Afterward, he left them and returned to his office. Nobody dared go with him. He was in one of those “states” which they all venerated.
On July 15, their plans as carefully mapped out as possible, the small group left the campus by car for the airport.
About an hour after their departure, Hearty arrived at the psychology department. He was looking for Carl. No, he told Carl’s secretary, he had no prior appointment with the professor, but he had a vitally important message for him and his companions.
It took some time before he learned the news of Carl’s departure and about the proposed visit to Aquileia. He sped by cab after Carl’s party to the airport, but arrived as the plane taxied for takeoff.
Hearty looked for some time into the evening sky as it swallowed up Carl’s plane. He could only guess at Carl’s condition of mind. But he knew rather exactly how the whole Aquileia venture would end. He was not guessing.
FATHER HARTNEY F.
When Hartney F. was born in Wales in 1905, his parents had been living there for almost 18 years. He was a late child. His mother was Welsh, his father, an Englishman from Northumberland.
Hartney’s hometown, which he called Casnewydd-ar-Wysg but which is shown on English maps as Newport, stands on the banks of the river Usk in Monmouthshire. He was baptized in St. Woolos parish church.
When Hearty was one and a half years old, his father, a general medical practitioner of the old school, came into a substantial inheritance from his father. Up to that point, the family had struggled to make ends meet. Now, with the sudden affluence, his father gave up his city dispensary and practice. The family moved out of the town to a small village near the confluence of the Usk and Severn Rivers.
There, Hartney spent the next twelve and a half years. His father maintained a small private practice. At their home on the Severn, his first ideas and emotions were formed by his mother and aided by the ambient of Welsh tradition in which the neighborhood—its people, history, monuments, and communal life—were bathed. At the age of six he was sent to grammar school. His daily language was Welsh, but his father tutored him in English from the age of seven.
Up to that time his mother, an ardent Welsh nationalist, steeped in Welsh history and literature, would not allow any English to be spoken in her child’s presence. Only after he was fourteen did she consent to send him to a British public school, where he acquired a thorough grounding in English and developed a deep interest in science. But his English never quite lost the Welsh lilt and cadence.
His parents were Methodists and worshiped each Sunday at the little stone chapel in their village. Between his mother’s fixation with the Welsh soul or spirit, the attractiveness and beauty of their hymn-singing Methodism, and his immersion in the folklore of village and country, Hartney’s mentality was early on soaked in that peculiarity of all Celtic peoples which the Welsh developed to a very particular degree.
The best name for that peculiarity is style, style, as distinct and different from all other humanly valued qualities or powers, and not encompassed by or to be equated with intelligence, cunning, artistry, money, land, blood.
The soul of the Celt has a particular universality of its own: all of life and the world is interpreted in terms of light and shadow. But that innate generalism of their souls has never enabled Celts to achieve military conquest, imperial possessions, huge wealth, or cultural predominance. Early in their history, they were confined to the extremities of France (Brittany), of England (in Wales and Scotland), and in Ireland as the outermost tip of the European continent, dominated by Romans, Vandals, Franks, English, Normans, Danes, and others.
Celts developed the only power that remained: verbal expression and a corresponding mercurial agility of spirit. Oralism, not mentalism, is the mark of the Celt. The aspect of their peculiar style that became most noteworthy and most celebrated was their remarkable verbal expression of emotion.
At that one thing the Celts excelled. The Irish turned their style to express the Celtic twilight: the two dusks of birth and death. The Scots concentrated on the play of light and shadow, never clearly happy, never undoubtedly sad. The Bretons took refuge in the shadow as a covert for their perseverance.
But the Welsh took up the light in style and developed the distinct colors of their singing into a Pindarism all their own; and the clarity and brilliance of their language became a more powerful factor of identity than their nationalism or their religion. They maintained the Celtic shadow as a secret background in which to treasure their emotions. The great presumption of “Welshism” was that the visible and material world was merely a clothing or garment thrown over the living heart of sublime and beautiful reality.
It was this peculiarly Welsh style of thought, feeling, and expression that deeply characterized Hartney through the various stages of a life spent far from his native Wales.
Hartney’s psychic powers were part and parcel of this “Welshism.” Among his fellow countrymen there was no prurient curiosity as to his psychic ability—“Half of the people I knew had it, the other half presumed they had it,” Hartney remarked once. Nor was there any mystery attached to it. Consequently, he did not grow up with a feeling of being abnormal or out of the ordinary. And the security he enjoyed was a distinct advantage.
Only when he went to public school and thence to Cambridge did he realize that his psychic power was a rarity and usually regarded as an untrustworthy abnormality. The English, permissive though they might be about their own emotions and peculiarities, tend to regard emotions or psychic abilities in non-English people as evidence of primitive conditions.
Hartney’s latent psychic perception was mellowed at an early age by three prime, never-forgotten influences: the folklore of his people, the physical countryside, and his family’s Methodism.
Before he knew one rule of English grammar or how to use a test tube, Hartney’s memory was filled with the deep stuff of Welsh folklore that placed him in a living continuity with the “spirit” or “soul” of the land and the people. His mind was filled with the names of romantic Welsh princes such as Rhun ab Owain, Llewellyn, Owain Glyn Dwr, and of poets such as the fifteenth-century Tudur Aled. His mother recited the odes of the sixth-century Taliesin and Aneirin. And his speech was modeled after the metrical forms of the Welsh Middle Ages, the cywydd and englyn. He learned to avoid mentioning the year 1536 (when the infamous Act of Union abolished Welsh national independence).
The Welsh countryside that grew to be a part of Hearty’s inner man was and still is of a special kind. There was a living magic about its whitewashed houses, its stone chapels, the intimate play of light on running water, the aloneness of mountain and valley, the perpetuity of pastureland, the merciless maw of mines where men grew black and sick working beneath the earth but returned to sing in chapel and go home to their wives and children. As Owen M. Edwards wrote, “The spirit of Wales is born in the mountain farmhouse, in the cottage by the brook, in the coal miner’s home.”
This entire complex of nature’s face and men’s haunts was taken as a living thing. Years later, in the jungles of Burma and in postwar Japan, when waves of nostalgia hit him now and then for the Vale of Usk, Bala Lake, the Swallow Falls, Llyn Idwal, or for the north beach of Tenby Bay, where he spent all the summer vacations of his childhood and youth, Hearty saw himself once again in the long straw-thatched, small-windowed cottages, smelling the flitches of bacon hanging from the kitchen rafters, and eating hot “shot”—ground oatcake and milk. Such a memory was as mystical as a poem about the Vale of Avalon and as faery as the cuckoo’s song in Merion.
Methodism was the third great developing influence on Hartney. The meaning of Methodism was holiness. Not that the chapel was holy, or the singing sacred. (The minister, indeed, used to preach that it was the adjoining graveyard that made the chapel holy, not vice versa). But it was holiness in expression: the hymnal. Worship of God and Christ, performed according to rule and with the characteristic Methodist regularity and rhythm. This
expression was holy because it was believed to be a conversation with the spirit of Christ and God. And more than once in his early youth, as Hartney stood between his parents during the soaring phrases of the chanting, the gabled roof of the chapel would no longer be a thick shield against the sky. It was for him a sacred mountaintop opening on to Heaven through which the angels of song descended from God to men and ascended back to God.
The extent of Hartney’s psychic power became clear to him at a young age. He could and did receive clear—often literally accurate—inner intimations of what other people, near him and far away from him, were thinking and—on rare occasions—what they were suffering. It was thus in a Burmese jungle clearing late in 1943 that he knew the exact hour when both his parents died in the German blitz of London.
In 1924 Hartney chose to follow lectures in physics at Cambridge. While at the university, he became interested in Roman Catholicism. When he graduated in 1929, he had already been received into the Roman Catholic Church and had his mind made up to become a priest.
Ordained in 1936, he served in a succession of parishes in the London area, until he joined the British Army as a chaplain in 1941. Shortly afterward, his unit left for India and within a few months of his arrival there was sent into the Burmese jungles to harass the Japanese forces. During this part of his career Hartney was nicknamed “Battling Hearty” by his men. The shortened form, Hearty, stuck to him ever after.
He had his first experience of possession by Evil Spirit during the Burmese campaign. The small force of men with whom he traveled as chaplain had halted for the night in a small clearing. All was quiet and tranquil. But Hearty woke up at about 2:00 A.M. with a strong feeling that other human beings were moving near or around their encampment. He tried to fall asleep again, but the idea would not go away.
He finally sat up and listened for a few minutes. He crawled over to the commander of the unit, woke him up, and told him of his fears. It was not the first time Hearty had had these experiences. And he had always been right. The commander waited a while, talked with the posted sentinels, and finally decided to send a mortar barrage in the direction Hearty indicated. After five minutes, when there was no answering fire, they settled down to watch for the rest of the night.
In the faint light of the new day, scouts were sent out. One was back in minutes. The mortar barrage had found its target. Their night barrage had taken a Japanese hospital unit by surprise. When Hearty and the others arrived, all Japanese personnel, except for one soldier, were dead; the sole survivor was unconscious. Hearty’s unit commander wanted him for questioning. He was brought back to the encampment, and his wounds were tended. When he regained consciousness several hours later, the unit commander knew he would not live very long. He had the poor fellow interrogated by his intelligence officers.
Late that afternoon Hearty went over to talk with the prisoner. He wished to find out if he was a Christian, possibly a Roman Catholic. If he were, Hearty wished to give him the last rites of the Church.
It was at the time of the short Burmese dusk that Hearty approached him. Hearty wore battle fatigues like all the members of his unit. He wore no sign or badge indicating that he was a chaplain. As Hearty approached, the prisoner’s eyes flickered and then opened wide; he was looking straight up at the overhanging foliage and at the sky. Hearty expected a look of fear mixed with hate to appear in his eyes. But what he saw there was neither fear nor hate. It was some other emotion he could not recognize: inimical, yes but with an added trait he could not grasp immediately.
Still interpreting all this as a natural reaction to the sight of an enemy uniform, he drew nearer. The dying man grew more and more agitated; his limbs and torso shook; his eyes rolled around in their sockets; even his short-cropped hair seemed to stand up on his scalp. For all the world, he was like a helpless animal bristling in defense.
Hearty stopped and waited.
He had begun to perceive a very unaccustomed “mental” message. He had approached Japanese prisoners before and he knew their mentality. Hearty did not speak Japanese, but the language difference between him and them created no barrier for mental communication; that communication was not by words, verbal or mental. This dying man’s mentality had some curious trait in it which Hearty was perceiving for the first time in his life in a human being.
Years before, when he and his father with some local hunters had cornered a fox that had been devastating the chickens in the farms around their home on the Severn, Hearty had killed the fox. As he took aim and was about to pull the trigger, his eyes had caught the direct glare of the defiant, snarling animal. Now, in the jungle clearing, looking at that prisoner, he had a similar feeling.
Still thinking that he had been misunderstood. Hearty pulled a small crucifix from his breast pocket and held it up so that the dying man could see it. The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. By this time, one of the intelligence officers who spoke fluent Japanese had joined Hearty. He and Hearty heard strange guttural sounds coming from the man’s throat.
“My God! Padre, he’s cursing your cross,” the officer said. But already Hearty was “receiving.” His mind became full of a strange perturbation; and the wordless message was clear: Go away. Take yourself and all you signify away from us. You serve what we hate.
“Ask him a question for me, Captain,” Hearty said to the officer. “Ask him why does he hate the cross.”
The officer had no sooner put the question than the prisoner started to rise. His right hand flashed up to the bandages covering his chest wounds, tearing them off in a convulsive movement.
“Himiko! Himiko!” was as much as Hearty could catch of his shout before the man fell back. The intelligence officer could not understand the curious word, but thought it must be a name of some sort. In a matter of seconds, the prisoner’s eyes opened with the sightless stare of the dead. Blood flowed for a few moments from his wounds; then it stopped.
It was not until later that Hearty found out what Himiko meant. But, in the jungle, he had a dawning realization that the man who had just died had been dedicated to some spiritual power from which his hate of the cross had come. Obscurely, without fine lines or definitions, Hearty understood the raw elements of possession.
At the end of the war, in 1946, Hearty volunteered for a vacant chaplaincy in occupied Japan. He was posted to the city of Kyoto and settled into his new quarters in April of that year.
Untouched by war and deliberately preserved from bombing by the Allies, Kyoto had been the imperial capital of Japan until 1868. It was the one city of Japan that had been laid out geometrically in rectangular shape, every street running north-south or east-west. In Japan of the postwar period, Kyoto sank deeper and deeper into its traditional past while attracting radical politicians and thinkers. Its Buddhist and Shinto shrines were magnificent, and Hearty spent his spare time visiting them all.
It was during a conversation in 1947 with a teacher named Obata at the Ryukoku, the Buddhist school, that he learned about Himiko. Himiko had been, it appeared, a shaman queen in very ancient times, and a modern sect still existed that worshiped her as a devil-goddess. They believed she lived and ruled from among the snow-covered mountains behind Kyoto.
Hearty and Obata became good friends. Obata had graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938. His chosen field was mysticism; his thesis had been a comparative study of Dervish knowledge and Buddhist enlightenment. With the facts he had researched about the dance and rhythms of Dervishes and his own native knowledge of Buddhism, Obata gave Hearty a systematic perception of a type of human knowledge not based on scientifically controlled and verified facts.
Hearty’s scientific background began to fall into a new perspective. He started to realize the meaning of mysticism in his own religion. And very soon, also, he began to see that whatever psychic abilities he had should be carefully distinguished from spirit and the supernatural. For this was the central lesson of Buddhist and Dervish beliefs and practices.
(Here was
the distinction that Carl V. had never really understood, indeed had lost almost from the start of his parapsychological career. If any one factor in Carl’s mental makeup had helped preponderantly to his being possessed, this failure was it. Failing in this vital distinction, Carl inevitably took spirit, or soul, and psychic activity as one and the same thing. Any change produced in the psyche was taken by him as a change in spirit; and any illusion imposed on the psyche was taken as an ultimate truth of the soul.)
With Obata, Hearty explored the basic ideas of telepathy and telekinesis as well as bilocation; all these had been current coin over one thousand years before the words “parapsychology” and “extrasensory perception” had been breathed on a Western campus.
Obata used simple expressions and some current terms to instruct Hearty. Hearty’s psyche, he said, was a “screen” on which some powerful psychic sender could flash images. Hearty had, however, a “censor bond,” a faculty with which he could make his psyche opaque to the psychic probe of any “mind reader.”
Obata assessed Hearty as a “receiver.” And, concluding one of their discussions on the subject, he added, “Be thankful.” He would only grin good-humoredly in the Japanese fashion when Hearty asked why he should be thankful that he could not also “send” messages or move objects by telekinesis.
Hearty got only one clue, though a very dramatic one, as to why it was better thus. Once on their way home from an early-morning walk, the two men passed by the edge of the Geon, Kyoto’s renowned geisha district. Obata pointed this out to Hearty, and they stopped a moment. Without any forewarning, Obata suddenly fell forward on his face and rolled over. He was up in a flash, his eyes narrowed with apprehension.
“Hearty-San, they don’t like me to be with you here. Hurry.” He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead where he had struck the pavement.
Hearty was too dazed by the bizarre experience to say anything. But as Obata left him at the gate to his quarters, he said to Hearty, again with good humor, but with a faintly grim note: “You see, my friend, it’s better you be only receiver. But watch. They know you already. And they know always for future time.”
Hostage to the Devil Page 49
