The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  Showing me this, Hannigan was hugely excited. “D’ye realize, Murphy, that the old man probably came to this during his Oxford days in the 1890s! Now physicists from Berkeley to Princeton to Cambridge talk about ten-dimensional strings!”

  “But they’re not saying we should listen to them!” I protested. “When Irons said we could hear ‘the music of the spheres,’ he wasn’t kidding. He and MacDuff thought we could do it, with the right kind of practice, and transform ourselves in the process. That’s what they meant by practicing ‘true gravity’ and awakening the ‘luminous body,’ whatever the fuck that means. They were trying to join what they called ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ knowing, curvatures of space with bendings of the mind!”

  In 1956, Irons had let me read his journals, in which there were constant references to the relations between “inward” and “outward” knowing, shamanic and scientific discipline, soul-making and world knowledge. He believed their marriage would set the stage for a momentous advance of humankind. But the nature of this transformation, and the specific methods that he and MacDuff were using to achieve it, remained a mystery. Several notes in Irons’s books were opaque or indecipherable, a few were self-contradictory, and some were bizarre. And there was always the nagging question: “Why golf?” If Irons and MacDuff were trying to uncover the deepest secrets of human nature, why had they been so occupied with this time-consuming, often absurd, always frustrating game?

  Hannigan also had reports from people who might have seen Shivas Irons during the 1980s. Besides the one from Martin Adams, there were two others. One came from a middle-aged couple who sometimes picnicked on MacDuff’s estate. Hannigan had met them there in the summer of 1984, and had elicited a description from them of a man they’d encountered on the property a month before. He was six foot three or four, they estimated, with red hair, “soulful blue eyes,” and a broad-shouldered athletic physique. The woman guessed he was about thirty years old because they had seen him running sprints—for sheer enjoyment, it seemed!—in the field below the house, and because he was filled with enormous vitality. But her husband thought he was more than sixty. There was, he said, “too much experience in his face” to be younger than that. And there were other discrepancies. She said that the man had a very slight Scottish inflection, but her husband swore he’d spoken with such a heavy burr that he could barely understand him.

  And what had they talked about? “Murphy,” said Hannigan, “ye know what he asked? Whether they felt somethin’ strange in the place. Said he used to spend time there, but hadn’t been back for several years and was surprised to see how different it looked. Then—if ye can believe this—he started swinging an imaginary golf club. That’s right! Started swingin’ a club and pointin’ to places that would make good holes. They said he had a ‘big wicked smile’ when he said it, a smile that was hard to forget.”

  “It’s impossible to forget,” I said. “It’s like the sun coming up.”

  “That’s what she said! That’s exactly how she put it. ‘Like the sun coming up.’ ”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “A sweater, they thought, though they weren’t completely sure, and corduroy pants. It occurred to them that he might be a golf professional.”

  “Jesus. It could be him! How long did they talk?”

  “Just a few minutes. He was in great spirits, they said, and seemed to be enjoying himself. And the husband said another interesting thing. Said the man seemed to like them. Said he looked sad when he left, and apologized about having to leave so soon. Both of them were struck by his warmth. But there’s a problem. They never saw a car, and wondered where he went or how he got there. Like the man in Dornoch. Just came and went, without any visible means of transport.”

  The third report of a possible sighting had come in this letter from an American physicist, which was postmarked from London on July 7, 1985:

  Dear Buck,

  I came away from the Edinburgh meeting more than ever convinced that string theory will succeed. After Schwartz and Green reopened the doors last year, I was excited. After hearing you, I’m ballistic! Keep going. You’ve got a chance for the brass ring.

  But there’s another reason for this letter. Remember our talk at the pub about your ventures into the paranormal? I was worried about you, right? Now I’m worried about us both. Near my hotel yesterday afternoon, I saw a man who might be your Chivas Regal. Red hair, athletic, Scots inflection, amazing blue eyes, and a presence that caught my attention. He was standing alone, about twenty feet from me, watching two boys kick a soccer ball toward a lamp post in the park. They were Irish, I think, about ten or eleven years old, and angry because they couldn’t hit their target. When one of them decided to quit, our man came up to him and asked for the ball, which he kicked into the post with his eyes closed! He then got both of the boys to do it. This I swear. Both of them hit the thing with their eyes shut, not once but several times. Then, as if to give them further inspiration—or maybe to see if he could do it—he faced away from the post and hit it with a backward kick.

  How he accomplished all this I don’t know. He didn’t give them much instruction. It seemed that he taught them the trick through his example more than anything else. Or did he use your ten-dimensional strings? What do you think? Did I spot him? Unfortunately, he disappeared when my back was turned.

  Will write from Berkeley,

  Saul-Paul Sirag

  One question, though. You said he was tall. This man was shorter than me, which would make him less than five foot nine.

  For me, this report didn’t carry much weight. Irons was six foot three, and it was hard to imagine that Hannigan’s friend could have thought he was half a foot shorter. But Hannigan disagreed. “In a trial,” he said, “witnesses rarely agree about everything they saw, even if they were standing side by side. Maybe the park had a slope he didn’t notice.”

  After reviewing Hannigan’s discoveries and my own experiences of Shivas Irons, we talked into the night about their complexities and implications. In the afternoon, a storm came up, with occasional thunderclaps and lightning we could see through the studio windows. The gloomy sky over Edinburgh contributed to our dark imaginings, as we tried to find patterns in the many scraps of evidence we now possessed. But a coherent picture wouldn’t emerge from the jigsaw puzzle. I was uncertain whether Shivas Irons still lived, and wondered, as I had for thirty-one years, what he and Seamus MacDuff were ultimately trying to achieve. Much about the two men was still hidden in mist, like the figure we’d seen in the necromanteion.

  * The book, Evidence of Personal Survival from Cross Correspondences, is by H. F. Saltmarsh, a British expert on psychical research. Published originally in London by G. Bell & Sons, it was published in the United States by Arno Press. Frederic Myers died on January 17, 1901, and the messages purported to come from him continued for many years afterward. Saltmarsh writes:

  The very large bulk of those cases wherein evidence of a supernormal kind is put forward as proving personal survival, consists of communications of knowledge which is not in the possession of any living person concerned, but was, or could have been, possessed by the individual from whose surviving spirit the messages purport to come.

  Now, it is clear that for such communications to be of any value as evidence, the information conveyed must be capable of verification, and this implies that some living person must know the facts or else that some record exists or some circumstances from which the facts may be inferred.

  But if this be so, it is always possible to hold that the information was conveyed telepathically to the mind of the medium from the living person who knew the facts, or else that the medium clairvoyantly became aware of the record or circumstances in which it is embodied. We have to bear in mind that it is not only the ordinary supraliminal knowledge of living persons which is available, but also the subliminal; further that a telepathic impression may be received and lie dormant in the subliminal mind of the percipient, emerging into
ordinary consciousness only after a lapse of time, sometimes of quite considerable length.

  In these circumstances it is hard to imagine any possible evidence which could bring unequivocal proof of survival. Now Myers … was fully aware of all this, and what makes these experiments so peculiarly interesting is that, if we take the statements of the communicators at their face value, it looks as though his surviving spirit had invented a means of getting over the difficulty and had endeavored to carry it out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A TOWERING THUNDERHEAD rose from the platform of cumulus clouds advancing across Loch Awe. The steel grey column stretched more than forty thousand feet, I guessed, above the storm moving in from the west. From my vantage point above the abandoned distillery, it seemed to reach all the way to God.

  Lightning flashed in the approaching clouds, momentarily illuminating the distant ridges of Ben Cruachan. This was a different vista than the one I’d experienced three days before. Though there was blue sky to the east, darkness was spreading through the morning light. The long bank of clouds was laced with black. The thunderhead was growing in size and majesty. As if to announce its approach, a sheet of lightning lit up the loch, and there was a gigantic thunderclap.

  Sensing that rain would soon arrive, I drove down the hill, parked my car, and found refuge with my golf clubs under the overhanging roof of the abandoned distillery. From here I could watch the advancing storm and the enormous mushroom-shaped cloud above it. The thunderhead’s eastward edge was brilliantly lit by the morning sun. Its dark grey cap was streaked with lavender, and its westward edge was black. More and more it reminded me of an atomic explosion.

  “August 6 again, but 1950.” Had MacDuff inscribed his mysterious photograph on a day like this? Maybe the reference to Hiroshima was inspired by this kind of weather, rather than things occult. The thought was reinforced by the storm’s aliveness. The best things to come from my search for Shivas Irons were moments like this, rather than metaphysical speculations. The freedom that Irons and MacDuff represented was more present now, in this wild beauty of the elements, than it was in talk about materializations from hyperspace and disembodied spirits. Lightning broke loose beneath the clouds, lighting the peak of Ben Cruachan, then came distant rumbling. Zipping my windbreaker, I found a place to stay dry at the back of the overhang, and watched the rain grow heavier. There was little visibility now. Suddenly the fields below the hill disappeared in a wind-gusting downpour.

  Protected by the building, I watched the rain slant past me. It was filled with dancing shades of grey, indigo, and violet, changing color like curtains of silver lamé. Something above and behind me was banging, maybe a shutter on MacDuff’s old house or the limb of a tree hitting the abandoned distillery. In the wind’s whistling I heard distant bagpipes, yearning, wild, and sad by turns, accompanied by muffled drums.

  At irregular intervals the rain diminished, sometimes revealing a bright blue sky, sometimes the distant peaks of Ben Lui and Ben Cruachan. During one such respite, a window of sky was bordered with golden mist. During another, the clouds above me filled with rainbows. I watched these sometimes-subtle, sometimes-dramatic shifts of the elements with increasing wonder. A summer day in Scotland, Shivas Irons had told me, could have “tropical storms in the morning, a California afternoon, and an arctic night.” He often enjoyed such weather in solitude, sometimes for twenty-four hours or more, discovering subtleties of land and sky that few people ever noticed. He’d given me a taste of this while crossing the Burningbush links at first light.

  “Have ye ever counted shades of grey?” he’d asked. “Ye can see dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of ’em.” Beyond the silver-sheened fairways, the hills of the town stood in silhouette against the dark grey sky. “Let’s watch the land wake up,” he’d said as we reached his car. “Every moment it’s different. Every minute ye can see somethin’ new.” A bird was scampering on the silvery grass. Light appeared in a distant window. Beyond the golf course, the dark sea was rolling toward us.

  “It’s never the same,” he whispered. “The light, the sound, the smells, the taste. They always can surprise ye.” In the distance, a church bell sounded. It was tolling the hour, now three o’clock. As if in response, a car engine started on a distant part of the links. Were two lovers headed back to town?

  “Ye know why the landscape changes?” he asked. “Do ye know the physics of it? It’s because the light o’ the sky comes at different angles every instant, through different air, to meet the earth’s changing spectrum of color. Every hour of the day, if ye look close enough, the grass has all sorts o’ browns and greens and yellows in it. And the bare ground, too, and the trees and the sea and the heather. When the lights of the sky meet the lights of the earth, they never make the same combination. The fairways are silver now, but they’ll be violet soon, then shades o’ green and blue and brown before the sun goes down. To a fresh eye, it’s always surprisin’—always, even on a cloudy day, even in the dark like this. Do ye ever watch the land wake up?”

  Lights were appearing on the hills of the town, each with its own unique luminosity. “We fix our sight,” he said, “like we fix our thinking and our bones. We put ourselves in prisons. Our senses, our feelings, our bodies could have more freedom than we think.”

  An hour before, swinging Seamus’s club by firelight in the ravine by the thirteenth hole, I had felt my “inner body” contract to an hourglass shape in which my waist seemed as small as a fist. Recalling the experience, I leaned for balance against the car. My boundaries weren’t normal yet. There were hints of nausea in this newfound freedom.

  “Ye look seasick,” he said with amused concern. “Just do what I told ye before. Feel yer tummy. Take a breath. Let the woozy feelin’s go.”

  Lowering my center of gravity, as he had suggested during our midnight lesson, I felt the nausea pass. In spite of my fatigue and light-headedness, there were first hints of a pleasurable equanimity.

  “Ye see.” He touched my chest. “Ye can always come back. No matter how seasick ye get when yer boundaries shift, no matter how strange yer mind is actin’, ye can find a home in this empty space, this silence behind yer thoughts. It’s always there. It’s who ye are. Waitin’ to be rediscovered. The truest center o’ gravity is not the center of the Earth. It’s at the center of the soul. And because it’s everywhere, Michael, it gives us our deepest stability.”

  From his suggestive power perhaps, or the cumulative effects of our all-night vigil, my light-headedness gave way to the liberating emptiness I’d experienced at the end of our golf round. There was surprising stabilty in this vanishing state, a sense that nothing could limit, disturb, or attach itself to me.

  “There’s nothin’ to knock off balance,” he’d said. “This is our best center because it’s everywhere—and because it’s no single thing at all.”

  First streaks of violet appeared in the hills, and the fairways were rainbows of grey and silver. A breeze had come up, laced with the taste of salt, and seabirds were circling above us. A vow had risen in me then to spend more time at first light, watching the land awaken.

  And a similar vow was rising now. If this storm lasted all day, I would sit here and enjoy it. It had more shades of grey and silver, more iridescence, more music than I could ever perceive. No one could count its colors and textures, or anticipate all of its surprises. And this was true of any day, or any weather. Each had a richness beyond calculation.

  In all directions, the rain had turned to silken drizzle. To the northwest, through the curtain of falling dew, the peak of Ben Cruachan reappeared. Sunlight was bleaching the clouds above me, while the thunderhead, atop its platform of cumulus clouds, pulled away to the north like a gigantic battle station. Again I could see the entire column and its mushroom cap. As if to cover its retreat, it fired a few bolts of lightning, and thunder shook the roof above me.

  It was almost ten o’clock, and the rolling hills glistened in the morning light. Stepping out from un
der the overhang, I was surprised how warm it was. Plumes of steam rose from MacDuff’s old house, giving it a golden halo. In the breeze that followed the storm, there was a fragrance of sycamore, wet grass, and oak, and a faint whistling in the roof above me. The entire property seemed reborn.

  With my clubs and practice balls, I found the stretch of ground from which I’d hit drives during my previous visit. After removing my windbreaker and slipping a golf glove on my left hand, I smoothed a patch of stubble and grass and surveyed the field between me and the abandoned first green. It didn’t matter that the rain-soaked ground wouldn’t afford much roll. I would not begin by hitting for distance. Instead, I intended to make as complete a surrender as possible to the presence I’d felt here before. Everything else, such as hitting balls four hundred yards, would have to give way to the comprehensive intelligence that seemed to inhabit this place. There were sounds of distant thunder. To the north, the thunderhead’s cap was disappearing beyond the peak of Ben Cruachan. Just a few scattered clouds trailed in the wake of the storm.

  After a series of gentle stretches, I started to swing my driver. I could do this with leisure now. For this day and another week, I had no obligations. My publisher and friends had agreed that I needed to get away from my book, on which I’d worked for three years without a vacation. There were no schedules to meet, no bets to be won, no hecklers or advisors. There was nothing to keep me from the simple pleasure of hitting golf shots. When wayward impulses and voices rose, I would let them pass. If lost in fantasies, I would return to the silence behind them. By practicing in this way, I could yield more fully to the presence that was gathered here, following its guidance through the challenges, charms, and illusions of MacDuff’s mysterious golf course. If I could hold such a focus for the rest of the day, there was no telling what the place might teach me.