Beyond the Occult (50 page)

Even if I had not met Guy Playfair some of the features of the case would have puzzled me.
This poltergeist behaved more like a ghost, and its connection with the former Cluniac monastery and the local gallows was fairly well established.
In that case the theory that it was a really a kind of astral juvenile delinquent from Diane’s unconscious mind seemed absurd.
Besides, as Diane described her feelings as she was pulled upstairs by Mr Nobody I experienced a sudden total conviction that this was an independent entity, not a split-off fragment of her own psyche.
When I left the Pritchards’ house that afternoon I had no doubt whatever that Guy Playfair was right: poltergeists are spirits.

It was an embarrassing admission to have to make.
With the exception of Guy Playfair there is probably not a single respectable parapsychologist in the world who will publicly admit the existence of spirits.
Many will concede in private that they are inclined to accept the evidence for life after death, but in print even that admission would be regarded as a sign of weakness.
Before that trip to Pontefract I had been in basic agreement with them: it seemed totally unnecessary to assume the existence of spirits.
Tom Lethbridge’s ‘tape-recording’ theory explained hauntings; the unconscious mind theory explained poltergeists; and the notions of ‘double consciousness’ and the ‘information universe’ combined to explain mysteries like telepathy, psychometry, even precognition.
Spirits were totally irrelevant.
Yet the Pontefract case left me in no possible doubt that the entity known as Mr Nobody was a spirit — in all probability of some local monk who died a sudden and violent death, perhaps on the gallows, and who might or might not be aware that he was dead.
And I must admit that it still causes me a kind of flash of protest to write such a sentence: the rationalist in me wants to say, ‘Oh come off it… .’
Yet the evidence points clearly in that direction and it would be simple dishonesty not to admit it.

When I returned from Yorkshire I took a deep breath and plunged into the annals of poltergeist activity with the aid of the library at the Society for Psychical Research and the College of Psychic Studies.
The picture that now began to emerge made me aware of how far my preconceptions had caused me to impose an unnatural logic on the whole subject of the paranormal.
It was not so much that the conceptions underlying
The Occult
and
Mysteries
were wrong as that they were incomplete.
And much of the evidence required to complete them had been staring me in the face from the beginning.

I began, on Guy Playfair’s advice, by reading Allan Kardec.

^*
Nicholas Clark-Lowes, the librarian of the Society for Psychical Research, informs me that Dr Leapsley appears in their records as Dr James H.
M.
Le-Apsley MD, who in 1922 lived in Pasadena, California and who moved to Honolulu in 1928.
His last appearance in the SPR records is in 1949.

^*
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
, 1916.

^*
The case is described at length in Lombroso’s
After Death — What?
and in my book
Poltergeist, A Study in Destructive Haunting
(1981).

Allan Kardec was one of the first and most influential converts to spiritualism.
Born in Lyons in 1804 Kardec’s real name was Denizard-Hyppolyte-Léon Rivail, and he was descended from generations of lawyers and magistrates.
He attended the school of the great educationalist Pestalozzi and soon revealed a brilliant and far-ranging intelligence.
Like Ruskin or Carlyle in England, he was a born educator.
By the time he was thirty he was the author of a French grammar, a work on arithmetic and a treatise on education.
He gave immensely successful lectures on astronomy, chemistry, physics and anatomy and became a member of many learned societies.
He was also fascinated by the great Mesmer, who had died lonely and discredited in 1815, at the age of eighty-one.
In the 1850s most French doctors would have been afraid to confess an interest in mesmerism; it would have been tantamount to professional ruin.
But Rivail had no need for caution; he was a famous savant with independent means and had no need to fear the malice of the coteries.
So it came about that in May 1855, when he was fifty years old, he attended a hypnotic session with a certain Mme Roger who, in a trance, was able to perform apparently paranormal feats such as mind-reading.
At that session Rivail met a Mme Plainemaison, who persuaded him to attend a seance at her house.
There this disciple of the French encyclopaedists was astonished to see tables dancing and moving around the room.
(It had been seven years since the manifestations in the home of the Fox family
in New York and spiritualism had already become the latest craze all over Europe.)

It was in the home of Mme Plainemaison that Rivail met a M.
Baudin, who told him that his two daughters practised automatic writing.
They were apparently rather frivolous young ladies, fond of dancing and parties.
But when Rivail asked them questions, their hands raced across the paper and produced answers that were far beyond the intelligence of the attractive amanuenses.
Asked, ‘Is density an essential attribute of matter?’
the disembodied intelligence replied, ‘Yes, of matter as understood by you, but not of matter considered as the universal fluid.
The ethereal and subtle matter which forms this fluid is imponderable for you, and yet it is none the less the principle of your ponderable matter.’
When the communicator was asked why its replies were so much more profound than anything so far transmitted to the young ladies, it explained that spirits of a much higher order had come expressly for him, to enable him to fulfill a religious mission.

When Rivail had accumulated a vast amount of information, he was told that he should publish it using the pseudonym Allan Kardec — both names that he had borne in previous incarnations.
The Spirits’Book
was a widespread and immediate success, one of the first — and perhaps one of the most important — of the classics of spiritualism.

The philosophy of
The Spirits’ Book
is certainly remarkably profound and consistent.
The universe is permeated by a vital principle, but ‘life’ means the union of spirit and matter.
This vital principle, or fluid, sounds like Mesmer’s ‘magnetic fluid’.
When it is blocked, the result is ill health.
The universe is also permeated with disembodied intelligences, and human beings are such intelligences confined within a body.
But the purpose of their existence as human beings is a certain evolution.
When the body dies, the spirit is eventually reincarnated in another body.
In the meantime, depending upon its state of evolution, it may wander around, unaware of its condition.
Such immature spirits may be responsible for various forms of mischief such as poltergeist effects, or they
may turn up at seances and talk nonsense.
Such a spirit, Kardec learned, had been the cause of violent poltergeist disturbances in the Rue des Noyers, when objects had been hurled around and every window had been smashed.
The culprit in this case was a drunken rag-and-bone man who had been dead for fifty years and who was getting his own back on people for treating him without respect during his lifetime.
He obtained the necessary ‘magnetic energy’ from a servant girl in the house: the poor girl was quite unaware that her energies were being drained and was more terrified than anyone of the ‘ghost’.
The rag-and-bone man qualified as a low spirit, one of those who are trapped in the material world and addicted to mischief.
More evolved second degree spirits experience only a desire for good, while perfect spirits have reached the peak of their evolution.
To some extent the spirit can choose the trials it will undergo in its next life: these are chosen for the purpose of evolution.
(Rudolf Steiner had once remarked, ‘Never complain about your lot, for you chose it before you were born.’) Kardec’s informants also stated that man is a fourfold being, consisting of body, vital principle (‘aura’), intelligent soul and spiritual soul — the same divisions that can be found in Steiner and Friederike Hauffe, the ‘Seeress of Prevorst’.

In spite of its success
The Spirits’ Book
was soon causing severe controversy in the French spiritualist movement.
Generally speaking spiritualists do not accept the doctrine of reincarnation, which lies at the heart of Kardec’s doctrine.
Kardec’s main rival as a channel of ‘spiritual’ information was a man named Alphonse Cahagnet, who obtained his information about the next world through a somnambule (hypnotic subject) named Adèle Maginot, who said nothing about reincarnation.
The French spiritualist movement soon split into two, and since Kardec was to die in 1869, sixteen years before Cahagnet, his own doctrines were the first to be generally rejected.
But
The Spirits’Book
and its successor
The Mediums’ Book
made their way across the Atlantic to Brazil, where a powerful spiritist religion already flourished (based, to some extent, on voodoo) and where they became religious
classics, held in almost as much esteem as the New Testament.
Spiritism (or Kardecism) is still Brazil’s most widespread religious belief.
And it was there that Guy Playfair came upon it when he arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1961.

In
The Flying Cow
Playfair has described his own startling introduction to spiritism.
Suffering from some minor stomach ailment, he was taken by a friend to see a healer named Edivaldo Silva who gave him some pills and told him to come back for an operation.
Lying on the table was an old man whose abdomen had been ripped wide open, exposing his entrails.
Yet a few minutes later the old man was being helped out by his wife, and Playfair was told to lie down.
Moments later Playfair felt a distinct plop as Edivaldo’s hands entered his stomach, which suddenly felt wet all over as if he was bleeding to death.
He experienced a tickling sensation and a smell like ether.
Then he was told it was over: someone slapped on a bandage and he was helped out of the room feeling strangely stiff and rather weak.
He took a taxi home.
The next day he felt normal again.
A few months later the stomach complaint was still not entirely cured and he went through the whole thing again: on this occasion he felt as if there were two pairs of hands inside him.
Then he was told he could go.
This time the pains (presumably caused by an ulcer) vanished for a year.
Playfair began to spend all his spare time in Edivaldo’s surgery, watching him plunge his hands inside people’s bodies and then leave the flesh intact after the operation.

For the unprepared reader this part of Playfair’s narrative sounds so preposterous that it is bound to raise suspicions that he is either (a) mad (b) a liar or (c) hopelessly gullible.
Fortunately I was not entirely unprepared.
While writing
The Occult
I had come across Pedro McGregor’s book
The Moon and Two Mountains
, an important study of magic and spiritism in Brazil which preceded
The Flying Cow
by nine years and which spends a whole chapter discussing José Pedro de Freitas, better known by his nickname Arigó, the simple one.
In 1958, Arigó claimed, he had been ‘taken over’ by the spirit of a German surgeon who had been killed in the First World
War: now he was performing complicated operations like removing tumours with a kitchen knife, a scalpel, scissors and a pair of tweezers.
I had quoted a passage in which a number of eminent doctors witnessed Arigó thrusting scissors and scalpels into the vagina of a young woman who was suffering from a tumour in the womb: the witnesses noticed that Arigó was holding only one handle of the scissors, yet the other moved in and out as he cut.
After Arigó had said, ‘Let there be no blood, Lord’, the bleeding had stopped and Arigó had removed the tumour and sealed the cut by pressing its edges together with his fingers.

Arigó was to die in a car crash in 1971, but not before a team of American doctors and scientists had been to his village to witness his operations.
What they saw has been described by John G.
Fuller in a book called
Arigó — Surgeon of the Rusty Knife
, and it describes so many of these operations and cites so many eminent witnesses that the reader finally becomes slightly punchdrunk.
By the time I read the book I had become a friend of two of the scientists — Andrija Puharich and Ted Bastin — and so had their first-hand confirmation.
I had also seen the amateur film that Ted Bastin made of Arigó, which showed him thrusting a penknife into the eyes of two patients and extracting a lump of pus.
Compared to the things described by Fuller it was rather disappointing, but I could not share the view of two companions at the showing, the late Dr Christopher Evans and the magician ‘the Amazing Randi’, that the whole thing was a fake.
It was true that a film such as this was no final proof of Arigó’s genuineness, but unless all the other witnessed accounts were part of a conspiracy then it was 99 per cent certain that Arigó was genuine (he had in any case nothing to gain from fraud since, like Edivaldo, he charged nothing), in which case it followed that the operations on the film were genuine too.

As I read Guy Playfair’s account I could suddenly see the essence of the problem of ‘the occult’.
To someone like Playfair or Bastin or Puharich, who have actually witnessed such things, it is self-evident that if they contradict medical theory, then medical theory must be wrong.
And people like
myself, who have not actually witnessed the phenomena but have read about them and talked to obviously honest people who
have
witnessed them, are also struck with a conviction that such things really happen and that therefore the world of the paranormal is a reality, not some fairy tale.
But sceptical scientists living in London or New York have already concluded that the paranormal does not exist because it
cannot
exist.
Almost without exception they would not take the trouble to go and see a psychic surgeon even if one lived round the corner: they tell you wearily that they know nothing will happen, or that if it does it will be trickery.
All they
are
prepared to do is to consider the evidence at second hand, preferably in some easily digestible form, for they all lack patience, and then think up objections.
And the result of their deliberations is then accepted by the rest of the scientific community as the unbiased conclusions of hard-headed scientists.
In fact it is little more than a regurgitation of the opinions they have been expressing for years, opinions which are change-proof because the scientists have no intention whatever of studying the evidence.

One of the chief culprits, Christopher Evans, was an old friend and colleague — we had even edited a series of books together — and I found ‘the Amazing Randi’ likeable and plausible.
The leading American sceptic, Martin Gardner, was also an old friend.
(No longer, alas: he became increasingly bad tempered at my criticisms and finally broke off the correspondence.) But once it had become clear that they were entrenched in a kind of lazy dogmatism then it was obvious that they simply had no right to pronounce on the facts; they really had nothing whatever to say, except to repeat their old convictions, which, however sincerely held, were quite irrelevant as evidence.
I could only endorse the irritable comment made by the American researcher Professor James Hyslop, who remarked, ‘I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject.
Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward.
I give him
short shrift, and do not propose to argue with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.’
And whether such waspishness is scientifically defensible or not, I understand just how Hyslop felt — as, no doubt, do most readers of Guy Playfair’s account of his own experience of ‘psychic surgery’.