The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Scrutton went on to uncover many other legends concerning a great catastrophe in ancient Welsh poetry and in the Icelandic Eddas (where it was known as Ragnarok). It is worth mentioning that Ignatius Donnelly, whose book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World19 caused a sensation in 1882, went on to write another classic, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Ice in the following year; in this volume he attempted to study catastrophe legends of the northern hemisphere and created a remarkable theory of continental drift that later proved to be totally accurate.

  Scrutton’s research led him to rediscover the Oera Linda Book and to become absorbed in its strange yet credible account of ancient history. The first question he asked himself was: what was the precise nature of the catastrophe that destroyed Atland and depopulated Britain? In The Other Atlantis (1977) he suggests that it was a giant meteor or asteroid that struck the earth somewhere in the region of the North Pole; the force of the explosion had the effect of tilting the earth’s axis into a more upright position, so lands that had formerly had long, hot summers now developed arctic conditions. The Greeks have their legends of the Hyperboreans, a people who live in idyllic conditions in the far north, and Scrutton identifies these with the Atlanders.

  This projectile, Scrutton suggests, produced the crater known as the Arctic Ocean – which, he claims, would look like one of the enormous craters of the moon if its water was drained away. Many stones and rocks that modern scientists believe were moved by glaciers were actually, Scrutton suggests, hurled by the explosion. But this part of his theory is open to a simple objection. The opening section of the Oera Linda Book says that during the whole summer before the flood “the sun had been hid behind the clouds, as if unwilling to look upon the earth”. There was perpetual calm, and “a damp mist hung like a wet sail over the houses and marshes”. Then, “in the midst of this stillness, the earth began to tremble as if she was dying. The mountains opened to vomit forth fire and flames”.

  That seems clearly to be a description of a volcanic catastrophe of the kind that is supposed to have destroyed Atlantis, not a tidal wave caused by a meteor. Does this mean that the meteor theory must be abandoned? Not necessarily. A meteor that struck in the region of the North Pole would certainly have produced a tidal wave, but if the polar cap itself was covered with ice, it may not have been great enough to cause a tidal wave that would submerge Britain and Atland. But the volcanic activity that would almost certainly follow such an impact could produce a mighty tidal wave, like the one caused by the explosion of Santorini (and later of Krakatoa).

  Scrutton also mentions a description in the Finnish epic the Kalevala of a time when the sun vanished from the sky and the world became frozen and barren, and quotes a modern introduction that places this at a period when the Magyars (Hungarians) and the Finns were still united – at least three thousand years ago.

  Scrutton believes that the “maps of the ancient sea kings” described by Professor Charles Hapgood (and discussed in chapter 49) confirm his view of the catastrophe that destroyed Atland. Once again, there is an objection. Core samples taken in Queen Maud Land (in the Antarctic) show that the last time the South Pole was unfrozen was around 4000 BC So the great maritime civilization that Hapgood believes was responsible for the “ancient maps” must have flourished before then.

  This, of course, does not rule out a catastrophe some two thousand years later – perhaps the civilization of Atland lasted for two thousand years, like that of the Egyptians. But if Hapgood is correct, and his great maritime civilization existed more than six thousand years ago and then was either forgotten or destroyed in a great catastrophe, it certainly becomes difficult to reconcile the two theories.

  There is, however, one way of reconciling them that is no bolder – or more absurd – than the theories themselves. Hapgood believed that the ancient maps were evidence of a worldwide maritime civilization that existed long before Alexander the Great. Let us, then, posit the existence of such a civilization that began sometime after the last great ice age – say, around 10,000 BC. Six thousand years later this civilization is highly developed in the Antarctic and in Atland. In other parts of the world – like the Middle East – it is less highly developed, although there are already cities, and the plow has been developed. For unknown reasons – no one knows what causes ice ages – the cold returns, and the Antarctic civilization freezes up, so its peoples are forced to go elsewhere – notably to Egypt. The Atland civilization, being in more temperate latitudes, is not affected. Then, in 2192 BC, comes the “great catastrophe” that tilted the earth’s axis. Now, like the inhabitants of the South Pole, the Atlanders are also forced to move – and of course they move south, to regions that have not been affected by the great catastrophe – like India and the Mediterranean. If this scenario is correct, then both Hapgood and Scrutton could be right.

  One thing seems clear: that the ancient maps prove the existence of a great maritime civilization that flourished before Alexander the Great. Like the maps, the Oera Linda Book also points to the existence of such a civilization. Even if the Oera Linda Book proved to be a forgery, the evidence of the maps would be unaffected. But at the present time, there is no evidence that it is a forgery. In this case, it deserves to be reprinted in a modern edition and carefully studied by historians – as well as read by the general public for its fascinating tales of murder and battle. If it proves to be genuine, the Oera Linda Book could revolutionize our view of world history.

  40

  The “People of the Secret”

  Early in 1883 a book called Esoteric Buddhism caused an immediate sensation, and quickly went into a second edition. It was by a slender, balding little man called Alfred Percy Sinnett, editor of India’s most influential newspaper the Pioneer. What caused the excitement was Sinnett’s claim, on the very first page, that he had obtained his information from “hidden masters”, men who lived in the high mountains of Tibet and who were virtually immortal. Coming from the editor of a newspaper that was regarded as the mouthpiece of the British government in India, this could not be dismissed as “occultist” lunacy. Such a man deserved serious attention when he declared:

  For reasons that will appear as the present explanations proceed, the very considerable block of hitherto secret teaching this volume contains, has been conveyed to me, not only without conditions of the usual kind, but to the express end that I might convey it in my turn to the world at large.

  Many people took Sinnett very seriously indeed. The poet W.B. Yeats read the book and handed it to his friend Charles Johnston, who was so impressed that he rushed off to London for permission to set up a Dublin branch of the Theosophical Society, the publisher of Sinnett’s book.

  It was almost three years later that the general public learned how Sinnett had obtained his “hitherto secret teaching”, and the sceptics felt confirmed in their cynicism. In October 1880 Sinnett and his wife had played host to that remarkable lady Madame Blavatsky, who told him that most of her knowledge had been obtained from her “secret Masters” who lived in the Himalayas. She convinced Sinnett of her genuineness by a series of minor miracles. On a picnic, when an unexpected guest had turned up, she ordered another guest to dig in the hillside with a table knife; he unearthed a cup and saucer of the same pattern as the rest of the china. When a woman remarked casually that she wished she could find a lost brooch Madame Blavatsky told the other guests to go and search in the garden; the missing brooch was found in a flower-bed wrapped in paper. And when Sinnett expressed his desire to correspond directly with the “Masters” Madame Blavatsky promised to do what she could, and a few days later Sinnett found lying in his desk the first of what were to become known as “the Mahatma letters”. It was from this series of letters that Sinnett obtained his knowledge of “esoteric Buddhism”.

  Unfortunately, this information about the Mahatma letters was revealed in a report on Theosophy published by the Society for Psychical Research towards the end of 1885, and the rest of the report was damning. It wa
s the result of an investigation by a young man named Richard Hodgson, who had talked to Madame Blavatsky’s housekeepers and learned that most of the “miracles” were fraudulent; their most convincing demonstration was to cause a letter – addressed to Hodgson and referring to the conversation they had only just had – to fall out of the air above his head. Hodgson’s report had the effect of totally destroying Madame Blavatsky’s credibility, and demolishing the myth of the “hidden Masters” in Tibet.

  Having said all this, it is necessary to admit that there are still a number of things to be said in Madame Blavatsky’s favour. The evidence of many observers shows that she was undoubtedly a genuine “spirit medium”. Constance Wachtmeister, a countess who became Madame Blavatsky’s factotum in 1884, found it at first a little unnerving. She was sharing a room (divided by a screen) with Madame Blavatsky, and as soon as Madame was asleep the raps would begin, continuing at intervals of ten minutes until about 6 a.m. A lamp was burning by Madame Blavatsky’s bed; on one of the first nights the countess was kept awake and slipped behind the screen to extinguish it. She had only just got back into bed when the lamp was relit. Madame Blavatsky was obviously asleep, and in any case the countess would have heard the scrape of a match or tinder box. Three times she extinguished it; three times it promptly relit itself. The raps also continued. The third time she put it out, she saw a disembodied brown hand turning up the wick. She woke Madame Blavatsky, who looked pale and shaken, and explained that she had been “with the Masters” and that it was dangerous to awaken her suddenly.

  Charles Johnston describes how he sat watching HPB (as her admirers called her), tapping her fingers idly on a table-top. Then she raised her hand a foot or so above the table and continued the tapping movement; the sounds continued to come from the table. Then she turned towards Johnston, and began to send the “astral taps” on to the back of his hand. “I could both feel and hear them. It was something like taking sparks from the prime conductor of an electric machine; or, better still, perhaps, it was like spurting quicksilver through your fingers”.

  It is of course possible that all this was fraudulent; but it seems unlikely. If we can accept the hypothesis that there are genuine mediums that is, mediums who either possess, or are possessed by, certain “magical” powers then it seems fairly certain that Madame Blavatsky was such a person. And if we can accept that there are genuine mediums, then the next question is whether their powers are the result of some mysterious activity of the unconscious mind, or whether they involve some external force – some emanation of the “collective unconscious”, or even “spirits”. Most students of the paranormal end up by conceding (however reluctantly) that there does seem to be some external force, although understandably many of them find it impossible to concede the existence of spirits.

  The psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen, who studied hundreds of patients suffering from hallucinations in the Mendocino State Hospital, reached the remarkable conclusion that the nature of the hallucinations had been accurately described by the eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. They seemed to fall into two types, which he calls “higher order” and “lower order”. Lower-order hallucinations seemed to be stupid and repetitive; they “are similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it”. But higher-order hallucinations seemed “more likely to be symbolic, religious, supportive, genuinely instructive”. A gas-fitter experienced a higher-order hallucination of a beautiful woman who showed him thousands of symbols. Van Dusen was able to hold a dialogue with this “woman”, with the help of the patient, and after the conversation the patient asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.

  If we can accept this much, then we can also see that Madame Blavatsky’s “secret masters” may not have been her own invention. She told Constance Wachtmeister that the raps that resounded from above her bed were a “psychic telegraph” that linked her to the Masters, who watched over her body while she slept. If we are willing to concede that the Masters may have been what Swedenborg calls “angels”, or what Van Dusen calls higher-order hallucinations, then it suddenly ceases to be self-evident that HPB was an old fraud. We have at least to consider the hypothesis that something was going on which is slightly more complicated.

  Madame Blavatsky was not the inventor of the idea of secret masters; the notion is part of an ancient “occult” tradition. The composer Cyril Scott, who was also an “occultist”, writes in his Outline of Modern Occultism (1935) of the basic tenets of “Occult science”:

  Firstly, the occultist holds that Man is in process of evolving from comparative imperfection to much higher states of physical and spiritual evolution. Secondly, that the evolutionary process in all its phases is directed by a Great Hierarchy of Intelligences who have themselves reached these higher states.

  Now, many modern thinkers would agree that man is involved in an evolutionary process that involves his mind as well as his body, and many would insist that the process is not entirely a matter of Darwinian mechanisms (see, for example, the contributors to Arthur Koestler’s Beyond Reductionism). But it is clearly a very long step from this kind of evolutionism to the belief that the evolutionary process is being directed by “higher intelligences”.

  Such a step was, in fact, taken (on purely scientific grounds) by the cybernetician David Foster, in his book The Intelligent Universe. Foster’s basic assertion is simply that, to the eye of the cyberneticist, evolution seems to suggest some intelligent intervention. Cybernetics is basically the science of making machines behave as if they are intelligent – as does, for example, a modern washing machine, which performs a number of complex processes, heating water up to a certain temperature, washing the clothes for a certain period, rinsing them, spin-drying, etc. But these processes are “programmed” into the machine, and can be selected by merely turning a dial, or inserting a kind of plastic biscuit – each of whose edges contains a different programme – into a slot. An acorn could be regarded as a device containing the programme for an oak-tree. But to the eye of a cybernetician the acorn, like the plastic biscuit, suggests some form of programming. Could an acorn be programmed solely by Darwinian natural selection? Foster points out that one basic rule about computer-programming is that the intelligence that does the programming must be of a higher, more complex, order than the programme itself. Similarly, in order to drive a car or use an electric typewriter my mind must work faster than the machine; if the machine goes faster than my mind, the result will be disaster or confusion. In cybernetics, blue light could be a programme for red light, but not vice versa on the same principle that Dickens can create Mr Pickwick, but a Mr Pickwick could not create a Dickens. And Foster argues that the energies involved in programming DNA would need to be higher than any form of energy found on earth. He argues that the process would require energies of the same order as cosmic rays. Such an argument obviously implies that the complexity of life on earth can only be accounted for by some intelligence “out there”.

  We may reject this argument, pointing out that “instinct” may create a complexity that looks like superintelligence. Mathematical prodigies, who can work out problems of bewildering complexity within seconds, are often of otherwise low intelligence. There is no evolutionary necessity for the human brain to work out such problems; so why has the brain developed such a power? The physiologist would reply: as a kind of by-product, just as a simple calculating device like an abacus could be used to multiply numbers far beyond the grasp of the human imagination. But those who believe that evolution is basically purposive use such examples as mathematical prodigies to argue that the evolution of man’s higher faculties cannot be explained in purely Darwinian terms.

  Since Madame Blavatsky (who died in 1891) there have been many “occultists” (I use the word in its broadest sense, as meaning those who are interested in the paranormal) who have believed that they were in contact with higher intelligences. Alice Bailey became an active member of the Theosophical Society
after the death of Madame Blavatsky, and was convinced she was in touch with Sinnett’s “Mahatma” (it means “great soul”) Koot Hoomi. In 1919, disgusted by the power struggles within the society, she founded her own group, and produced a large number of books dictated by an entity called “the Tibetan”.

  The Rev. Stainton Moses, an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, used “automatic writing” to produce large quantities of a script that was published after his death under the title Spirit Teachings. Although Moses published extracts from these in Light, he was too embarrassed to admit that some of the “spirits” who dictated them claimed to be Plato, Aristotle and half a dozen Old Testament prophets. Yet there was strong evidence that these scripts were not simply the product of his own unconscious mind. On one occasion Moses asked the “spirit” if it would go to the bookcase, select the last book but one on the second shelf, and read out the last paragraph on page 94. The spirit did this correctly. Moses was still not convinced, so the spirit selected its own book. It dictated a passage about Pope, then told Moses precisely where to find it; when Moses took the book off the shelf, it opened at the right page. The spirit dictated these passages while the books remained closed on the shelf.

  In 1963 two Americans, Jane Roberts and her husband Rob, began experimenting with an ouija board, inspired to some extent by “Patience Worth” (see chapter 62). Various personalities identified themselves and gave messages; then after a while a character who identified himself as “Seth” began to come through:

  It was immediately apparent that the board’s messages had suddenly increased in scope and quality. We found ourselves dealing with a personality who was of superior intelligence, a personality with a distinctive humor, one who always displayed outstanding psychological insight and knowledge that was certainly beyond our own conscious abilities.