Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  His dreams seemed to provide a clue — dreams of living among cave men who wore skins, and of crouching in a crude hut where strips of meat hung up to dry. He had also dreamt of meeting a powerfully built, primitive man coming up from his basement. Soon after this dream he was looking through his collection of coins when he found that one had been displaced and put on a shelf. He had no memory of doing this. A window screen that he had repaired was torn, and again he could find no explanation. It was after this that he began to hear a voice in his head. It told him that he — the voice — was the man he had seen in his dream, and that he was permanently inside Marius. To prove it, he had twice taken possession of him, moving the coin and tearing the screen. He could, he said, possess him whenever he liked.

  Marius also seemed to believe that he was ‘possessed’ by some curious entity called the Bear. And he seemed to have his own ideas about how to exorcise it. He felt that he needed to lie in front of a large wood fire, to absorb its warmth, and that this would strengthen him enough to allow the Bear to reveal itself.

  For this therapeutic session, Crabtree and his patient moved to a country retreat, and five strong men also came along, in case Marius should give way to the urge to violence. A huge wood fire was built in the fireplace, and Marius lay in front of it, stripped to the waist. After half an hour, he began howling and tearing at the floor. When he relaxed and returned to normality, he told them that he now understood about the Bear. It was a huge cave bear that had been captured by a band of hunters, and then killed slowly — no doubt as part of some ritual. Its spirit had entered one of the hunters, and had then moved down the generations, passing from father to son until it reached Marius. Now it had left.

  But the entity that was driving Marius to violence was still inside him. According to Marius, this was a ‘round hole in space’, and it absorbed violence. It had been present when the bear was killed. It had appeared in Marius’s dream as the huge, primitive man coming up from the basement (the symbolism here is obvious).

  The following day, when Marius had been placed in a deeply relaxed state, this entity began to speak through him. After a great deal of questioning and some hostile bickering, it finally gave its name as Morlac, and said that, in the remote past, it had been worshipped as a goat and a stag. ‘It had fed off the life and energy of those who worshipped it.’ For thousands of years it had been worshipped in various forms; ‘it detested affection and love but it prospered in an atmosphere of violence and fear’. It described itself as a kind of ‘shimmering’ in space, ‘a sort of vortex, completely dark, with a “rim” of some kind’. It actively disliked the feelings of concern and benevolence that Crabtree and his fellow workers were directing at Marius.

  When Marius became exhausted — which happened frequently during work with the ‘entity’ — they stopped work until the next day. Marius retained no memory of what took place during these sessions.

  Back in Toronto, the strange conversations with the ‘entity’ continued; it remained contemptuous but was no longer totally uncooperative. ‘After a number of city sessions, something new entered the work. The entity began to recall its origins. It realised it had come from some other place and had a history which preceded its earth experiences, though it could not remember that history.’

  The next paragraph makes it clear why Crabtree felt so embarrassed about describing this particular case:

  Then one day the entity realised something about itself: that it was not totally dark, as it had always thought; in fact, its ‘rim’ had a tinge of light. From that point things moved quickly. The entity recognised that it did not have to fear the ‘white light’, that it had long ago in some other place lived in ‘the light’. Next came the recognition that it must leave the host it was possessing. At first the entity feared starvation without a victim to feed upon, but when it realised that ‘the light’ would nourish it, it left.

  Crabtree records that, in the eighteen months since this happened, Marius has experienced no recurrence of the problem, and his family life has returned to normal.

  As usual with Crabtree’s cases, there is nothing here that could not be interpreted in terms of mental illness. Having said that, it is necessary to add that psychics from Swedenborg to Rosalind Heywood would agree that there is another possible explanation: that there are disembodied entities, and that some of them are evil and dangerous. Rosalind Heywood’s description of an encounter with such an entity may serve as a conclusion to the present chapter. It happened in 1927, in a house in Sussex that had been converted out of a group of old barns. She and her husband arrived together with their furniture, late one night, and after putting up two beds, slept heavily until morning. On waking up, both of them had the same thought: ‘We cannot bring the baby here.’ ‘We were simply aware of hate — that hostile invisible non-human entities belonged to the place and desperately wanted to drive us away.’

  They had signed the lease and could not afford to look for somewhere else. Her husband decided that the answer might be an exorcist. He came back later with a priest, who asked for salt and water:

  I went to fetch these from the kitchen … Then came a shock. It was a hell’s kitchen, a raging whirlpool of hate, dismay and, strongest of all, panic. I felt as if I were being battered by almost physical breakers of panic and was very tempted to turn and bolt. However, although at the time I knew nothing of systematic investigation, the instinct to test the unusual was too strong, and I took some water only, returned to the drawing-room and said casually to my husband, ‘Oh dear, I’ve left the salt. Do get it, will you?’

  He went off cheerfully, but on his return even he looked taken aback. ‘Good gracious,’ he said, ‘that kitchen.’

  But the ritual of exorcism apparently worked, and when she sat in the kitchen with the light turned out, ‘the raging hate had gone, the terror had gone, and in their place was a quiet shining peace’.

  With her usual fair-mindedness, Rosalind Heywood is willing to admit that this may have been simply due to suggestion. A few years later they lent the house to her sister, who found it impossible to venture into the kitchen at night without feeling something that filled her with terror. But neither Rosalind Heywood nor her husband ever again picked up the sense of the hostile non-human entity.

  This episode, like so many others discussed in this chapter, sounds as if it belongs to the world of mediaeval superstition. In fact, it fits into a pattern of discovery that has begun to emerge in the last century and a half, and which we must now consider in its historical perspective.

  *See my Criminal History of Mankind, Chapter 2.

  *Grimble, Pattern of Islands, Chapter 6.

  **F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon, 1971.

  *Psychometry is the ability to ‘read’ the history of an object by touching it or holding it in the hand — or, in the case of a room, sensing some event that has taken place there. See my book The Psychic Detectives, 1984.

  **Lodge, Man and the Universe, 1908.

  ***Mysteries, 1978, Chapters 1 to 4.

  *In Man, Myth and Magic, 1972–73.

  *‘Right and Wrong Use of Esoteric Knowledge’ — lecture delivered at Dornach, 18, 19 and 25 November 1917.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Invasion of the Spirit People

  The literary sensation of the year 1848 was a book entitled The Night Side of Nature by Catherine Crowe. Mrs Crowe was an Edinburgh housewife, who had already achieved a modest success with novels like Susan Hopley and Lily Dawson. The Night Side of Nature — subtitled ‘Ghosts and Ghost Seers’ — made her a celebrity, and went on to become one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.

  Regrettably, Mrs Crowe did not enjoy her success for long. In 1859, she produced a treatise called ‘Spiritualism and the Age We Live In’ — which, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, evinced ‘a morbid and despondent turn of mind’, and soon after this she went insane — a fate her contemporaries must have felt she had invited by her in
terest in such macabre subjects. She recovered, but wrote little between then and her death in 1876. The Night Side of Nature remained as popular as ever, and was still on sale on railway bookstalls (price two shillings) at the turn of the century.

  The author of the piece in the Dictionary of National Biography was clearly not a believer in ghosts and ghost seers; for while he admits that the book is ‘one of the best collections of supernatural stories in our language’, he then attacks Mrs Crowe for being ‘extremely credulous and uncritical’. The reproach is unfair; the book would not have become so influential if it had been merely a collection of ghost stories. What the Victorians liked about it was its air of sturdy commonsense, and its attempts to treat the phenomena with detachment. It would be more than thirty years before scientific investigators approached the supernatural in a spirit of systematic research. But Mrs Crowe did her best, citing letters and documents and offering names of witnesses and dates.

  The book that inspired The Night Side of Nature was another nineteenth-century bestseller called The Seeress of Prevorst, by Justinus Kerner, and Catherine Crowe had published her own translation from the German only three years earlier. It was the first full-length study of a clairvoyant in literary history. The seeress of Prevorst was a peasant woman called Friederike Hauffe, who had been seeing strange visions and conversing with invisible spirits since childhood. At the age of nineteen, Friederike had married a cousin and had a baby; then she went into post-natal depression, and developed symptoms of hysteria. Every evening she fell into a trance and saw spirits of the dead. Kerner, a wealthy doctor and amateur poet, was summoned to try to cure her.

  Understandably, he treated her visions as delusions. But he was fascinated by one claim that was undoubtedly genuine. Friederike could read with her stomach. She would lie on a bed, and an open book would be placed, face down, on her naked midriff. And, with her eyes closed, she would read as easily as if it was in front of her face. She also claimed to be able to see into the human body, and possessed a knowledge of the nervous system that was extraordinary for a peasant.

  Kerner changed his mind about her visions after a strange experience. She told him that she was being haunted by a man with a squint, and Kerner recognised the description of a man who had died a few years earlier. The dead man, said Friederike, was suffering from a guilty conscience because he had embezzled some money and another man had been blamed. Now the embezzler wanted to clear the innocent man’s name, for the sake of his widow. The proof, he said, resided in a chest of documents, which would be found in the room of a certain official. The ‘spirit’ had shown her the official sitting in his room, with the chest open on the table; her description was so good that Kerner recognised a judge called Heyd. The judge had to admit the accuracy of Friederike’s account of his room, and both he and Kerner were staggered when the document was found exactly where she said it would be — she even knew that it had been filed in the wrong place.

  From now on, Kerner took Friederike seriously, and made a note of her basic ideas. She told him that we are surrounded by invisible spirits, and to prove it, persuaded them to make rapping noises, throw gravel, and made a stool rise up into the air. A book opened itself; a candle was extinguished by invisible fingers; and something tugged off Friederike’s boots as she lay on the bed. Kerner himself saw a ‘spirit’, which he described as looking like a grey pillar of cloud surmounted by a head.

  Friederike spoke a strange unknown language, which she claimed to be the original language of the inner life — scholars later found that it resembled Coptic. She talked about various complicated cycles of human existence — sun-circles and life-circles. And — most significant — she declared that man consists of four parts: body, ‘nerve aura’, soul and spirit, the nerve aura being an ‘ethereal body’ which carries on the vital processes when we are asleep or in trance; all this corresponds precisely to the views of Steiner, as described in Chapter Two.

  These spirit manifestations did her health no good, and she died at the age of twenty-nine, in 1829, the same year that Kerner published his book The Seeress of Prevorst. It caused a sensation. Kerner was a respectable literary man, a friend of poets and philosophers, as well as an eminent physician, so it could not be dismissed as lies or fantasy. The well-known theologian David Strauss had also witnessed many of the things described in the book, and vouched for their truth. Strauss’s ‘destructive’ Life of Jesus would soon be causing a national scandal; but even this hardly compared with the European scandal caused by The Seeress of Prevorst. The nineteenth century was the age of rationalism triumphant. Scientists would come to terms with David Strauss’s scepticism — but not with Friederike’s invisible spirits. The doctors of Paris and Vienna had destroyed the career of Dr Franz Mesmer by denouncing ‘mesmerism’ and hypnosis as a fraud. They refused even to look at the evidence for telepathy or clairvoyance. It was easier to believe that The Seeress of Prevorst was a hoax than to ask what it all meant. The tremendous popular success of the book only deepened their conviction that it was some kind of imposture.

  All this helps to explain why it took Kerner’s book almost two decades to reach England. Britain, after all, was the original home of scepticism. David Hume had dismissed miracles by asking which was more likely: that witnesses should tell lies, or that the laws of nature should be violated? The English were proud of their tradition of bold thinking; they liked to point out that, unlike the French and Italians and Bavarians, they had no reason to fear being sent to the stake if they called the pope a liar. The British medical profession entirely approved of the decision of their French colleagues to denounce Mesmer as a charlatan; when a nonconformist doctor named John Elliotson declared that he took mesmerism seriously, an eminent surgeon named Sir Benjamin Brodie stated in print that it was ‘a debasing superstition, a miserable amalgam of faith and fear’.

  But Catherine Crowe published her translation of The Seeress of Prevorst in 1845, and came to no harm — after all, she was a woman, and a novelist at that. The book excited as much attention as it had in German. And it convinced Mrs Crowe of the reality of the ‘supernatural’. She had so far been a disciple of the famous Edinburgh doctor George Combe, Britain’s most famous exponent of phrenology — the doctrine that a man’s character can be read through the bumps on his skull — and Combe was a determined sceptic about ghosts and such matters. Kerner — and Friederike — made her a convert. It now came to her as a revelation that the ‘scientific spirit’ had gone too far. ‘Because, in the 17th century, credulity outran reason and discretion, the 18th century, by a natural reaction, flung itself into an opposite extreme.’ And the nineteenth century had carried this attitude to the point of absurdity; in fact, it had become a new kind of superstition, refusing to face facts that contradicted its dogmas.

  Mrs Crowe was not particularly credulous. She set about unearthing her own facts, and found that they seemed to fit together into a logical pattern. Almost everything she wrote about would later be studied more systematically by parapsychologists, and carefully documented in scientific archives: dreaming of the future, death-bed visions, premonitions of disaster, ‘phantasms’ of the living and of the dead, poltergeists, spontaneous psychokinesis, even possession. She reproaches contemporary scientists for insisting that the supernatural can be explained in terms of hysteria or nervous derangement, and points out, quite fairly, that they ‘arrange the facts to their theory, not their theory to the facts’. What is now needed, she says, is investigation. ‘And by investigation I do not mean the hasty, captious, angry notice of an unwelcome fact … but the slow, modest, pains-taking examination that is content to wait upon nature, and humbly follow out her disclosures, however opposed to preconceived theories or mortifying to human pride.’ Here she seems to be echoing a famous remark by Thomas Henry Huxley about the duty of the scientist: ‘Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn
nothing.’ It is interesting to discover that Huxley wrote this sentence in 1860, more than a decade after The Night Side of Nature was published; Huxley may, in fact, be echoing Mrs Crowe.

  Her aim, she readily admits, is to see whether the evidence proves that some part of man can survive his death. The first step in this direction — and it was later followed by most of her eminent successors, such as Myers and Tyrrell — was to try to show that man possesses powers that cannot be explained by science. She devotes several chapters to dreams and presentiments of the future, and includes a number of experiences gathered from friends:

  Another friend lately dreamt, one Thursday night, that he saw an acquaintance of his thrown from his horse, and that he was lying on the ground with the blood streaming from his face, and was much cut. He mentioned his dream in the morning, and being an entire disbeliever in such phenomena, he was unable to account for the impression it made on his mind. This was so strong that, on Saturday, he could not forebear calling at his friend’s house, who he was told was in bed, having been thrown from his horse on the previous day, and much injured about the face.

  If Mrs Crowe had lived to become a member of the Society for Psychical Research, she would have gone to the trouble of getting signed statements from her friend, the man who had the accident, and the person he told about the dream the morning after. As a pioneer in the field, she obviously felt that this was unnecessary. Otherwise, it is difficult to fault her method.

  Like every writer on the paranormal, she is particularly fascinated by out-of-the-body experiences, for she rightly regards these as potential proof that there is something in man that can exist outside the body. Again, she does her best to offer facts that could be checked: