyslop visited the New England swamps and coastal regions, he recognized them as the subject of these sketches.
Hyslop consulted a neurologist, Dr Titus Bull, about Thompson. And Bull himself went on to conclude that many cases of mental illness really involved “possession”. In one case, the patient, who had suffered a head injury, claimed that he had been “taken over” by the spirit of a painter named Josef Selleny, who had been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian and who was “forcing” him to paint. (Wickland, as we know, believed that such accidents as head injuries could provide opportunity for alien “entities” to invade.)
Lengthy research by Bull’s assistant, Helen Lambert, finally uncovered the existence of a real Josef Selleny (the encyclopedias mistakenly spelled his first name Joseph, but the patient spelled it correctly), who had, indeed, been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian. A medium who worked with Dr Bull was able to reveal that the patient was being possessed by several “entities”, one of whom seized possession of her body and grabbed Bull by the throat.
Eventually, the various entities were dislodged or persuaded to go away. Mrs Lambert’s account, later published in her book A General Survey of Psychic Phenomena, sounds remarkably like many cases described by Carl Wickland. The few available cases make it clear that Bull’s name deserves a distinguished place in the annals of psychical research; unfortunately, most of his records have been lost.
Clearly, views like those of William James and Titus Bull will find no acceptance with the majority of doctors and scientists. Yet in recent years, belief in “possession” as a cause of some mental illness has received support from two eminent psychiatrists, Adam Crabtree and Ralph Allison. In his book Multiple Man (1986), Crabtree asserts that he has come to accept, merely as a convenient working hypothesis, the notion that certain multiple personalities are “possessed” by spirits, inviting us to believe that he is waiting for someone to suggest an alternative psychological theory that will cover all the facts. But the cases he describes make it virtually impossible to imagine such a hypothesis.
Crabtree’s first experience with “possession” involved a young patient named Sarah Worthington, who was in a condition of suicidal depression. In a semitrance state, Sarah spoke in a completely different voice, which sounded like that of an older woman used to exercising authority. This “voice” identified herself as Sarah’s grandmother and explained that she wanted to “help Sarah”. It began to emerge that the grandmother also had a problem: many years earlier, she had left her seven-year-old son alone in the house, then rushed back when she heard that the neighbourhood was on fire. Her son had, in fact, been removed to a safe place by neighbours, but she had spent a traumatic hour searching for him. Later, her indifference to her daughter, Sarah’s mother (she greatly preferred her son), had created psychological problems, which had been inherited by Sarah. Now the grandmother believed that she was trying to help Sarah, who had always felt rejected; in fact, her presence was troubling the girl, who was intuitively aware that she had been “invaded”. The case sounds oddly similar to many described by Carl Wickland. But in this case, it was unnecessary to persuade the “spirit” to go away; when Sarah realized that the obscure inner presence she felt was her grandmother, she came to accept it, and all her suicidal impulses vanished.
In another case, a girl named Susan was convinced that she was “possessed” by her dead father, who had been killed in a car crash. He had always been sexually obsessed with her, creeping into her bedroom when she was asleep to fondle her genitals; her unconscious knowledge of what was going on made her contemptuous of him. But the close rapport between them meant that when he died, he had found refuge in his daughter’s body, unaware that he was dead. When Crabtree was able to persuade him to leave her, her problems vanished.
But from the point of view of “demoniacal possession”, perhaps the most interesting case in Crabtree’s book is that of a history professor whom he calls Art. About to be married for the second time, Art was experiencing strange feelings of reluctance, as if “under great pressure from some inner force that he could not control”. A censorious inner voice would criticize anyone whom he liked. Art’s own theory was that some negative aspect of his personality had unconsciously assimilated the critical attitudes of his mother, Veronica, who was now living in Detroit. When Crabtree placed Art in a light trance, he was able to open a dialogue with the “mother”, and she told him, “Art is mine and his life is mine . . . I have to make sure Art knows how kooky all these friends of his are”.
Art’s description of his mother revealed that she was sexually obsessed with her son. Until he was in his late teens, she would call him into her bed when her husband had left for work and arouse him into a state of sexual excitement that she refused to satisfy. Oddly enough, the Veronica who “possessed” Art was also aware of herself as “Veronica who lived in Detroit”, and she described the life of her alter ego as drab and dull. Crabtree suggested that life might become more interesting if she spent more time with “Veronica in Detroit”, and the entity agreed to try it. When Art’s mother had an operation to remove a cancerous growth, the entity realized that it had been robbing her of vitality by concentrating on Art and began spending less time with Art. The real Veronica’s life now underwent a remarkable transformation, and she began seeing more of people and enjoying herself. Art, surprisingly enough, found he missed the censorious inner voice and recognized how much he had encouraged it, using it as an excuse for not making his own decisions. As he faced this fact, his problems vanished.
Here we may assume either that Art himself was suffering from delusions – a reasonable enough hypothesis, under the circumstances – or that, in some odd way, his mother was somehow “possessing” him from a distance, in spite of the fact that she was still alive. This, admittedly, sounds farfetched – until we take into account the mother’s transformation after her operation. And if Art’s mother was somehow “in two places at once”, the implications are very strange indeed.
Can one person “possess” another? In Frederic Myers’s classic Phantasms of the Living, there is an interesting account of a girl who was convinced that a man she scarcely knew was taking control of her dreams and trying to force her into sexual slavery (see chapter 60). If this is possible, and if disembodied “spirits” exist, then it would seem to follow that, under certain circumstances, “possession” by a spirit is a possibility.
Although Crabtree claims to treat the notion of “possession” merely as a working hypothesis, it can be seen that his work lends support to the views expressed by Wickland. This is even m
ore so in the case of the California psychiatrist Ralph Allison, whose Minds in Many Pieces (1980) is a major work in the field of multiple personality disorder (usually shortened to MPD). Allison had been practicing for almost a decade when he encountered his first case of MPD – a woman named Janette who had tried to kill her husband and children. A colleague advised Allison that he thought Janette was a case of MPD, and when Allison induced her to relax deeply and asked if he could speak to the “other person”, a woman with a harsh, grating voice emerged and identified herself as Lydia. At one point, Janette had been raped in the hospital by several orderlies; now, as Lydia mentioned her interest in “drinking, dancing, fucking”, and placed herself in a provocative position, Allison began to suspect that the orderlies may not have been entirely to blame. Eventually, a third personality named Karen emerged – a balanced, sensible woman – and with her help, Allison was able to cure Janette. (He came to call such personalities “the inner self-helper”.)
In this case, the basic hypothesis of multiple personality covered the facts; that a traumatic childhood had caused the “prime personality” to withdraw from the problems of life, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. But Allison’s next patient, a girl named Carrie, forced him to take the “possession” hypothesis seriously. Carrie was another “multiple” with a history of childhood traumas, including a gang rape. Even without hypnosis, an alter ego named Wanda emerged and talked to Allison. But it seemed clear that Wanda was not responsible for the suicidal impulses Carrie was experiencing. When told that a “psychic” claimed that Carrie was possessed by the spirit of a drug addict who had died of an overdose in New York in 1968, Allison decided to “give the concept of spirit possession a try”. Under deep hypnosis, Carrie agreed that the drug addict was influencing her life, and Allison’s makeshift “exorcism” – performed with a swinging crystal ball on a chain – apparently succeeded. Unfortunately, it failed to dislodge two other personalities, and Carrie eventually committed suicide.