Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Buchanan next handed Mr Kent a letter by General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, written to Buchanan’s father-in-law during an election campaign ‘in a spirited style’: ‘My first sensations were sharper and stronger than before, passing up in the same manner from my finger’s ends. In less than a minute my whole arm became violently agitated, and I yielded to an irresistible impulse to give utterance to my thoughts and feelings. A determined, self-confident, daring and triumphant feeling, suggested the language I used, and it seemed to me that I could have gone on triumphantly to the accomplishment of any purpose, however subtle or strong might be the opposition to be overcome. My whole frame was shaken, my strength wrought up to the highest tension, my face and arm burned, and . . . when I retouched the letter, after repeated removals of my hand by Dr B., in consequence of my great excitement, it was like touching fire, which ran to my very toes.’

  We can see why Buchanan, watching the clergyman’s mood change from scepticism to intense excitement, should have been totally convinced. Further experiments—he carried out literally hundreds in those first two years—deepened his certainty that he had made one of the major scientific discoveries of the age. In his ‘Original Sketch’ of psychometry, written in 1848, he wrote exultantly: ‘If, then, man, in every act, leaves the impression or daguerreotype of his mental being upon the scenes of his life and subjects of his action, we are by this law furnished with a new clue to the history of our race; and I think it highly probable that, by the application of this principle, the chasms of history may be supplied, and a glimpse may be obtained of unrecorded ages and nations whose early history is lost in darkness. The ancient manuscripts, paintings and other works of art . . . are doubtless still instinct with the spirit that produced them, and capable of revealing to psychometric exploration the living realities with which they were once connected. At present these relics are barren of significance. Their hidden meaning lies waiting for the future explorer, as the hieroglyphics of Egypt awaited the arrival of Champollion . . .

  ‘The Past is entombed in the Present! The world is its own enduring monument; and that which is true of its physical, is likewise true of its mental career. The discoveries of psychometry will enable us to explore the history of man, as those of geology enable us to explore the history of the earth. There are mental fossils for the psychologist, as well as mineral fossils for the geologist . . . Aye, the mental telescope is now discovered, which may pierce the depths of the past, and bring us in full view of all the grand and tragic passages of history . . .’

  It is easy to sympathize with his excitement. He was no mad enthusiast or religious crank, but a respectable man of science. If he was correct, as he had not the slightest doubt that he was, then his name would rank with the greatest discoverers and explorers in human history. It was surely impossible that his findings could fail to arouse wide interest . . .

  They did precisely that, as the National Cyclopedia of American Biography tells us: ‘His lectures and experiments attracted much attention in the United States and Europe, and he received many encouraging endorsements from physicians. But he realised that the medical profession was then extremely conservative, and he gave up the labours of propagandism and united with other physicians in establishing, in 1845–46, in Cincinnatti, Ohio, the Eclectic Medical Institute, an institution fundamentally devoted to independent thought and progress. He was professor of physiology in the college in 1846–56, and dean of the faculty in 1851–56. He retired from the college in 1856.’

  Buchanan was fortunate to establish a haven for himself. It would protect him from the coming storm—the storm caused by the rise of the movement called Spiritualism, which made every respectable doctor and scientist in the United States the sworn enemy of anything that sounded like ‘occultism’. But that is a story that must be told in the next chapter.

  Meanwhile, before we proceed with the story of psychometry, it is important to consider an interesting parallel development on the other side of the Atlantic; an idea that, by that revolutionary year 1848, had already made its discoverer famous. It was called the Odic force.

  Karl Reichenbach was one of those dynamos who seem born for wealth and success. Born in 1788, he had flung himself into the bold and venturesome spirit of the age, and built his first ironworks when he was 26. A sugar-beet factory followed; then there were blast furnaces in Moravia and a steelworks at Ternitz in Austria. He purchased vast estates, including a castle. Turning to the study of tar derivatives, he discovered paraffin, creosote and a blue aniline dye.

  He was approaching 50 when his business partner, Count Hugo zu Salm, died, and Reichenbach found himself involved in tiresome legal battles with the count’s sons. He won; but the litigation filled him with longing to turn his back on the world of quarrelsome human beings. When, in 1839, he was created a baron (Freiherr), he decided to retire to his castle at Reisenberg, near Vienna, and plunge into the peace of scientific research. But he was no longer concerned with organic chemistry. He now felt free to pursue an old dream, which was connected with the mysteries of the human mind.

  When he was in his early 20s, Reichenbach had been excited by the researches of the poet Goethe into the nature of light. Goethe had decided that Newton was wrong in believing that white light is made up of the seven colours of the spectrum—a conclusion he reached by looking at a white wall through a prism and observing that the rainbow colours only appeared around its edges. If white light was really multicoloured, why did not the whole wall turn into a rainbow? Goethe decided that colours are created by the mechanism of the eye, pointing out that if you rub your eyes vigorously in the dark, you see vivid flashes of colour. Goethe’s results had been dismissed by scientists as muddle-headed; but Reichenbach suspected he might be right after all. If so, it would be one more proof that the human mind is more complex than we think. And it was this possibility that fascinated Reichenbach.

  Like most other scientists in Europe in 1839, he was interested in mesmerism and hypnotism (usually known as ‘somnambulism’). It is also certain that he was aware of a mystery that was still causing speculation all over Europe: that of the youth called Caspar Hauser, who had been murdered by an unknown assailant a mere seven years earlier. Hauser had first walked into the town of Nuremberg on Whit-Monday 1828, apparently unable to speak a work. His feet were bleeding, and proved to be so white and tender that it was obvious he had never walked on them. A letter he was carrying, addressed to an army captain, stated that he was a foundling who wished to serve his king and country. He wrote his name on a piece of paper in crude and childish letters: Caspar Hauser. And it soon became clear that the unfortunate youth—who seemed to be about sixteen—had spent his whole life in darkness, chained to a bed in some unknown dungeon. He had no memory of who he was; his mind was totally unformed. Yet he proved to be intelligent and, under the tutelage of a local schoolmaster, soon learned to speak.

  Because he had been raised under such abnormal conditions, Caspar proved to have an extraordinary sensitivity. His sight and hearing were abnormally acute; he could see in the dark, and demonstrated his ability by reading aloud from the Bible in a completely black room. His sense of smell was so keen that he began to vomit if coffee, beer or any other strong drink was in the same room. The mere smell of wine literally made him drunk. The static electricity in the air during a thunderstorm caused him intense suffering. His teacher, Dr Daumer, soon discovered that Hauser could instantly detect copper or brass as soon as he came into a room, even if it had been carefully hidden. Moreover, he could distinguish between various metals—exactly like Buchanan’s subjects—simply by holding his hands above the cloth that concealed them.

  Hauser was also something of a human magnet—another phenomenon that has never been explained by science. Some people can build up such a powerful electric charge that anyone who touches them receives a severe shock. Hauser was not actually ‘electric’, but he attracted metal, and when he was on a horse, the stirrups stuck to his feet. He responded stron
gly to magnets; the north pole gave him a different sensation from the south pole, and he seemed to perceive different colours at either end.

  In 1829 an unknown man entered Daumer’s house when Hauser was alone and stabbed him. He recovered; but in 1832, the same man stabbed him again in the public gardens, and this time it proved fatal. The criminologist Anselm von Feuerbach published a paper in which he argued convincingly that Hauser was a prince of the house of Baden, a brother of the queen of Sweden who, for reasons of political intrigue, had been kept alive by those who were ordered to murder him. (His brothers, Feuerbach maintains, were murdered soon after birth.) Feuerbach was bitterly attacked for his views—for in those days of petty princelings, royalty was regarded as above criticism—and died soon after Caspar Hauser’s murder. The mystery still remains unsolved.

  Whether because of the Hauser case, or because of some more general interest in abnormal sensitivity, Reichenbach began to repeat some of Mesmer’s experiments with magnets—which, according to Mesmer, could cause small tides in the universal ether, and move it around the body. Then, in 1844, he heard about a girl named Mary Novotny, daughter of a tax collector in Vienna, who suffered from general debility and cataleptic attacks—like Justinus Kerner’s famous patient, Friederike Hauffe, ‘the Seeress of Prevorst’. Herr Novotny was asked if he would take a large magnet—no doubt supplied by Reichenbach—into his daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night, and see if she responded to it. The results were far more striking than he had expected. Around the poles of the magnet, the girl saw a fiery glow, a kind of aurora borealis, reddish-yellow from the south pole and bluish-green from the north. Could this have been auto-suggestion? Reichenbach got his assistant to go into the next room and point the magnet at her through the wall; she immediately detected its presence. Blindfolded, she could tell when the armature was moved from the end of the magnet. And, like Caspar Hauser, Miss Novotny proved to be a kind of magnet herself—at least, her hand stuck to the magnet as if her skin was made of iron.

  Two months later, Reichenbach heard about another sick girl, Angelica Sturmann. He had, meanwhile, been experimenting with ‘magnetized’ crystals, and found that they also affected sensitives. But for his first experiment with Miss Sturmann, he took a large piece of ordinary mountain crystal. He hid this in a dark room, then asked for the girl to be brought in. Within moments she had pointed out the crystal; she said that it was glowing and emitting sparks, and that a blue light was streaming out of its peak. When Reichenbach turned it upside down, she saw a kind of red and yellow smoke around the bottom.

  His tests with sensitives revealed that they enjoyed holding their fingers in the blue light, which they found cool and pleasant, while the reddish-yellow light produced a warm, slightly nauseating, sensation. Metals like brass and copper produced this same unpleasant sensation; so did quicksilver, which seemed to explain why many of his ‘sick sensitives’ could not stand mirrors. When he threw a spectrum on a wall with a prism, and placed glasses of water in the blue and the yellow light, the sensitives could tell the difference; the ‘blue’ water tasted faintly lemony, the ‘yellow’ bitter and sickly—one sensitive vomited after tasting it.

  His sensitives could also see plants and flowers in the dark—they seemed to be surrounded by a dim light. In fact, so were animals and human beings. And when a bell was rung, its vibrations produced a colour which gradually died away. The light from human beings was dim and smoky, except around the hands. These had clear colours streaming from the fingertips—blue from the right hand, yellowy-red from the left. A blindfolded sensitive could tell which hand he was touching her with according to whether it produced a cool or a warm sensation. ‘You see,’ remarks Reichenbach, ‘that a man is polarized from right to left . . . in the same way as a crystal’—anticipating one of the most interesting discoveries of modern brain physiology.

  All this seemed to support Mesmer’s conclusions about animal magnetism; but, oddly enough, Reichenbach disagreed. This was surely not some ‘etheric’ fluid that pervaded all space, but some mysterious energy that was common to magnets, crystals and living creatures. Reichenbach called this energy ‘Od’ or ‘Odyle’, and it became generally known as the ‘Odic force’.

  Here it becomes possible to see the error in Reichenbach’s reasoning. Our senses are all tuned to different kinds of energy; our ears vibrate to sound, our eyes to colour, our skins to warmth. The range of our senses is limited, apparently by survival needs; it would be of no particular use to us to be able to see the sun’s ultra-violet rays, or the infra-red radiation from a hot stove. It sounds very much as if Caspar Hauser’s years in darkness developed his senses to a point where he could perceive far beyond the normal range, just as some of Reichenbach’s sick sensitives could see the vibration of a bell or a violin. They were not perceiving ‘Od’, but ordinary energy. The force that animates living beings seems to have little in common with heat and light, although we now know that all living creatures generate a weak electric field—which its discoverer, Harold Burr, called the ‘L-field’. Whatever the nature of this life-force, it is certainly not Reichenbach’s ‘Od’. Reichenbach, like Goethe, had been led astray by his enthusiasm and his desire to find some simple uniting principle behind all phenomena. He would have done better to be contented with multiplicity.

  Nevertheless, by the year 1848 Reichenbach had achieved European celebrity. His ‘Od’ theory was regarded as the latest scientific advance, and most scientists were willing to preserve an open mind about it—Reichenbach’s descriptions of the precautions he took against auto-suggestion were so impressive. Others were beginning to take up his ideas and repeat his experiments. It seems a reasonable assumption that, even if Buchanan had never discovered psychometry, one of Reichenbach’s followers would have done so.

  In fact, it was a follower of Buchanan who opened up new and exciting vistas in the study of psychometry.

  His name was William Denton, and he was an Englishman who had been born in Darlington in 1823, and became a popular lecturer on temperance after his conversion to Methodism at the age of 16. Seven years later he moved to the United States, and went to Cincinnatti, where, oddly enough, he seems to have failed to encounter Joseph Rodes Buchanan, professor at the newly founded Eclectic Institute. He nevertheless married a Cincinnatti girl, moved on to Dayton, Ohio, as a headmaster, and became interested in the latest ideas in geology. In fact, he embraced what was then the violently controversial idea that the earth had not been created a few thousand years ago, but many millions. It is recorded that this caused so much offence to orthodox Christians that on one of his lecture trips he was threatened with mob violence. But it was after he became Professor of Geology at the University of Boston—in 1853—that he came upon Buchanan’s idea, published in the Journal of Man. The second issue contained the remarkable passage about the past being entombed in the present. For a geologist, no idea could be more exciting:

  ‘And why should not the world be filled with the monuments and unwritten records of its past history? . . . The geologist finds, in the different strata of the earth, in its curiously mingled and irregular structure, and in the fossil remains which it conceals in its bosom, the history of its various changes of surface, and of the antediluvian races of animals which have long been extinct. The huge saurian monsters, which he portrays from their fossil relics, rise before the eye as incredible chimeras. And over this fertile region, now occupied by prosperous States, he revives, by the magic power of science, the antediluvian seas and their strange inhabitants . . .’

  Denton was carried away by Buchanan’s daguerreotype theory. He also liked an experiment performed by G. H. Lewes, husband of the novelist George Eliot. Lewes laid a wafer on a surface of polished metal, and breathed on it. Then he allowed his breath to evaporate, removed the wafer, and breathed on the plate again. The image of the wafer appeared on the surface. It was still there months later. It even remained there when he carefully brushed the metal surface with a camelhair
brush. Is it not conceivable, Denton reasoned, that nature is full of such daguerreotypes of past events?

  His sister, Anne Cridge, seemed a suitable subject for experiment, since she was ‘highly impressible’. Denton began by trying Buchanan’s experiments with letters. Mrs Cridge revealed herself to be an excellent psychometrist: ‘She saw and described the writings of letters he was examining, and their surroundings, telling at times even the colour of hair and eyes correctly.’

  The next step was to try her with a geological specimen. Denton selected a piece of limestone which he had picked up near Quindaro, Kansas, on the Missouri River; it was full of tiny fossil shells. His sister was not told anything about the specimen, and it was wrapped in paper so she could not tell what it was. Her response was:

  ‘It seems to me there is a deep hole here. Oh, what shells! small shells; so many. I see water; it looks like a river running along. What a high hill – almost perpendicular; it seems as if the water had cut it in two; it is not so high on the other side. The hill is covered with sand and gravel.’