Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  By comparison, Sherman Denton’s description sounds vague and inaccurate; he described it as a green island without mountains (in fact, the mountains are five thousand feet high), and continued with descriptions of natives who lived a hand-to-mouth existence. But the fact that Denton includes this relative failure is a testimony to his honesty.

  These first two volumes of The Soul of Things are both impressive and exciting; with their long descriptions of past ages, they read almost like a novel. Denton was as convinced as Buchanan that psychometry was a normal human faculty, a ‘telescope into the past’ that could be developed by anyone who was willing to take the trouble. He gives the impression of being a rather better scientist than Buchanan, more anxious to exclude possible error, and to explain psychometry in terms of scientific theory. For example, he devotes a chapter to the psychological curiosity that is now known as ‘eidetic imagery’ or photographic memory—the ability some people (especially children) possess to look at some object, then to project an exact image of it onto a blank sheet of paper. Newton discovered that, during his optical experiments, the image of the sun (seen in a darkened glass) kept returning like a hallucination. It would vanish when he forgot about it; but he only had to call it to mind to make it appear in front of him. Denton discovered many other descriptions of the same phenomenon: not just of simple images like the sun, but of whole scenes. He quotes Professor Stevelly who, after watching bees swarming from hives, continued to have visual hallucinations of swarms of bees for days afterwards. A doctor named Ferriar described how, in the evening, he could conjure up in detail some scene he had looked at during the day—an old ruin, a fine house, a review of troops; he had only to go into a darkened room to see it as if in a coloured photograph. The geologist Hugh Miller had a similar ability. He wrote:

  ‘There are, I suspect, provinces in the philosophy of mind into which the metaphysicians have not yet entered. Of that accessible storehouse, in which the memories of past events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal; but of a mysterious cabinet of daguerreotype pictures, of which, though fast locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar, they seem to know nothing.’

  More than a century later, Dr Wilder Penfield proved the truth of this observation when, during a brain operation, he touched the patient’s temporal cortex with the electric probe, and the patient suddenly ‘replayed’ precise and lengthy memories of childhood, all as minutely detailed as if they were happening in the present.

  It is difficult to see at first what connection Denton saw between these visual hallucinations and psychometry—after all, they seem to have little enough in common. But it slowly becomes clear that his wife and sister—and later his son—actually saw these visions of the past; if the cinema had been invented at the time, he might have compared it to a mental film show. These experiences of hallucination seemed to offer a clue to this strange faculty of psychometric vision. Particularly interesting is Newton’s observation that he could make the image of the sun reappear before his eyes by imagining it. What is suggested here is that the image was so vividly imprinted on his brain that it could be ‘projected’ like a film by merely wanting to. This also seems to explain Stevelly’s visions of the swarming bees and Ferriar’s of old ruins of fine houses. The philosopher Berdyaev has a passage in which he describes his own hallucinatory vision of a woman called Mintslova—a disciple of Rudolph Steiner—whom he regarded as a pernicious influence:

  I was lying in bed in my room half asleep; I could clearly see the room and the corner opposite me where an icon was hanging with a little burning oil lamp before it. I beheld the outline of Mintslova’s face: its expression was quite horrifying—a face seemingly possessed of all the power of darkness. I gazed at her intently for a few seconds, and then, by an intense spiritual effort, forced the horrible vision to disappear.1

  It is significant that Berdyaev was half asleep, so that what might have been merely a dream-image was projected as a hallucination.

  The third volume of The Soul of Things makes us aware of the drawbacks of this ability. The frontispiece is a ‘Map of Jupiter’, with a key underneath listing such items as ‘Houses and city, seen 19 March 1870’, ‘Sugar loaf hills, seen 23 March 1870’. And the longest section in the book is a chapter called ‘Astronomical Examinations’, beginning with ‘A boy’s visit to Venus’, ‘Visit to a comet’, and including accounts of Mars and Jupiter. Sherman Denton’s observations on Venus begin promisingly with the comment that its mountains are higher than those on earth—which is true. But he then goes on to describe giant trees shaped like toadstools and full of sweet jelly, and an animal that was half-fish and half-muskrat. The 1962 Mariner space-probe revealed that the temperature on the surface of Venus is 900°F, hot enough to melt solder, and therefore too hot to support life. Sherman’s visit to a comet is equally disappointing; he states that it is a planet that has become a kind of fireball. We are still not sure of where comets originate; but we know that they are of low density, and almost certainly very cold. Sherman’s visit to the sun revealed that it is made of molten lava which is hardening in places into a crust. Modern astronomy has shown that the sun is a ball of gas. A visit to Mars revealed that it was much like earth, but peopled with men with four fingers, wide mouths, yellow hair and blue eyes. ‘It seems warm, like summer weather.’ (In fact, Mars would be very cold indeed, since it is more than 50,000,000 miles further from the sun than earth is.) Mrs Cridge and Mrs Denton also visited Mars, and described its religion, its art and its scientific inventions. Sherman and Mrs Cridge both described Jupiter, also peopled by blue-eyed blondes who can float in the air, and whose women all have plaits down to their waists. Modern space probes have revealed that Jupiter is basically a ball of freezing gas with a hot liquid core.

  Volume three of The Soul of Things is undoubtedly an anticlimax, and no one could be blamed for being inclined to dismiss the whole work as an absurd piece of self-deception. But before we throw the baby out with the bath water, we might recollect the parallel case of Emanuel Swedenborg. That remarkable mystic devoted the first fifty-six years of his life to science and engineering; then he began having strange dreams, hallucinations and trances. In these visionary states, he believed he had visited heaven and hell, and his books contain detailed accounts of the ‘afterworld’, all of which his disciples—who were soon numbered in thousands—accepted as literal truth. A century before the rise of spiritualism, Swedenborg claimed to be able to converse with spirits of the dead. When the queen of Sweden asked him to give her greetings to her dead brother, the prince royal of Denmark, Swedenborg said he would. Soon after, he told her that her brother sent his greetings, and apologized for not answering her last letter. He would now do so through Swedenborg . . . As Swedenborg delivered the detailed message, the queen turned pale, and said, ‘No one but God knows this secret’. On another occasion, in 1761, the widow of the Dutch ambassador told Swedenborg that she was having trouble with a silversmith who was demanding payment for a silver tea-service; a few days later, Swedenborg told her he had spoken to her husband, and that he had paid for the tea-service; the receipt would be found in a secret compartment in his bureau drawer. Swedenborg also mentioned some secret correspondence that would be found in the same drawer. Both the receipt and the correspondence were found where Swedenborg had said.

  In July 1759, Swedenborg was able to tell guests at a party in Gothenburg that a great fire had broken out in Stockholm, 300 miles away. Two hours later he told one of the guests that the fire had been extinguished only three doors from his home. Two days later, a messenger arrived confirming these details.

  So, understandably, Swedenborg’s disciples believed him when he described the ‘spirit realms’, and his visits to other planets. Mercury, he said, had a moderate temperature, and its beings were more spiritual than human beings; the planet also had cattle that were a cross between cows and stags. Venus had two races living on opposite sides of the planet, one mild a
nd humane, the other savage and violent—the latter being giants. Martians had faces that were half black and half white, and communicated by a kind of telepathy; they were also vegetarians. The inhabitants of Jupiter—whom Swedenborg claimed to know more intimately than those of any other planet—looked like human beings, but were far more gentle and humane, and naturally moral and virtuous. Those in warm regions went naked—except for a covering over the loins—and were astonished to be told that human beings could be sexually excited by another’s nakedness. The inhabitants of the moon had thunderous voices, which were produced by a kind of belching . . .

  How can these contradictions be resolved? One answer is suggested by Dr Wilson Van Dusen in his book Presence of Other Worlds. Van Dusen argues that there is strong evidence that Swedenborg’s visions were seen in ‘hypnagogic states’, the states in which we linger between sleep and waking. Swedenborg seems to confirm this when he writes: ‘Once, when I awoke at daybreak, I saw . . . diversely shaped apparitions floating before my eyes . . .’ Swedenborg’s descriptions of various kinds of spirits—particularly the ‘damned’—sound as if he is deliberately writing in parables; but the descriptions are as precise and detailed as those of a novelist. The most probable answer is that Swedenborg had developed a faculty very similar to that discussed by Denton in the chapter on Newton, Hugh Miller and others who experienced visual hallucinations. The severe mental crisis that changed him in his mid-fifties from a scientist to a visionary allowed the unconscious mind to erupt into consciousness; he could, in effect, dream with his eyes open.

  But if the visions of planets—and probably of heaven and hell—were self-deception, then how do we explain the accuracy of the vision of the Stockholm fire, and the information about the secret drawer and the queen’s letter? The answer is that, unfortunately, the possession of genuine ‘clairvoyant’ or mediumistic faculty is no guarantee of the truthfulness of other kinds of vision. In fact, the best clairvoyants and psychometrists have always been willing to admit that they can be confused by telepathic impressions from other people.

  And so we must count the third volume of The Soul of Things a failure—but a most extraordinary failure which does little to obscure the achievement of the first two volumes. It is a pity that Mrs Denton and Mrs Cridge were unable to distinguish between genuine ‘clairvoyance’ and the products of their own imagination; But, to be fair, we should admit that they had no reason to.

  Thomson Jay Hudson devotes some space to Denton and his geological experiments in The Law of Psychic Phenomena; (Denton was dead by that time—he had died in New Guinea in 1883, while on a world lecture tour.) Recalling what Hudson had to say about the hidden powers of the ‘subjective mind’, you might expect him to praise Denton as another explorer of the ‘invisible palace’. Yet, oddly enough, he rejects Denton’s ‘telescope into the past’ as self-deception. According to Hudson, everything Mrs Denton discovered could be explained by the telepathic powers of the subjective mind. She was simply able to read her husband’s mind. But surely, Denton had gone to enormous trouble to make sure that even he did not know what was in the various brown paper parcels? Hudson dismisses this. The subjective mind possesses immense powers of observation and memory, and it would be child’s play for the subjective mind to see through the elementary precautions taken by Denton . . .

  This sounds plausible, until we look more closely into Denton’s experiments. If the visions originated in his own mind, then why did his wife and sister—and later his son—often produce different pictures from different periods in the sample’s history—as with the piece of mosaic from the villa of Cicero? Why did Mrs Denton describe a man who sounds like Sulla when Denton was expecting her to describe Cicero? And if, indeed, it was Sulla she described, and Denton had no idea that Sulla had lived in the villa, then telepathy would have been impossible.

  Hudson could, of course, have countered these objections. If Denton’s wife and sister selected different parts of the sample’s history to describe, then they were merely selecting from the knowledge in Denton’s mind. As to Denton not knowing that it was the dictator’s villa, perhaps he did know, but had long ago forgotten that he had read it . . .

  But the real objection to Hudson’s arguments is that he is willing to credit the subjective mind with powers just as remarkable as psychometry—for example, healing a relative at a thousand miles. If the subjective mind can pick up vibrations from another mind, then why can it not pick up vibrations from a letter or a piece of mosaic? Hudson even credits the subjective mind with the power to foretell the future; he says that its deductive powers are so tremendous that it can calculate every possibility—like some gigantic computer—and select the likeliest one. He gives a great deal of space to the ‘daemon’ of Socrates—the inner voice that would give the philosopher good advice and warm him of impending danger; this, says Hudson, is simply the subjective mind making itself heard as a kind of voice inside the head. (A modern exponent of split-brain theory, Julian Jaynes, believes that the ancients heard ‘voices’ that came from the right cerebral hemisphere.) If the subjective mind possesses these remarkable powers, it seems contradictory to deny it the power of psychometry.

  The explanation of Hudson’s ‘tough-minded’ attitude is probably that he was unwilling to expose his newborn theory to ridicule by appearing too credulous. In fact, we can see in retrospect that many of his mistakes sprang out of being too sceptical. His chapter on crime and hypnosis provides two examples. He argues that no one could be made to commit a crime under hypnosis, because the prophetic powers of the subjective mind would make it aware that it might lead to disaster. In fact, many crimes have been committed under hypnosis—one of the best known examples being the Copenhagen case of 1951, when a man named Palle Hardrup robbed a bank and murdered the cashier under hypnotic suggestion. Hudson also remarks that committing suicide under hypnosis is as unlikely as committing a crime under hypnosis; in fact, this is precisely what did happen in the Sala case of 1929, when the hypnotist Sigwart Thurneman made a member of his criminal gang commit suicide by hypnotic suggestion.1

  But these criticisms fail to obscure the remarkable nature of Hudson’s achievement. The Law of Psychic Phenomena is one of the most important contributions to nineteenth-century thought, and deserves to be as well-known as The Origin of Species or Das Kapital. But, within a few years of the book’s publication, Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind had become still more notorious. Freud also believed that the unconscious is far more powerful than the conscious mind; but Freud’s unconscious is entirely negative, a kind of gigantic dustbin full of guilt, misery and repressions. Freud seemed even more sceptical and tough-minded than Hudson, and the result was that his more controversial theories won the day, and Hudson’s were forgotten.

  In fact, modern split-brain research has shown that Hudson’s ideas have a sounder basis than Freud’s. It is now a matter of scientific fact that we have two ‘selves’ inside our heads, that one is intuitive and the other intellectual, and that genius, as Hudson said, is a close co-operation between the two. So it is important to look again at Hudson’s contribution, and give careful thought to some of his insights. His most important recognition is that human beings possess mental powers of which they are unaware. He was right to emphasize the mystery of calculating prodigies; for their abilities seem to defy what we regard as the normal laws of the mind. They often appear out of the blue, in perfectly normal children, and later vanish just as abruptly. Archbishop Whately said that his own powers appeared at the age of six, when he knew nothing about figures except simple addition; suddenly, he could do tremendous calculations in his head. When he went to school three years later, ‘the passion wore off, and he became a dunce at mathematics. The powers of such prodigies seem incredible. One 6-year-old boy, Benjamin Blyth, was out walking-with his father when he asked what time he was born. His father told him four a.m. A few minutes later, the child stated the number of seconds he had lived. When they got home, his fathe
r worked it out on paper, and told Ben he was 172,800 seconds wrong. ‘No’, said the child, ‘you have forgotten two leap years’.

  Most calculating prodigies lose their powers in their teens, when life becomes more complex and difficult, and sexual changes in the body disturb the emotions. But the inference is that our brains have an extraordinary power that few of us ever bother to develop.