The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  As he crossed the room with my coffee, I saw that his hands were shaking. For a moment he searched my face intently, then nodded toward the sheets of equations. “Look at these!” he exclaimed. “Been pourin’ out of me since four o’ clock. It’s a breakthrough, maybe. One of the biggest I’ve had. One of the very biggest.”

  Sitting down at the desk, he picked up a book from Irons’s library that we’d examined during my previous visit. “When I got back here last night, something inspired me to look at this. It has these figures in it.” He pointed to mathematical formulae inscribed on a flyleaf. “For the last two years, I’ve wondered what they were. Then last night it hit me. As soon as I looked at ’em. All at once. Like a bolt of lightning! The book was originally owned by MacDuff. Look at his initials here. But holy Jesus! He’d seen a world of mathematics that no one else has seen yet. Last night I realized it. Christ! Right now, I’d say he saw a way to solve some o’ the greatest puzzles that appear when we try to use hyperspace to unify the physical forces.” He shook his head in wonder. “But there’s more, which is why I wanted ye to come here. This morning, Nadia calls in a wild state. Never heard her so excited. Says she’s channelin’ a new kind o’ music. You heard her singing last night. Well, this morning she tells me she’s gettin’ new songs from the other side—and pictures, too. Pictures of something she calls ‘spirit-matter.’ ” He held up a hand to forestall objections. “It sounds crazy. I know. I know. But Murphy, I’ve gotten to know her. She’s not given to easy proclamations. And she’s never come up with something like this. With the new music, she saw these. She brought them here this morning.” From beneath his sketchpad, he produced a sheet of paper with these drawings:

  “What do they look like to you?” he asked.

  “Two whirling spheres, each with a double helix or Möbius strip. Two spinning tops? Two hearts?”

  “Ye’ve never seen it?”

  “No, but let’s see.…” Suddenly I felt uneasy. Maybe I had seen something like it. Without thinking, I reached into a jacket pocket and found the envelope on which I’d copied the chart I’d made with the table setting.

  Hannigan laid the drawings on his desk. “So ye’ve never seen these,” he said with disappointment. “Somehow I thought ye might’ve, with all yer studies of the esoteric. But Murphy, here’s the strangest part. These drawings of hers are awfully close to models I use in my theories of hyperspace, models I’ve shown to physicists for years.” He produced a sheet from his artist’s pad on which he’d sketched a series of spheres that resembled the ones in Nadia’s drawings. “Think of these, like the ‘strings’ in superstring theory. Ye can’t model ’em in ordinary space, okay? Now let me ask ye. Does all of this remind ye of something?”

  “No. I don’t see what you mean.”

  “Just this.” He laid her drawings next to his. “She doesn’t know a thing about string theory. She’s never seen my diagrams. I know that for a fact. Until she sees them comin’ out of that goddamned mirror in her necromanteion! And she sees ’em about the same time I get the secret of MacDuff’s equations! Naturally we thought about our visitor last night and wondered if somethin’ hit you. A dream, an idea, a vision, a connection. Somethin’ about Irons, maybe. But ye say there was nothing?”

  “No. Nothing striking. Nothing like you’re talking about.”

  “What ye got there?” He nodded toward the envelope.

  “Oh, this?” I was surprised. “Just a sketch I made. A map of MacDuff’s old golf course.”

  “When did ye draw it?”

  “This morning, just before I came here.”

  He placed my drawing next to his and Nadia’s. “For God’s sake!” he whispered. “Don’t ye think this is odd?”

  “What?”

  “Well, look. Isn’t there a resemblance to my and Nadia’s diagrams? What’n the hell led ye to draw it?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened. I was toying with things on the table, and, well, without knowing it, rearranged everything until I realized I’d diagrammed MacDuff’s old course. I copied it on this envelope.”

  “So it just came to ye? Out o’ the blue? Doesn’t that seem a little strange? What are these crisscross lines?”

  “Golf shots Irons might’ve tried. After I’d made the map, I saw how he could’ve used the course to practice unusual shots.” Now the coincidence was starting to hit me. “But yes. It is strange. It does look a little like Nadia’s drawings.”

  Hannigan stood. “It’s a pretty strong coincidence,” he said. “My equations, Nadia’s diagrams, and this thing o’ yers. All three of us inspired about the same time. Don’t ye think that’s interesting?”

  “But they’re so different,” I protested. “You’re always thinking about superstring theory. Nadia’s fascinated with the body’s occult secrets. I’m looking for Shivas Irons. So we have inspirations about our special obsessions. So what?”

  “But Murphy, look!” He held up Nadia’s drawings. “Are ye proposin’ that she read my mind—and yers!—before she came up with this?”

  “Without knowing it, she could’ve fished those diagrams out of your subconscious. It happens to lovers every day. When you’re intimate with someone, you can read their mind.”

  He looked at me suspiciously, then threw up his hands with exasperation. “I thought I was the skeptic here. Murphy, there’s more goin’ on than our readin’ each other’s minds. Look at these drawings! It has to be more than coincidence or simple telepathy. And wait! There’s another thing. One more incredible thing. Look here. The old man’s equations are written in this.”

  He picked up the book in which Irons had inscribed MacDuff’s equations. Titled Evidence of Personal Survival from Cross Correspondences, it describes messages channeled through automatic writing and other means that make sense when pieced together. The recipients involved thought most of this material to have come from the discarnate spirit of Frederic Myers, the great pioneer of psychical research.* Now I saw what Hannigan meant. He was proposing that our visitor in the necromanteion had used the same method to communicate with us.

  “You mean,” I said, “that something’s downloading into the three of us, using each of us to reveal different parts of a connecting pattern?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Our séance last night could’ve triggered it.”

  Has your flesh ever crawled as some unwanted recognition forced itself into consciousness? That’s what I felt as the implications of Hannigan’s proposal became apparent. He handed me the book with MacDuff’s equations. “Frederic Myers,” I said. “He was an extraordinary character. You know he invented the word ‘telepathy.’ ”

  But Hannigan didn’t respond. He sat down at his desk, tore a sheet from his artist’s pad, and started to write equations. For a moment I browsed through the book, reacquainting myself with the ingenious correspondences—some of which involved several languages, including Latin and ancient Greek—that emerged when transcripts from different mediums were juxtaposed.

  “Ye ever heard of a mathematician named Ramanujan?” Hannigan gazed at the equations he’d written. “Little clerk in Madras. Poor. Sick. Self-educated. But one o’ the greatest brains the field’s seen. You should study him. Got some of his ideas in dreams, like Coleridge and Blake. It’s amazing to see what he invented. And sometimes got it all at once, like Mozart got his symphonies. All of them were mediums. Everyone of ’em was channeling, from who knows where.”

  “Does this mean they’re both dead?” I asked.

  “What?” He looked up. “Who’s dead?”

  “Are you proposing that Irons is dead? Do you think both he and MacDuff are trying to communicate from the other side?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s plausible, isn’t it? Why can’t we find any traces of him?”

  “Because we haven’t looked hard enough.” Hannigan put down his pen. “He could be living in Australia, or Spain, or the Outer Hebrides. Hell! Who knows? He might be livin
g on Lake Baikal. He’d be in his late sixties now, or seventy at the most; and from what everyone says, he was strong as a bull. Maybe it was MacDuff in the mirror last night. Or maybe it was something we don’t understand, somethin’ we don’t understand at all.” He took off his glasses, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Maybe it didn’t come from the afterlife. Nadia says it was neither dead nor alive. Says she’s never seen anything like it.”

  “Do you believe her? Do you really think she knows the difference? How can she possibly tell whether a thing like that is dead or alive?”

  “Maybe she can’t.” He shrugged with what seemed to be genuine detachment. “But watchin’ things appear in that glass, I’ve got to think she’s learned a secret or two about whatever it is we call the spirits. In the circles she comes from in Mother Russia, they’ve kept this sort o’ thing alive. If ye stick around, ye’ll see what I mean. In any case, I’m not prepared to say that Irons is dead.”

  “But he could be.”

  “You think he is?”

  “I’m just wondering.”

  “What does yer intuition tell ye?”

  “I don’t have a stable intuition. When I wrote Golf in the Kingdom, I thought he might contact me. But he hasn’t, and that was fifteen years ago. Apparently, no one in Burningbush knows where he is. And there’s been no word of him from anyone else. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be more than seventy now, and he was tremendously vital. There’s no doubt about that. So I don’t know. He might be alive. He could’ve died.”

  “Yes, he could’ve died.” Hannigan put on his glasses, stretched his arms above his head, and took a photograph from a desk drawer. “It’s possible. But if he’s dead, we have some problems. For example, what d’ye make o’ this?”

  It was a faded color picture of a male figure facing the camera. The man had striking aquiline features, reddish brown hair, blue eyes, and an athletic physique accentuated by a close-fitting open-collared shirt. It was a deeply unsettling photograph. The man resembled Shivas Irons.

  “When was this taken?” I asked.

  “Half a year ago,” Hannigan said coolly. “It came in the mail last December.”

  “Who’s it a picture of?”

  “The man who took it doesn’t know.” He watched me calmly. “Does it remind ye of anyone?”

  “It could be Shivas Irons, if that’s what you’re suggesting. It looks a little like him. But he seems to be in his late thirties, or early forties at the most—not someone pushing seventy. Where was it taken?”

  “Dornoch. On the links there.”

  “Who took it?”

  “Someone named Adams. Here’s the note he sent. It was postmarked from Burningbush, but had no return address.” He handed me this handwritten letter:

  Dear Mr. Hannigan,

  A Mrs. Webster at the Burningbush bookshop told me about your interest in curious events related to golf, and suggested I send this photograph to you. A few weeks ago, the man in the picture appeared—as if from nowhere—on the ninth green at Dornoch, walked for two holes with me, then inexplicably disappeared after I photographed him. He had an extraordinary presence, which I find hard to describe, that prompted me to take his picture.

  He was greatly interested in why I was playing alone at Dornoch on a winter day, and we talked about the links there. He seemed constantly amused and was, as you can see, a well-built, attractive man. But I cannot account for his mysterious appearance and disappearance, which continue to trouble me. No one in Dornoch whom I talked to is acquainted with him. No one in the clubhouse had seen him that day.

  It seems odd to be sending you this, but Mrs. Webster was insistent. I hope it is of interest to you.

  Sincerely,

  Martin Adams

  I looked at the photograph. If it was Shivas Irons, he hadn’t aged since 1956. “Hannigan,” I asked, “what leads you to think this is Shivas Irons? You never met him.”

  “I’m not sayin’ it’s Irons. But it reminds me of the descriptions in yer book, and other things I’ve heard about him.”

  “Other things?”

  “Murphy, we haven’t had a chance to talk about everything I’ve learned about him and MacDuff. Ye’re free today, I take it.”

  “It’s why I’m here.”

  “All right. Let’s start from the beginning.” He crossed the room, took some folders and books from a shelf, and arranged them on a table. For the rest of the day and much of the evening, we talked about his findings, which included accounts of MacDuff’s appearance, background, and habits; things he’d learned about the abandoned distillery; information about the two men’s ideas and activities culled from margin notes and other material in books from Irons’s library; and reports of apparent Shivas sightings during the 1980s. Here is a summary of what he told me:

  From what the senior Ramsay had said, and from the notes of Shivas Irons, it was clear that Seamus MacDuff believed that his mother had been trained in Sufi and African shamanic disciplines, and that she had made a clairvoyant search for a mate with whom she could have a child who “would make a great discovery.” This could have been mainly MacDuff family legend, but would—if true—help account for MacDuff’s lifelong interest in human transformation and the further reaches of consciousness. But, it was not a legend that his father had brought him from West Africa to Oxford in 1888, or that he had made discoveries about flight dynamics that contributed to the development of rockets. This was established by Oxford University records.

  It was also possible to picture with confidence what he looked like. Ramsay’s description, a few notes in Irons’s books, and accounts I’d heard at Burningbush in 1956 cohered to suggest that he was a striking, sometimes formidable figure, probably more than six feet tall, with dark skin, green eyes, and imposing carriage. Hannigan discounted stories I’d heard that the old man had lived in a cave near the thirteenth hole at Burningbush, though it was hard to say why people in the town believed that. According to a letter in the law firm’s files from one of his trust’s administrators, MacDuff rarely left his estate. He traveled to Edinburgh rarely and abroad just once, to Africa in August 1945.

  In 1987, Hannigan was still collecting speculations and facts about the abandoned distillery. A story in the back pages of The Herald on August 16, 1984 described a couple who reported a “descending light” which they had seen on the property from their passing car. Their account coincided with UFO sightings by people who lived in the region. Another newspaper story, which appeared in The Scotsman of December 20, 1985, was a debunking account of beliefs that the place was haunted. Titled “The Wee Folk Are Growing,” it quoted people who claimed to have seen brownies there, and noted that estimates of their size had grown since the distillery’s closing. An elderly lady was quoted as saying that she’d seen the same brownie on several occasions, and that he had more than doubled in height, from about two to four feet tall. The story also included a brief description of the man named Haig, who claimed that his bodily functioning had been damaged by mysterious forces that haunted the place.

  In the books that Hannigan had collected from the library of Shivas Irons, there were passages on flyleaves, underlinings, margin notes, and other inscriptions that agreed in various ways with things that Irons had told me and notes I’d copied from his journals. Partly because most of these were highly enigmatic, they fascinated Hannigan more than anything else he’d discovered about Irons and MacDuff. For example, he had several interpretations of this inscription from the book Phenomena of Materialization: “Like S. last night. Step by step. Lasted for five or six minutes.” Since there was no date for the inscription, nor any explanation of what it meant, Hannigan thought it might refer to materializations by MacDuff of “energies or structures from hyperspace,” or to an appearance by MacDuff himself as a phantom figure, either when he was alive or after he’d died. Most of the notes in Irons’s books had a similar ambiguity, and for that reason challenged Hannigan’s appetite for problem s
olving.

  But a larger part of his fascination came from the fact that the activities of Irons and MacDuff seemed to resonate with his own theoretical work. Like many other physicists, Hannigan believed that all the physical forces, from gravity to the force that binds the atom, could best be unified by multidimensional—or “hyperspace”—models of the universe, such as those provided by superstring theories. If hyperspace was indeed a fact, which such theories suggested to him, human consciousness and the flesh could have relations with it that might be surmised by means of thought experiments and equations such as those he’d been developing. Though I couldn’t follow his mathematics, I understood his reasoning, which resembled the thinking of my physicist friends. In 1987, hyperspace and string theory were the subjects of lively speculation, as they had been on and off since the early 1970s. It wasn’t surprising that Hannigan was interested in them, but amazing to me that they’d been anticipated by Seamus MacDuff. His anticipation of them seemed to have been inspired, in part, by Pythagoras.

  Shivas Irons had told me about the Greek philosopher. “Pith-uh-gor’-us had the clue,” he had said with great conviction, which was “to ken the world from within.” If we followed the ancient master’s lead, we could find capacities within ourselves that technology would never give us. By listening to the “music of the spheres,” for example, as Pythagoreans of antiquity had advised, we could extend our powers of mind over matter, uncover secrets of the flesh, and play golf with nothing more than an Irish shillelagh. Irons had been introduced to these ideas by MacDuff, who, like the Greek philosopher, believed that there were profound connections between geometry, consciousness, and the soul’s adventures. Though some of this might have come from Sufi lore that MacDuff had learned from his mother, much of it had developed at Oxford, where he encountered conceptions of the “fourth dimension” then current among mathematicians and popular philosophers. In 1884, the clergyman Edwin Abbott had written Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by a Square, which made fun of people who refused to admit the existence of other worlds; and H. G. Wells had proposed that it might be possible for humans to become invisible through a “formula (or) geometrical expression involving four dimensions.” Shivas had owned Wells’s book The Invisible Man, in which he’d inscribed this note: “S. says we can listen to hyperdimensional strings of the world-harp. Their music can’t be modeled in three dimensions, but can be felt, heard, and embodied.”