by Ken Webster
A LITTLE CORRECTING!, FINNISH AFTER.
[unsigned]
No confidence had ever been placed in communications from 2109, but since this chapter merely contains ideas for discussion let us continue their theme. This disruption in the time/light continuum is itself attributable to variations in the pattern of certain magnetic fields around the earth. The disruption affects, if you will, the soul; the essential self-image. Tomas Harden managed to direct or draw out some form of control over the displacement of his consciousness. Debbie, too, in certain dream states, became lucid, self-aware, and although sometimes this was veiled by her reluctance to believe she could ‘be’ in another time she appeared to Tomas quite regularly, and from his side and in his inimitable language we are informed of their conversation. Unfortunately the mirror image of self would require an energy to be available everywhere for the self to manifest and act in another ‘timescape’. What energy? And because not everyone can see the transferred image, perception and this energy must be related.
Now we are in deep water! It is partly because explanations of the phenomenon based upon the premise that what we recorded was real always run into such problems that the rational person will, on a priori grounds, dismiss the whole business. It suffers from ‘antecedent improbability’: it doesn’t fit ‘reality’ therefore it must be impossible. Ah, well …
But even on the edge of ‘reality’, reports are beginning to accumulate of mental interference with computers*, and several writers have posited the existence of lines of force† in fact as feng shui (Chinese geomancy), an ancient tradition which has had an enormous influence on Chinese thought and culture. But can even severe fluctuations in these extremely weak fields be tied in with consciousness? Is it within the bounds of science to have a situation where distorted consciousness allows access to other times?
Professor Jack Sarfatti certainly believes something of the sort, and was quoted in Timewarps by John Gribbin as saying:
I believe the gravitational distortion of space and time predicted in Einstein’s general theory of relativity provides a possible scientific explanation of precognition, retrocognition, clairvoyance, and astral projection, provided we accept the additional postulates that individual consciousness can alter the biogravitational field of a living organism and that the biogravitational field distorts the local subjective space time of the conscious observer … I conjecture that distortions can be manipulated in such a way that the rate of time flow at the location of the participator does not match the corresponding rate of time flow at the object being observed and influenced … and can in principle be so adjusted that the participator working within his local light cone … samples universe layers.
But is this the same as being in another time? The task is beyond me but I hope that someone will be interested enough, open enough, to explore further the relationship between mind, the nature of the world we perceive and time.
For myself I am hoping someone will find a book a friend left for me some years ago.
Picture Section
Dodleston seen from the Welsh side, where it straddles a slight rise on the edge of the Cheshire plain. (D. Griffiths)
Sandstone blocks from beneath the kitchen – from Tomas’s house? (Frank Davies)
Furniture displaced on the night of 15 May 1985 – by poltergeist?
This chalk message appeared on the floor in early May 1985
Tomas claimed to have met Erasmus. This picture of Erasmus disappeared from the cottage and ‘returned’ in this fragile condition. (D. Griffiths)
This picture of a Jaguar Coupe also disappeared and was ‘returned’. Tomas became convinced that everyone in 1985 drove a ‘carte tyger’!
We took this chalk message on the floor to be poltergeist ‘mutterings’. They appear to have no relevance to the communications via computer
Meadow Cottage, Dodleston, 1986 (D. Griffiths)
Deb using the computer in the cottage, early 1986. (Frank Davies)
Tomas’s diagram of his house – a colour-pencil sketch left for us in August 1985
Tomas Harden in his kitchen, drawn from memory by Deb Oakes, 1987
Further Reading
Bohm, David: Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark Paperbacks, 1983. A combination of science and philosophy. His concept of totality includes both consciousness and matter, the known and the unknowable.
Capra, Fritof: The Tao of Physics, Fontana, 1976. Often cited by those looking for links between mysticism and physics. Useful for me when I was trying to seek alternatives and some logic to alternative views of time.
Farrow, Joan: The Mask of Time, Corgi, 1981. General book looking at the surprisingly frequent instances of ‘time slip’ experiences.
von Franz, Marie Louise: Time: Rhythm and Repose, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1978. Lovely book, written with insight but absolutely straightforward. My first port of call in 1985. Time is never what it seems.
Gribbin, John: Timewarps, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1979. Excellent book. Contains the Sarfatti quote (see p.) and many thought-provoking chapters, especially on the relationship between time and mind.
Jahn, Robert and Dunne, Brenda: Margins of Reality, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Anomalies relating to mind/machine interaction and remote viewing get some solid scientific support from this Princeton University team.
Koestler, Arthur: The Roots of Coincidence, Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1972. A clear argument for an open-minded approach to aspects of parapsychology and especially acausal relationships as explored by Jung in Synchronicity, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1972 (although Jung himself would not quite agree with Koestler’s interpretation of his idea).
Manning, Matthew: The Stranger, W. H. Allen & Co., 1978. Manning’s experience could be interpreted as a genuine overlap of times, although Manning’s contact with a Robert Webbe from the 18th century is not generally treated as such in Manning’s account. This book is quite hard to locate but worth the effort.
Playfair, Guy Lyon: This House is Haunted, Souvenir Press, 1980. This account of the Enfield poltergeist is as much a record of the psychology of investigators as a good record of a poltergeist case. Two SPR members act as witnesses but still the case is dismissed by colleagues, leaving so much unexplained.
White, John (ed.): Psychic Warfare: Fact or Fiction, Aquarian Press, 1987. A collection of readings. Sometimes seems over the top but Tom Bearden’s very sensible contribution (pp. 169–90) offers ideas for a possible mechanism to the events at the cottage. Stimulating reading.
Notes on the Messages
Between December 1984 and March 1987 approximately 300 messages were received. These included chalk or handwritten scripts and the computer messages. In length they vary from one or two characters, to single words and phrases, to messages in excess of 400 words. The bulk of the communications (about fifty-five per cent) were addressed to myself, and the others were shared roughly equally between Debbie and Peter. This book contains approximately one third of the available messages, either in full or by way of extracts.
Punctuation
According to Tomas some of the early computer messages (at least) were doctored by 2109. Apart from ‘editing’, the interference apparently included adding some modern punctuation, especially apostrophes, parentheses and exclamation marks.
Tomas did on occasion use the full stop. This is perfectly normal for the 16th century but Debbie admits that in error she told him not to ‘copy’ our punctuation when she saw that he was using full stops. Some messages in July 1985 do carry this punctuation mark. In later messages he would often indicate the likely breaks by word spacing.
Translations
My aim was to render Tomas’s words into a modern idiom. I accept that this has made certain inaccuracies inevitable.
With the written scripts it has not always been possible to make out Tomas’s words and some sections carry a ‘probable’ translation based on the context of the passage.
The Scripts
Tomas indicated th
at he was making every effort to render the written word easy on our eyes. He did this by treating each character individually. I am told that these individual characters compare well with extant 16th-century examples, but the overall orthographic effect is probably uncommon. Even within Tomas’s scripts illustrated in this volume ‘careful’ and ‘quick’ writing is discernible.
Appendix: the Language of the Messages by Peter Trinder
From the beginning of my involvement with the messages it was the language in which they were written that most intrigued me, then captivated and finally convinced me. I have grown increasingly sure that ultimately it must be the very nature of that language which proves the authenticity of the experience as a whole.
We have all heard Shakespeare’s words, but none of us has heard his voice, and we cannot be absolutely sure of any single word that he wrote. He did not write ‘to sleep, perchance to dream’ but (more likely) ‘to sleepe, perchance to dreame’ and there is all the difference in the world. Moreover, on that difference our present tale hangs.
I have come across a book, Talks with Elizabethans by Percy Allen (Rider & Co., London, 1946), in which the author, in all sincerity, reports many conversations he held between 1942 and 1945 with Bacon, Oxford, Shakespeare and other Elizabethan figures through a series of professional mediums in London. Now all of these Elizabethans talked to him like gentlemen of the 1940s. Perhaps it is normal, for they spoke in the voice of a 20th-century medium, and of course the book is merely a transcription of those conversations. There have also been cases of spirit-writing, but I cannot trace any extensive examples of such writing in the English of a period other than modern.
It is generally agreed that the history of English can be divided into three (or perhaps four) main stages: Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) up to a time very soon after the Norman Conquest and the dominance of Norman French, say roughly 1100; Middle English, a transitional period when the language still retained enough of the formal characteristics of Old English to be decidedly not our Modern English. This period is generally agreed to run until about the advent of printing, say 1450. Modern English, though with many changes continuing, dates from roughly this period. Many scholars prefer to talk of an intermediary period called ‘Early Modern’, which could be dated roughly 1400–1600, and in which so many important developments in spelling and vocabulary took place as to make it quite feasible to talk of this as a distinct stage in the long-term development of the English language. During this period in particular the form, use and meaning of individual words were so diverse that it is relatively easy to place the writer of a script within a broad area of the country and within a certain time-span. If the piece of writing is long enough and the forms distinctive enough then the field proportionately diminishes until it can even become possible to date and locate the writing within a very narrow limit.
If the author is unknown it can often be a relatively simple matter to identify him (or, rarely, her) precisely. It is, after all, on such evidence that very many of the earlier examples of English literature have been associated with particular authors. Even some of the Shakespearian ascriptions are made on this kind of evidence, not to mention many others. The whole game started officially with a critical examination of Biblical documents in the last century, which caused a controversy that still disturbs many of the faithful. Much of the most recent research and development in the technology of espionage involves increasingly sophisticated methods of voiceprinting, and of course fingerprinting has been with us a long time. Blood prints and saliva prints are not unknown, and genetic fingerprinting is now in use. Just so a man’s writing reveals himself, his time and his circumstances in many subtle hints, for truly, ‘Le style c’est l’homme même’. Professor Higgins, like his original, Henry Sweet, could place people within five miles, and in London within two streets, by their speech. When people commit themselves to paper we have got them, providing only that the amount of material available for analysis is sufficiently extensive to provide satisfactory evidence.
The messages we received through the computer are certainly sufficiently extensive and they purport to date from the very period in which spelling, vocabulary and semantics were at their most idiosyncratic and variable in the whole history of the English language.
Fortunately we possess an incomparable reference work in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which charts this historical maze in incredible detail. This, of course, was the main authority to which I referred when working on the texts, especially to its dating system for the various recorded forms of words. Reference to the entry for the word ‘champarty’, for example, will show that the form ‘champartye’, (which is how it was spelt in our text) is recorded in the 14th and 15th centuries, and so on, with the modern form of this rare word dating from the 17th century. For many words in the OED this list of alternative forms and their dating is very long and complicated. The original intention behind the dictionary was that everything written in English up to the time of editing should be read and scrutinized, but this could never be fully realized, particularly as many important texts and documents were not available at that time and the later letters of the alphabet were in general more fully researched than the earlier. Despite this it is perfectly reasonable to take the evidence of the dictionary as conclusive. Consequently, if we have in our texts enough words whose dating, according to the OED, is consistent with the period in which we were led to believe they were written, then that evidence alone might go far to confirm the authenticity of the messages, and hence of the whole unlikely experience. For who could devise such documents using the dictionary backwards by searching out recondite terms and then checking every word used not only for its meaning but also its form in a particular period? The amount of effort involved in this process beggars belief. Even if the process of composition in this way by some modern hoaxer is conceivable, there was very frequently no time in which it could possibly have been carried out. Moreover, of course, we are looking only at the ‘how?’ and leaving out the bigger questions of ‘who?’ and ‘why?’
I drew up a table showing the forms of words (i.e. their spelling), choosing to look not only at the 16th century itself but at periods before and after. If any word occurred which was not recorded in the 16th century then we had to be on our guard. This is what I was looking for when I first began using the OED. At that very early stage I thought that Ken was perhaps playing a game himself and I expected to be able to unmask him by the use of the OED.
The dating of the first messages proved most interesting, and slowly I was convinced that something very strange was happening, for these had to be the words of a 16th-century writer or of someone doing a very convincing imitation. In fact, as the experience proceeded and the evidence grew, the incidence of words and forms too modern for the 16th century remained credibly limited, to say the least. It was perhaps increasingly difficult to remain entirely objective in judgement but I certainly tried.
The dictionary is not, of course, by any means quite complete in its original intention. How could it be? Many words must have remained undiscovered in texts not read, or carelessly read, or as yet unknown. A literate person needing a new word frequently used the nearest Latin term, simply giving it an English form; in this way hundreds of words first occurred in English in this period called Early Modern, indeed that is one of the characteristics of the period. Many such words caught on and still remain: many more must have been stillborn or were used so very rarely as effectively to lie dormant until a later flowering.
I became increasingly interested to note how many of the forms and words in the messages were actually dated by the OED in or even before the 15th century. This suggested someone whose language was in some respects rather old-fashioned for its time. Of course, the fact that a word is not recorded in any particular period does not show that it did not exist or was not used, but merely that it was not found by those compiling the OED. But still, if a form is recorded as, say, 14th or 15th century (‘4–5’
in OED’s abbreviations) then that is all the evidence we have in most cases. For my purposes, in view of the extent of the material I was dealing with, it was quite sufficient.
The messages contained, then, very many forms which the OED records as not in use later than the 15th century. This led me to suspect a South-Western English origin for our man, since innovations and change in the language tended to spread from the North, the Midlands or the South-East, and the area of the country which preserved regular forms longest was the South-West. This was partly why I prompted Ken to ask if our man knew ‘Bristowe’, an old form of the main city of that region. That question received a most encouraging and revealing answer.
Among the most frustrating of all words were the parts of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’. Most puzzling were the frequent, but not invariable, ‘beeth’, ‘arn’ and ‘han’ for am, art, is, are and have. The other main puzzle has been the use of ‘my’ or ‘thy’ for ‘the’, the definite article. I have been assured by an expert researcher in the period that these forms do all occur in written material, but I have not found them, in spite of diligent search in many obscure corners. Letters of ordinary, undistinguished people from the mid-16th century are very few. Remember that the date we were given was 1546. The famous Paston Letters, though of some help, are from quite the wrong area, East Anglia; and the Cely Letters are mostly of London. The South-West was a quiet, secluded part of the country, from which very little of the 16th century seems to have survived, and certainly nothing of such relatively humble and obscure origins. Even supposing that we could prove our texts to be genuine writings of this period there would appear to be no comparable contemporary documents by which we could check their language. By the same token, naturally, it follows that if they can be proved genuine they will provide invaluable evidence of the state of the language at that time and in that area. As my adventure proceeded, of course, I became increasingly convinced that this is exactly what we have, a kind of linguistic missing link in demotic speech. I can only hope I will live to see our texts accepted and dictionaries eventually revised to accommodate them.