Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Madeleine’s descriptions of sabbats and Black Masses sound like pure invention. But, as we saw in the previous chapter, the notorious Chambre Ardente (Lighted Chamber) affair, half a century later, revealed that many priests took part in such practices. It is difficult for us to understand why the Church was involved in this wave of demonology—the likeliest explanation is that 17th century rationalism was undermining its authority, and that the protest against this authority took the form of licentiousness and black magic. Whatever the explanation, the Chambre Ardente transcripts leave no doubt but that it really happened.

  Another investigator who came to believe that ‘possession’ was due to spirits was Max Freedom Long, an American schoolmaster who arrived in Hawaii in 1917, at the age of 27, and began to make a study of its native ‘magicians’, the Kahunas or ‘keepers of the secret.’1 According to the Huna religion, Long discovered, man has three ‘selves’, the ‘low self, the ‘middle self and the ‘high self. The low self is basically emotional, and corresponds roughly to Freud’s unconscious mind. The middle self is our ordinary, everyday consciousness. The high self might be called the superconscious mind, and can foresee the future. After death, the three selves may become separated, and it is the low self that sometimes becomes a poltergeist. The middle self may become a ‘ghost’. In his book The Secret Science Behind Miracles, Long also discusses the phenomenon of multiple personality, and expresses the view that this is often due to ‘possession’, either by a low self or a middle self, or a combination of the two. He describes the case of a Californian girl with two personalities, which took over the body for years at a time, and how, when doctors tried to amalgamate the two under hypnosis, a third personality appeared, who told them that the girl should be left as she was, with two spirits sharing the body. This third personality Long believes to be the ‘high self’.

  Two more eminent American investigators came to accept the possibility of ‘possession’. The philosopher William James was converted from his early scepticism to a belief in ‘spirits’ through the mediumship of Mrs Leonore Piper, whose ‘control’, Phinuit, was able to tell him all kinds of things that he could not possibly know by normal means. James was to agree that if a medium can be ‘possessed’ by a spirit, then it is possible that other people might be. James’s close friend Professor James Hyslop was another sceptic who was ‘converted’ by Mrs Piper. But he had a more practical reason for becoming convinced of the reality of ‘possession’. When Hyslop was president of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1907, he was visited by a goldsmith named Frederick Thompson, who was convinced that he had become ‘possessed’ by the spirit of a painter, Robert Swain Gifford, whom he had met on a few occasions. After Gifford’s death, Thompson had begun to hear Gifford’s voice urging him to draw and paint—something he had never done before. Although he had no artistic training, Thompson began to paint in Gifford’s style. What convinced Hyslop was that Thompson painted pictures of places that he had never been to, but which Gifford had. Some of these proved to be identical to Gifford’s final sketches—which Thompson had never seen—and when Hyslop visited the New England swamps and coastal regions he recognised them as the subject of these sketches.

  Hyslop consulted a neurologist, Dr Titus Bull, about Thompson. And Bull himself was to to conclude that many cases of mental illness really involved ‘possession’. In one case, the patient—who had suffered a head injury—claimed that he had been ‘taken over’ by the spirit of a painter named Josef Selleny, who had been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian, and who was ‘forcing’ him to paint. (Wickland claimed that such accidents as head injuries would provide opportunity for alien ‘entities’ to invade.) Lengthy researches by Bull’s assistant Helen Lambert—a wealthy woman with time to spare—finally uncovered the existence of a real Josef Selleny (the encyclopedias mistakenly spelt it Joseph, but the patient spelt it correctly), who had, indeed, been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian. A medium who worked with Dr Bull was able to reveal that the patient was being possessed by several ‘entities’, one of whom seized possession of her body and grabbed Bull by the throat. Eventually, the various entities were dislodged or persuaded to go away. Mrs Lambert’s account, later published in her book A General Survey of Psychic Phenomena, sounds remarkably like many cases described by Carl Wickland. The few available cases make it clear that Bull’s name deserves a distinguished place in the annals of psychical research.

  Dr Adam Crabtree, a psychiatrist who lives and works in Toronto, began to give serious consideration to the idea of possession as a result of treating patients who claimed to hear ‘voices’ inside their heads.

  Now such cases are not particularly rare, and ‘hearing voices’ is certainly not a sign of madness. Dr Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, began to make a study of auditory hallucinations after experiencing one himself—he was lying on a couch when he heard a voice speaking from the air above his head. Naturally concerned about his sanity, Jaynes discovered, to his relief, that about ten per cent of people have had hallucinations of some sort, and that about a third of these take the form of ‘phantom voices’. One perfectly normal young housewife told him that she held long conversations with her dead grandmother every morning when she made the beds.

  Jaynes, of course, takes it for granted that such experiences are hallucinations, and for a long time Adam Crabtree shared that belief. Then he encountered a case that raised some basic doubts. It concerned a young woman named Sarah Worthington, who was the patient of a female colleague of Crabtree’s called Jenny. After a treatment that had been initially successful, Sarah Worthington had suddenly plunged into moods of depression in which she was tempted to commit suicide.

  The three of them met in Crabtree’s office, and he began to probe her difficulties. One of his questions was whether she had ever heard voices inside her head, and she admitted that she had. Crabtree asked her to lie down and relax, and to do her best to try to recall these inner conversations. Almost immediately, the girl’s body tensed, and she exclaimed: ‘Oh, the heat! I’m hot!’ And as she went on speaking, both psychiatrists observed the change in her voice. Sarah lacked confidence; this new personality had the voice of someone who was used to exercising authority. When they asked the woman what she wanted to do, she replied: ‘Help Sarah.’ It was a clear indication that this was not Sarah. They asked the woman her name, and she replied: ‘Sarah Jackson.’ She identified herself as Sarah’s grandmother. Crabtree explained that he and Jenny were also trying to help Sarah, and asked the ‘grandmother’ if she would be willing to help; she replied yes. This ended the first session.

  At the next session, the grandmother soon came back. She was still talking about a fire, and at one point she asked: ‘Where is Jason?’ Jason, it transpired, was her son, and the fire she was referring to had taken place in 1910. Sarah Jackson had rushed home as soon as she heard that there was a fire in her street—her seven-year-old son had been left in the house alone. The whole neighbourhood was ablaze. In fact, Jason had been moved to safety by neighbours, but it took Sarah Jackson another hour to discover this, and in the meantime she had rushed around the streets in a frenzy, stifling in the heat. The experience had imprinted itself deep in her consciousness.

  According to the grandmother, she had ‘taken possession’ of Sarah Worthington when her granddaughter was playing the piano—both of them loved music. And it soon became clear that, in spite of her avowed intention of helping her granddaughter, it was Sarah Jackson herself who was in need of help. She was tormented by guilt feelings about her own life—particularly about how badly she had treated her daughter Elizabeth, Sarah’s mother. Elizabeth had developed into an unhappy, neurotic girl, who had in turn treated her own daughter badly. And Sarah’s relations with her mother were a strange duplicate of Elizabeth’s relations with her mother. Both mothers had greatly preferred their son to their daughter, and had taught the daughter that men were everything and women nothing. The grandmother had become fully aware of a
ll this by the time she died, which is why she now felt that she had to help her granddaughter. Instead of helping, she had made things worse; Sarah was frightened and confused by the voice inside her, and was becoming desperate.

  Now grandmother Jackson was ‘out in the open’, things became much easier. She was able to give the psychiatrists invaluable information about Sarah’s family background. And although Sarah was at first astonished to realise that her grandmother was speaking through her, she gradually learned to accept it, and began to achieve deeper insight into her problems. At the end of two months she was cured. The grandmother remained a ‘possessing presence’, but now Sarah understood it she was no longer afraid; in fact, it gave her a sense of comfort to feel that her grandmother was a vaguely beneficent presence in the background of her life.

  The reader’s reaction to this story is probably much the same as my own, when I first read it in the typescript of Adam Crabtree’s Multiple Man: that there must be some purely psychological explanation. Sarah had known her grandmother as a child; perhaps she had heard the story about the fire from her own lips. Perhaps she recognised how similar her mother’s problems had been to her own. And her unconscious mind had ‘re-told’ her the story as a rationalisation of her own sufferings . . . But the more I read of Crabtree’s book (which his publishers had sent to me, asking if I would write an introduction) the more I saw that such explanations are unacceptable. He goes on to recount another eight cases from his practice, each one involving some type of ‘possession’. And after the third or fourth case, the unconscious mind explanation had begun to wear very thin. A social worker named Susan was unable to sustain any normal relationship with a male, and recognised, correctly, that this was due to some deep resentment towards her father. Crabtree was able to speak to her father—who had died in a car crash—just as he spoke to Sarah’s grandmother, and he learned that he had been sexually obsessed with his daughter. Until she was 16, he had crept into her bedroom after she was asleep and had fondled her genitals. On some unconscious level, she was aware of what was happening. She recognised his desire for her, and treated him with contempt, behaving provocatively and exercising her new-found sexual power to make him squirm. The contempt spread into her relations with boyfriends and caused problems. When her father died in the car crash, he was drawn to his daughter as a ‘place of refuge’, and she was vulnerable to him because of the sexual interference. Once ‘inside’ her, he was in a condition of ‘foggy sleep’, unaware of his identity or his present position. Crabtree patiently explained to Susan’s father that he was actually dead, and that he ought to leave his daughter alone. And one day, he simply failed to appear at the therapeutic session; Susan experienced a sense of relief and freedom.

  I found one case particularly fascinating and intriguing; it concerned a university professor called Art, whose first marriage had been unsuccessful, and who was about to embark on a second. He was beginning to experience a deep reluctance to go through with the marriage, and he associated this with ‘inner storms’ in which a censorious voice criticised him and various people he knew. He was vaguely aware that the voice sounded like his mother—who was living in Detroit—and he had arrived at the commonsense explanation that the voice was some negative aspect of himself, and that he had somehow incorporated elements of his mother, who had always been intensely possessive towards him.

  Crabtree followed his usual procedure, placing Art in a state of deep relaxation, and then opening a dialogue with the mother, who was called Veronica. Veronica was perfectly willing to talk at length about her relation to her son, and about why she disapproved of so many of his friends. ‘Veronica came across as blatantly, almost naively, self-centred . . .’ She explained that she simply wanted to make her son recognise that many people he trusted—including his future wife—were stupid and scheming and not worthy of his respect.

  Crabtree asked her if she thought all this interference could be good for her son, or even good for herself, and she finally admitted that the answer was probably no. In Detroit she was living a drab and boring life, and Crabtree pointed out that if she paid more attention to her own affairs and less to her son’s, things might improve.

  During the therapy, Art’s mother discovered that she had a cancerous growth, and had to have an operation. The ‘Veronica’ who spoke through Art’s mouth agreed that this might be because she was robbing herself of vitality by ‘possessing’ her son. And at this point, Art’s ‘inner voice’ began to fade, until he finally ceased to hear it. But there was a remarkable change in his mother in Detroit. She had been experiencing a slow deterioration, and emotional withdrawal from life. Now, suddenly, her vitality began to return; she started going out and making new friends. ‘She seemed to have gained the proverbial new lease on life.’

  Crabtree insists that his own attitude towards such cases is not that of a believer in the paranormal; he claims to be merely an observer, a phenomenologist, who simply treats each case ‘as if it were possession. And clearly, there is nothing contradictory in such an attitude; Susan and Sarah and Art could have been manufacturing the voices themselves; the unconscious mind is capable of far more remarkable feats. Still, the fact remains that most readers will feel that, taken all together, these cases make an overwhelming impression of being something more than unconscious self-deception.

  I turned back to Julian Jaynes to see what he had to say about ‘disembodied voices’. He outlines his theory in a remarkable work called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976 (‘bicameral’ means simply having two compartments.) Jaynes advances the extraordinary theory that our remote ancestors heard ‘voices’ all the time, the reason being that—according to Jaynes—early man lacked all self-awareness in our modern sense of the word. Jaynes believes that our cave-man ancestors could not look inside themselves and say: ‘Now let me think . . .’, because they had no ‘inner me’. Their eyes were like a car’s headlamps, directed permanently towards the outside world. So if one of these men was ordered to go and build a dam down the river, he would find it extremely difficult to remember why he was ambling along the river bank. But his sense of purpose would be refreshed by a voice—the voice of his chief—which seemed to come from the air above his head, and which would repeat his instructions.

  And where would such voices come from? According to Jaynes, from the right side of the brain—the hemisphere which, as we have seen, houses the ‘other self’, Hudson’s ‘subjective mind’. If that is correct, it certainly offers a plausible explanation for the voice of Sarah’s grandmother and Susan’s father and Art’s mother—in fact, in the latter case, it sounds far more convincing than the notion that a living woman in Detroit could somehow ‘get inside’ her son’s head in distant Toronto.

  It is when Jaynes goes on to discuss the voices heard by mental patients that certain doubts begin to arise. He points out that most of the cases that have been studied involve schizophrenics, and says: ‘They converse, threaten, curse, criticise, consult, often in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes simply announce everything that’s happening. They yell, whine, sneer, and vary from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout. Often the voices take on some special peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly, scanning, rhyming, or in rhythms, or even foreign languages. There may be one particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many . . .’

  The voices described by Crabtree do not sound in the least like this bewildering babble; they apparently conversed like any normal person. And the same applies to the housewife who held long conversations with her grandmother as she was making the beds. There is no reason, of course, why ‘phantom voices’ should not sound like those of a normal person; but it seems to be a fact that most of them don’t.

  This is confirmed by a study made by another clinical psychologist, Dr Wilson Van Dusen, formerly of the Mendocino State Hospital in California. Van Dusen spent sixteen years observing the effect of h
allucinations, and he describes his findings in a chapter called ‘The Presence of Spirits in Madness’ in his book The Presence of Other Worlds. His conclusions are, perhaps, even more startling than those of Julian Jaynes.

  Van Dusen explains that most patients who are hallucinating prefer to keep their experiences to themselves, since they know it will be taken as a proof that they are mad. However, one unusually co-operative patient asked him if he would mind talking directly with her hallucinations, and he did. Naturally, the hallucination could not answer Van Dusen direct: he had to ask the patient to give an account of what he could hear and see. But there was nothing to stop Van Dusen addressing the hallucination directly. ‘In this way I could hold long dialogues with a patient’s hallucinations and record both my questions and their answers.’ And, like Adam Crabtree, he insists: ‘My method was that of phenomenology. My only purpose was to describe the patient’s experiences as accurately as possible. The reader may notice that I treat the hallucinations as realities—that is what they are to the patient.’

  One consistent finding, says Van Dusen, was that the patients felt as if they had contact with another world or order of beings. ‘Most thought these other persons were living. All objected to the term “hallucination”.’

  ‘For most individuals the hallucinations came on quite suddenly. One woman was working in the garden when an unseen man addressed her. Another man described sudden loud noises and voices he heard when riding in a bus. Most were frightened, and adjusted with difficulty to this new experience. All the patients described voices as having the quality of a real voice, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, than normal voices. The experience they described was quite unlike thoughts or fantasies; when things are seen they appear fully real. For instance, a patient described being awakened one night by air force officers calling him to the service of his country. He got up and was dressing when he noticed their insignia wasn’t quite right, then their faces altered. With this he knew they were of the Other Order and struck one hard in the face. He hit the wall and injured his hand. He could not distinguish them from reality until he noticed the insignia . . .