Beyond the Occult (53 page)

In 1926 the Reverend Montague Summers had caused a sensation with his work
The History of Witchcraft
in which he set out from the assumption that ‘black witchcraft’ was a reality and that many of the women who were burned at the stake were guilty as charged.
H.
G.
Wells was so shocked that he launched a vituperative attack on the book in the
Sunday Express
.
Many reviewers took the view that Summers was merely trailing his coat for the sake of publicity.
This was untrue: Summers believed that witches may possess real powers, and that these powers are dependent on ‘forces of evil’.
In
Strange Powers
I concluded that ‘the truth probably lies somewhere midway between Summers’s total acceptance of black witchcraft and Robbins’s total scepticism.’
Seven years later, after reading Max Freedom Long, Allan Kardec, David St Clair and Guy Playfair, I began to feel that the truth lay closer to Summers than to Robbins.

Yet in a basic sense this change of viewpoint made very little difference.
I continued to believe — as I still believe —
that the ‘occult’ or paranormal is about the hidden powers of human beings, not about spirits.
But acceptance of the reality of spirits made me rather less dogmatic about individual cases.
At the time I was making the Rosenheim programme at the BBC in Bristol a girl approached me in the canteen and asked my advice about her flatmate, who was the focus of a poltergeist outbreak.
Her clothes were hurled all over her locked bedroom, her possessions were damaged and on one occasion her coat had burst into flame.
I assured the girl that poltergeists were manifestations of the unconscious mind and asked if her friend suffered from psychological tensions or sexual problems.
When she admitted that this was so, I said, ‘There — you see!’

Soon after the Rosenheim programme I received a letter from a clairvoyant who called herself Madame Rose.
She told me that she had held a ‘sitting’ in Rosenheim and had been in contact with a spirit that claimed to be responsible for the poltergeist outbreak.
It was a girl who had been murdered during the course of the war and whose body was still in a secret grave.
She had been trying to use Anne-Marie to draw attention to herself, to persuade someone to have her reburied in hallowed ground.
I replied politely to Madame Rose but had no doubt whatever that she was talking nonsense.
After writing
Poltergeist
I changed my mind and decided to contact her again.
A German friend who spends her winters in Munich agreed to go to Rosenheim and look for some documentary evidence of the existence of the murdered girl.
If this proved to exist then we would ask Madame Rose’s assistance in trying to find the body.
To my surprise Madame Rose now proved to be totally uncooperative.
Yet that should not have surprised me: if we
had
traced the girl’s existence, then located her body, it would be positive proof of the reality of the paranormal — and that would have been a violation of the directive from the head of the Supernatural Civil Service stating that such matters must remain in a state of misty ambiguity.

Soon after writing
Poltergeist
I encountered a case that might have been reported by Guy Playfair.
A young married woman wrote to ask my advice about an unpleasant experience
in Brazil.
She began to suspect that her husband was having an affair with a native woman.
A stranger who claimed to be a clairvoyant stopped her in the street and told her that she was a victim of a
trabalho
(‘job’ or spell).
Then, as for David St Clair, life became a nightmare of frustrations with ‘every alley blocked’.
Lying in the bath, she was amazed to see her wedding ring slipping from her finger.
It was a fairly tight fit and the water should have made her flesh swell, yet it slid off and fell into the water.
She decided not to pull the plug out — in case the ring went down — but to drain the bath with a saucepan.
When the bath was empty there was still no sign of her ring.
One day, convinced that her husband was about to leave her, she obeyed a sudden impulse to go and talk to him at work and beg him to make up.
Oddly enough it worked, and their differences were resolved.
Back home, immensely relieved, she decided to have a bath.
And as she sat in the warm water she decided that she might as well wash her knickers.
As she did so her wedding ring fell out of them.

A year earlier the story would have baffled me and I would probably have made vague pronouncements about ‘apports’ or poltergeists.
Now I was able to tell the young woman precisely what Guy Playfair would have told her: that the ‘other woman’ had determined to make the husband desert his wife and had gone to some ‘backyard
terreiros’
or
umbanda
specialist and paid good money to have a spell cast.
The specialist, in turn, would perform the correct rituals and make offerings to the low spirits — including food, alcohol and tobacco — and the spirits would do their best to carry out the instruction.
Fortunately, as Playfair remarks, these spirits seem to need very precise conditions in which to carry out their tasks, and meet with many obstructions.
And the successful outcome of this particular case may be explained by a remark of Playfair’s mentor Hernani Andrade: ‘To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist.’
The wife’s decision to make a direct appeal to her husband seems to have short-circuited
the
trabalho
.
When I talked to her she was living happily in England with her husband.

It is, I agree, difficult for normal, sensible people to accept this notion of spirits.
Most of us have never encountered a ghost during the course of a lifetime and are never likely to.
So ghosts are, quite simply, an irrelevancy.
And since most children spend a great deal of time being quite unnecessarily afraid of the dark it is probably just as well that belief in spirits is not a basic part of our culture.
The fact remains that anyone who will take the trouble to study the evidence will concede, regretfully, that there are such things as spirits and that under certain conditions, they can impinge on human existence.
And when Montague Summers declared that modern spiritualism is a revival of mediaeval witchcraft, he was being strictly accurate.
Summers admits that many of the men and women burned during Europe’s three centuries of witchcraft madness were innocent.
But he also insists that witches
made use of
spirits and ‘demons’ to perform their magic.
And the evidence gathered by Playfair and Max Freedom Long makes it practically certain that he was correct.

Rudolf Steiner has an interesting notion — which we may take or leave according to our inclination — to the effect that man has been through various distinct stages of evolution, each of which began and ended in a particular year.
At the time of Jesus, he says, man was launched on to a new stage of evolution in which he finally developed a conscious ego, an ‘I’ which could make its own choices.
Before that he had been essentially a communal being whose identity was bound up with the group.
In this earlier stage there was no clear distinction between the human world and the world of spirits, and shamans and ‘witches’ (or witch-doctors) took the world of spirits for granted.
This faded away in the new epoch of the ‘intellectual soul’ (as Steiner calls it).
And when, in 1413, the age of the ‘intellectual soul’ gave way to the age of the ‘consciousness soul’, man virtually lost contact with the invisible world.
The new spirit gave rise to experimental science and has finally led to an age in which the invisible world has been totally forgotten.

This view undoubtedly contains a hard nugget of symbolic truth.
There can be no doubt that modern man has become increasingly a ‘split brainer’ who has lost contact with his intuitive half, and that primitive peoples are far more naturally intuitive — and ‘psychic’.
In
The Occult
I cite an article by Norman Lewis which I found in a Sunday colour supplement.
Lewis had gone to study the Huichol Indians of the Mexican Sierra Madre and had been fascinated by the way they took powers of extra-sensory perception for granted.
While Lewis was there the
shaman
Ramon Medina, visiting a village called San Andreas, had sensed death, and walked up to a locked house.
The corpse of a murdered man was discovered in the roof.
Even the local Franciscan missionary fathers accepted the ability to solve crimes by ESP as a natural part of life.

If Steiner is correct then the ‘witchcraft craze’ began at exactly the same time that man changed from ‘intellectual soul’ to ‘consciousness soul’ and the last vestige of that sense of ‘invisible worlds’ vanished from western Europe.
Witches ceased to be accepted as a natural part of life, as the Huichols still accept
shamans
, and became a symbol of evil, of intercourse with demonic powers.
And faced with persecution many witches no doubt used their mediumistic powers — for that is what it amounted to — to cast spells and torment their tormentors.

The rationalization of witchcraft entered a new phase with the publication of Margaret Murray’s book
The Witch Cult in Western Europe
(1921) and its successors
The God of the Witches
and
The Divine King in England
.
Margaret Murray was an archaeologist who spent the First World War in Glastonbury studying the King Arthur legends and old witchcraft trials.
Starting from the assumption that witches were poor old women who were persecuted for their delusions about the Devil, she was suddenly struck by the ‘revelation’ that they were really members of an ancient religious cult that predated Christianity and worshipped the powers of nature.
Their priest, she suddenly realized, was simply a primitive
shaman
dressed up in an animal skin with horns — like the drawings on the walls of Cro-Magnon cave dwellings.
Being
a fertility cult it naturally laid heavy emphasis on the phallus and sexual intercourse — another reason that it horrified the Christian Church.
Witches, according to Margaret Murray, were simply worshippers of the goddess Diana who still practised their fertility rites in country areas.

To some extent she was undoubtedly correct.
But in the excitement of her insight into the pre-Christian religion she went too far and decided that all tales of black witchcraft were pure invention.
She even went on to declare that dozens of famous historical characters like William Rufus, Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais were really members of the old religion who allowed themselves to be ritually sacrificed as kings were once sacrificed to ensure a good harvest.
Half a century later Professor Norman Cohn went back to many of the original documents cited by Margaret Murray and discovered that she had been guilty of considerable distortion to support her arguments.
Where she had left leader dots to indicate that something had been left out there were often wildly improbable events, like Isobel Gowdie’s descriptions of sexual intercourse with the Devil or Agnes Sampson’s description of sailing to sea in a sieve.
Cohn of course had no doubt that the whole ‘witchcraft craze’ was sheer delusion.
In fact his criticism of Margaret Murray tends to show that the Rev.
Montague Summers may have been closer to the truth than his contemporaries thought.

But what
can
we make of these absurd descriptions of satanic orgies and witches’ sabbats?
Playfair’s investigations into ‘the psi underworld’ indicate that Isobel Gowdie’s confession of having sex with a ‘demon’ may have been factually correct.
And this receives unexpected support from the contemporary psychologist Stan Gooch, whose first book,
Total Man
, published in 1972, argued that man’s darker, more instinctive being resides in the area of the brain known as the cerebellum, the ‘old brain’ which man inherited from the animals.
But in that otherwise academic book Gooch also admitted casually that he had once attended a seance at which he suddenly lost consciousness: when he awoke he discovered that several ‘spirits’ had spoken
through him.
In a later book,
The Paranormal
(1978), Gooch goes on to describe his subsequent experiences as a medium and his increasing interest in the paranormal.
But in books like
Personality and Evolution, The Neanderthal Question
and
The Double Helix of the Mind
(which rejects the split-brain hypothesis in favour of his own cerebellum theory), his approach remains cautiously scientific even when challenging the accepted wisdom.
So his 1984 book
Creatures from Inner Space
caused astonishment and consternation among reviewers.
It begins by describing the experiences of an ex-policeman, Martyn Pryer, who began trying to induce hypnagogic states as he lay in bed and who soon found himself being ‘attacked’ by some invisible entity which lay on top of him.
And one night, when the entity seized him from behind, he realized that it was a woman who wanted him to make love to her.
He lay there, paralysed, until it faded away.
Gooch then goes on to quote the experiences of an actress named Sandy who was interested in ‘the occult’.
She woke up one night to find that a spotlight in the corner of the ceiling had apparently changed into an eye, and she felt a weight lying on top of her.
Soon it began to move gently, and she felt pressure on her vagina.
Part of her was quite willing for the lovemaking to proceed; another part rejected it.
She struggled and eventually broke free: when she went to the bathroom she found that her mouth was full of half-dried blood although there was no sign of a nose-bleed.