by Colin Wilson
According to the man who invented the word – an American doctor named Joseph Rodes Buchanan – it is an ability we all possess, although most of us have unconsciously suppressed it. Buchanan – who was a professor of medicine in Kentucky – came to suspect the existence of such a faculty in 1841, when he met a bishop named Leonidas Polk, who claimed that he could always detect brass when he touched it – even in the dark – because it produced a peculiar taste in his mouth. Buchanan was interested in the science known as phrenology – the notion that the “bumps” on our skulls reveal our characters – and he was interested to discover that Polk seemed to have a highly developed “bump” of sensibility. So he decided to perform a scientific test on students who had a similar bump. Various metals were wrapped in paper, and Buchanan was delighted to discover that many of his students could detect brass, iron, lead and so on by merely pressing their fingertips against the paper. They could also distinguish substances like salt, sugar, pepper and vinegar.
Buchanan concluded that the answer lay in some “nerve aura” in the fingertips, which can detect different metals exactly as we could distinguish them by touching them with the tip of the tongue. This appeared to be confirmed by his observation that it seemed to work better when the hands are damp with perspiration – for after all, a damp skin is more “sensitive” than a dry skin. But this explanation began to seem inadequate when he discovered that one of his best “sensitives” – a man named Charles Inman – could sense the contents of sealed letters, and the character of the writers. Buchanan’s explanation was that the “nerve aura” of the writer had left some kind of trace on the letter, and Inman was able to pick up this trace through his own nerve aura. In other words, Inman’s “sensitivity” was abnormally developed, in much the same way as a bloodhound’s sense of smell. But that theory also broke down when he discovered that Inman displayed the same insight when presented with photographs – daguerreotypes – in sealed envelopes. Even the argument that the photograph had been in contact with the “sitter”, and had therefore picked up something of his “nerve aura”, ceased to be convincing when Buchanan discovered that newspaper photographs worked as well as daguerreotypes.
The professor of geology at Boston University, William Denton, read Buchanan’s original paper on psychometry – the word means “soul measurement” – and decided to try it himself. His sister Anne was “highly impressible”, and she proved to be an even better psychometrist than Inman; she was not only able to describe the character of letter-writers; she was even able to describe their physical appearance and surroundings.
This led Denton to ask himself whether, if a writer’s image and surroundings could be “impressed” on a letter, “why could not rocks receive impressions of surrounding objects, some of which they have been in the immediate neighbourhood of for years”. So in 1853 Denton began testing his “sensitives” with geological and archaeological specimens, “and was delighted to find that without possessing any previous knowledge of the specimen, or even seeing it, the history of its time passed before the gaze of the seer like a grand panoramic view”. When he handed his sister a piece of volcanic lava from Hawaii, she was shaken to see “an ocean of fire pouring over a precipice and boiling as it pours”. Significantly, she also saw the sea with ships on it, and Denton knew that the lava had been ejected during an eruption in 1840, when the American navy had been in Hawaii. A fragment of bone found in a piece of limestone evoked a picture of a prehistoric beach with dinosaurs. A fragment of Indian pottery brought a vision of Red Indians. A meteorite fragment brought visions of empty space, with the stars looking abnormally large and bright. A fragment of rock from Niagara brought a vision of a boiling torrent hurling up spray (which she thought was steam). A piece of stalactite brought an image of pieces of rock hanging down like icicles. To make doubly sure that his sensitives were not somehow picking up unconscious hints or recognizing the specimens, Denton wrapped them in thick paper. He also discovered that when he tried the same specimen a second time – perhaps a month later – it produced the same result, although the picture was never identical.
In one of his most interesting experiments he showed his wife a fragment of Roman tile which came from a villa that had belonged to the orator Cicero. She described a Roman villa and lines of soldiers; she also saw the owner of the villa, a genial, fleshy man with an air of command. Denton was disappointed; Cicero had been tall and thin. But by the time Denton came to write the second volume of The Soul of Things he had discovered that the villa had also belonged to the dictator Sulla, and that Sulla did fit his wife’s description.
Another impressive “hit” was the “vision” induced by a piece of volcanic rock from Pompeii. Mrs Denton had no idea what it was, and was not allowed to see it; but she had a vivid impression of the eruption of Vesuvius and the crowds fleeing from Pompeii. Denton’s son Sherman had an even more detailed vision of ancient Pompeii, complete with many archaeological details – such as an image of a boat with a “swan’s neck” – which proved to be historically accurate.
Denton was immensely excited; he believed that he and Buchanan had discovered a so far unknown human faculty, a kind of “telescope into the past” that would enable us to relive great scenes of history. In effect, everything that had ever happened to the world was preserved on a kind of “newsreel” (although this was not, of course, an image that occurred to Denton) and could be replayed at will.
But while the evidence for the psychometric faculty is undoubtedly beyond dispute, Denton was not aware of how far it can be deceptive. The third volume of The Soul of Things, published in 1888, contains “visions” of various planets that we now know to be preposterous. Venus has giant trees like toadstools and animals that sound as if they were invented by Hieronymus Bosch; Mars has a summery temperature (in fact it would be freezing) and is peopled with four-fingered men with blue eyes and yellow hair; Jupiter also has blue-eyed blondes with plaits down to their waists and the ability to float like balloons. Denton’s son Sherman (who was responsible for most of these extraordinary descriptions) had clearly developed the faculty that Jung calls “active imagination”, and was unable to distinguish it from his genuine psychometric abilities.
What impresses the modern reader about Denton’s Soul of Things and Buchanan’s Manual of Psychometry (optimistically sub-titled The Dawn of a New Civilization) is their thoroughly scientific approach. This also impressed their contemporaries at first. Unfortunately, the period when they were conducting their experiments was also the period when the new craze known as Spiritualism was spreading across America and Europe. It had started with curious poltergeist manifestations in the home of the Fox family in New York state (see chapter 41) in the late 1840s. By 1860 it was a world-wide phenomenon. Scientists were appalled, and most of them dismissed it as sheer delusion. Anything that seemed remotely connected with the “supernatural” became the object of the same skepticism, and the researches of Buchanan and Denton never attracted the attention they deserved. Denton died in 1883, Buchanan in 1900, both in relative obscurity.
The next major experiments in psychometry were made by Dr Gustav Pagenstecher, a German who moved to Mexico City in the 1880s, and who regarded himself as a hard-headed materialist. Some time after the First World War, Pagenstecher was treating the insomnia of a patient called Maria Reyes de Zierold by hypnosis. One day, as she lay in a hypnotic trance, she told him that her daughter was listening at the door. Pagenstecher opened the door and found the daughter there. He began testing Maria for paranormal abilities and discovered that while under hypnosis she could share his own sensations; if he put sugar or salt on his tongue she could taste it; if he held a lighted match near his fingers she felt the heat of the flame. Then he began testing her for psychometric abilities. Like Denton’s subjects, she could describe where some specimen came from. Holding a sea-shell, she described an underwater scene; holding a piece of meteorite, she described hurtling through space and down through the earth’s atmosphere. (
“I am horrified! My God”!) Dr Walter Franklin Prince, who tested her on behalf of the American Society for Psychical Research, handed her what he thought was a “sea bean” which he had found on the beach. She described a tropical forest. Professional botanists confirmed that the “bean” was a nut from a tree that grew in the tropical forest, and that was often carried down to the sea by the rivers.
Another eminent experimenter of the 1920s was Dr Eugene Osty, director of the Metapsychical Institute at which the novelist Pascal Fortunny correctly identified the letter from the mass murderer Landru. In his classic work Supernormal Faculties in Man, Osty described many experiments in psychometry with various “sensitives”. In 1921 he was handed a photograph of a sealed glass capsule containing some liquid; it had been found near the great temple at Baalbek. One of his best psychics, a Mme Moral, held the photograph in her hand – it was so blurred it could have been of anything – and said immediately that it reminded her of “a place with dead people”, and of one old man in particular. She “saw” a vast place, like an enormous church, then went on to describe the man, who was obviously a high priest. The capsule in the photograph contained the blood of a man who had been sacrificed in some distant land, and had been placed in the priest’s grave as a memento.
At the time Osty himself had no idea what the photograph represented, and was surprised when the engineer who had found it was able to confirm that it had been discovered in a rich tomb in the Bekaa valley.
This story raises again the central problem about psychometry. Buchanan’s original hypothesis – that it was simply a matter of “nerve aura”, so the psychometrist could be regarded as a kind of human bloodhound – ceases to be plausible if the information can be picked up from a photograph, which could not be expected to retain any kind of “scent”. Even Denton’s assumption that every object somehow “photographs” its surroundings seems dubious. In that case a piece of Roman pavement could only have “photographed” a limited area, and Mrs Denton’s view of Roman legionaries would have been simply of hairy legs towering up above her.
The likeliest hypothesis is that the faculty involved is what is traditionally known as “clairvoyance”, a peculiar ability to “know” what is going on in some other place or at some other time. But Bishop Polk’s ability to distinguish brass in the dark is obviously not clairvoyance. Here, as in so many other areas of the “paranormal”, it is practically impossible to draw neat dividing lines.
Many modern psychometrists – like Gerard Croiset, Peter Hurkos and Suzanne Padfield – have been able use their faculty to help the police solve crimes: Suzanne Padfield was even able to help the Moscow police catch a child-murderer without leaving her home in Dorset. But it is significant that Croiset disliked being called a psychometrist or clairvoyant, and preferred the more ambiguous word “paragnost” – meaning simply the ability to “know” what lies beyond the normal limits of the senses.
44
Rennes-le-Château
The Treasure of Béranger Saunière
The mystery of Rennes-le-Château is the riddle of a poor priest who discovered a secret that made him a millionaire and which profoundly shocked the priest to whom he confided it on his deathbed.
In June 1885 a new curé came to the little village of Rennes-le-Château, on the French side of the Pyrenees; he was 33-year-old Béranger Saunière, and he was returning to the area in which he had been brought up. His early account books survive, and they show that he was very poor – the income on which he supported himself and his housekeeper was the equivalent of six pounds sterling a year.
It was six years later that Saunière decided to restore the church altar, a stone slab cemented into the wall and supported at the other end by two square Visigothic pillars. One of these proved to be hollow, and inside it Saunière found four parchments in wooden tubes. Two were genealogies of local families; the other two were texts from the New Testament, but written without the usual spaces between the letters. It seemed fairly obvious that these were in some sort of code – in fact, the code of the shorter text was straightforward. Saunière only had to write down the letters that were raised above the others, and he had a message that read: “A Dagobert II roi et à Sion est ce trésor et il est la mort”: to Dagobert II, king, and to Sion belongs this treasure, and he is there dead. (The final phrase “et il est la mort” could also be translated “and it is death” – meaning, perhaps, “it is death to interfere with it”.) So these secret messages were about a treasure. Dagobert was a seventh-century French king of the Merovingian dynasty. The author of these parchments was almost certainly a predecessor of Saunière, a priest named Antoine Bigou, who had been the cure of Rennes-le-Château at the time of the French Revolution.
Saunière took the parchments to the Bishop of Carcassonne, Monseigneur Félix-Arsène Billard, and the bishop was sufficiently intrigued to send Saunière to Paris to consult with various scholars and experts in cryptography. Among these were the Abbé Bieil, director of St Sulpice. Bieil’s nephew was a brilliant young man named Emile Hoffet, who was a student of linguistics. Although Hoffet was training for the priesthood, he was in touch with many “occultists” who flourished in Paris in the 1890s, an era which had seen a revival of interest in ritual magic; Hoffet introduced Saunière to a circle of distinguished artists, which included the poet Mallarmé, the dramatist Maeterlinck and the composer Claude Debussy. It was probably Debussy who introduced Saunière to the famous soprano Emma Calvé, and the relationship that developed between them may have been more than friendship – Saunière was a man who loved women and food.
Before he left Paris, Saunière visited the Louvre and purchased reproductions of three paintings, including Nicolas Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie – the Shepherds of Arcady – which shows three shepherds standing by a tomb on which are carved the words “Et in Arcadia Ego” – usually translated as “I [Death] am also in Arcadia”.
When Saunière returned to Rennes-le-Château three weeks later he was hot on the trail of the “treasure”. He brought in three young men to raise the stone slab set in the floor in front of the altar, and discovered that its underside was carved with a picture of mounted knights; it dated from about the time of King Dagobert. When his helpers dug farther down they discovered two skeletons, and – according to one of them who survived into the 1960s – a pot of “worthless medallions”. Saunière then sent them away, locked the church doors, and spent the evening there alone.
Now Saunière, accompanied by his housekeeper – a young peasant girl named Marie Denarnaud – began to spend his days wandering around the district with a sack on his back, returning each evening with stones which he used to construct a grotto in his garden. Whether this was the only purpose of his explorations is not known. He also committed a rather curious piece of vandalism on a grave in the churchyard. It belonged to Marie, Marquise de Blanchefort, whose headstone had been designed by the same Abbé Bigou who had concealed the parchments in the column. Saunière obliterated the inscriptions on the stone that covered the grave, and removed the headstone completely. However, he was unaware that both inscriptions had already been recorded in a little book by a local antiquary. The inscription on the gravestone is shown opposite:
The vertical inscriptions on either side of the gravestone are easy to read: a mixture of Greek and Latin letters carries the inscription Et in Arcadio Ego – linking it with the Poussin painting. The central inscription: “Reddis Regis Cellis Arcis” may be read: “At royal Reddis, in the cave of the fortress”. “Reddis” is one of the ancient names for Rennes-le-Château, which was also known to the Romans as Aereda.
The inscription on the headstone has many odd features. In the first line, the i of ci (ci gît means “here lies”) has been carved as a capital T. The M of Marie has been left at the end of the first line. The “e” of “noble” is in the lower case. The word following “negre” should read “Dables” not “Darles”, so should have an R, not a B. Altogether there are eight of these
anomalies in the inscription, making up two sets of four, one in capital letters and one in lower case. The capitals are TMRO, while the lower case are three e’s and a p. Only one word can be formed of the capitals: MORT – death. Only one word can be formed of the lower-case letters: epée – sword. In fact these two words proved to be the “keyword” to decipher the longer of the two parchments found in the pillar . . .
Whether Saunière deciphered it alone, or whether his obliging friends at St Sulpice unknowingly handed him the vital clues, may never be known. All that is known is that shortly after this Saunière began spending money at a remarkable rate. He contacted a Paris bank, who sent a representative to Rennes-le-Château solely to attend to Saunière’s business. Then he built a public road to replace the dirt track that had run to the village, and also had a water supply piped in. He built a pleasant villa with a garden that had fountains and shady walks. To house his library he built a gothic tower perched on the edge of the mountainside. He began to collect rare china, antiques and precious fabrics. He began to entertain distinguished visitors, like Emma Calvé and the Secretary of State for Culture. One of his visitors was recognized as the Archduke Johann von Habsburg, cousin of Franz- Josef, Emperor of Austria. His guests were given the very best of food and wine (and it may be significant that Saunière eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver).