Beyond the Occult (56 page)

Dr James Hyslop, whom Prince mentions, had come to believe that possession can be genuine through a rather curious case.
In 1907 a goldsmith named Frederic Thompson came to see Hyslop, who was president of the American Society for Psychical Research from 1905 until 1920, the year of his death.
Thompson had met the American landscape painter Robert Swain Gifford once or twice.
In January 1905 he had unexpectedly been possessed by the urge to draw and paint, and later discovered that these compulsions had started at the time of
Gifford’s death in New York.
Now he heard Gifford’s voice urging him on and had visions of landscapes.
Hyslop consulted his friend Dr Titus Bull, a neurologist who also happened to be interested in psychical research: Bull referred him to two other neurologists, who had contradictory opinions on the case.
Then Hyslop learned that mediums were receiving messages from an entity that purported to be the late Robert Swain Gifford and who claimed that he
was
influencing Thompson.
It began to look very much as if Thompson really might be ‘possessed’ by the dead painter.
Thompson painted in Gifford’s style although he had no artistic training, and when Hyslop looked at some of Gifford’s final sketches, made shortly before his death and never exhibited, he was amazed to find that they were identical to some of Thompson’s.
Moreover Thompson painted pictures of places he had never been to, and when Hyslop went to the New England swamps and coastal islands where Gifford used to paint he immediately recognized landscapes drawn by Thompson.
That finally convinced Hyslop that this was a genuine case of possession, not of mental illness.

In fact William James had reached the same conclusion.
After all, if a medium can be possessed — temporarily — by spirits of the dead, then is it not conceivable that other people might be?
For the remaining thirteen years of his life Hyslop studied cases of ‘possession’, and when he died he asked Dr Titus Bull to take over where he had left off.
^*

Unfortunately most of Bull’s records have apparently been lost, but accounts of two of his most remarkable cases survive.
One concerned another man who was apparently possessed by the spirit of a dead artist.
C.E., as Bull calls him, had been a wreck since he had been ‘taken over’ by the spirit of an Austrian painter, Josef Selleny, who had been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian.
He was suffering from premature senility, epileptic attacks and incessant sexual broodings.
(We may recall Long’s assertion that epilepsy is due to
attacks from low spirits who drain the subject’s vital energy like a vampire.) He had even been in an asylum.
C.E.
had apparently been hospitalized for a head injury, which might explain his ‘madness’ — or how a psychic entity had succeeded in ‘possessing’ him.

Bull had reached the same conclusion as Hyslop: that if someone was ‘possessed’ by an ill-disposed spirit then the best solution was to persuade well-disposed spirits to help get rid of it.
(Of course in some cases, like that of Robert Swain Gifford, the possessing spirit was not actually ill-disposed and only had to be persuaded to leave.) For this purpose Bull used specially trained mediums, one of whom, Mrs Conklin, he had found in a madhouse and cured by exorcizing her.
One of his mediums now researched C.E.’s story to find out whether Josef Selleny was a creation of his imagination.
The answer was no.
After much research she discovered that Selleny actually existed — although he was hardly known outside Austria — and that he had indeed been a friend of the Emperor Maximilian.
C.E.
could not read German, so it looked as if this was a genuine case of possession.

When the mediums got to work on ‘dispossessing’ C.E.
they soon discovered that Selleny was only one of many spirits.
The main one was a Muslim priest who defended himself against the attempts to throw him out by calling on the spirit of a young man: but eventually, after more than thirty sittings, C.E.
was cured.

Another case — Bull calls the patient K.L.
— concerned a manic depressive woman of thirty-seven.
Her problems began when she was terrified by a thunderstorm as a child: her nurse had locked them both in a closet and prayed for help.
Later an attempted rape had further undermined her self-confidence.
Now she alternated between profound depression and fits of manic rage.

The sittings apparently revealed that the main ‘possessor’ was the nurse who was responsible for the original neurosis.
She was not ill-disposed — only inclined to continue to dominate the patient and look after her affairs.
Asked to go
away and leave K.L.
in peace she replied, ‘I do not know whether I will or not.’
But she was finally convinced that she ought to leave.
Other possessors were less tractable: one of them declared, ‘She is mine and I am going to keep her.
You keep out of this.’
But when the medium’s controls intervened and told her they could break her in two if they wanted to, she changed her mind and left.
Eventually only one entity remained, and she had become an ‘obsessor’ by accident.
She was a woman whose lover had abandoned her to die of venereal disease and was still in a mentally confused state.
When Bull explained her situation to her she left voluntarily.
After she had left K.L.
ceased to be troubled by irritations in the genital area.
The treatment was totally successful: two years later she wrote to Dr Bull, ‘I have never felt so well and happy in my life.’

It must be acknowledged that in most such cases there is bound to be a strong suspicion that no matter how convincing the evidence for possession, the real culprit is the patient’s subjective mind producing — as James says — a kind of unconscious self-hypnosis.
Yet there are some cases which leave no possible room for doubt.
One such was witnessed in Casablanca by Dr Natalie Monat, now practising in Alexandria, Virginia.
^*
She has described how, in 1943, she was approached by a rich dry goods merchant whom she calls Mohammed Sayed, who told her that his son had been possessed for the past two months.
The basis of the problem was Sayed’s own strictness as a father: his son was terrified of him.
The boy, who was eighteen, had stayed out late one night and got drunk.
In the early hours of the morning his mother heard him creeping through the house and going into the bathroom.
When she knocked on the door — which was locked — a shrill woman’s voice answered, ‘Don’t call me your son.
I am your daughter because I am using your son’s body.’
From then on their son behaved and sounded like a woman.
Dr Pierson, a Casablanca psychiatrist, concluded that the boy had been so afraid of his father’s anger that he had had a nervous
breakdown.
On the doctor’s advice the youth was placed in a mental home.
But since he had shown no improvement they had just brought him home.

The boy/woman spoke not only modern Moroccan Arabic but also an incomprehensible language that they could not understand.
However one day the boy’s tutor heard ‘her’ speaking and recognized the language as Egyptian, the language spoken in ancient Morocco.
Since the tutor himself could speak Egyptian he engaged ‘her’ in conversation and learned that she was a girl who had died at the age of eighteen many years before; she resented dying so young and had been looking for another body for a long time.
Then she found the boy, ‘whose own spirit was loosely anchored to his body due to the influence of a few drinks and his fright of [his father’s] anger’, and threw him out of his own body, much as Margaret used to dispossess Doris Fischer.
She violently resisted all the tutor’s attempts to persuade her to leave the young man.

The tutor knew of a witch who lived in the south: the merchant sent for her.
She drew a circle round the youth and asked them to pray with her.
The boy was unable to cross the chalk line and screamed with rage while they prayed.
The woman — who was obviously a medium — addressed the spirit in a more and more imperative manner, using various strange incantations.
The girl’s voice continued to scream, ‘No!
I shall never leave the body.’
But eventually the boy collapsed in a kind of fit, his mouth foaming.
Then there was a howl of rage and despair and the boy became unconscious.
The tutor restrained his mother from rushing to him.
A few minutes later he opened his eyes and asked dazedly, ‘Why am I sitting on the floor?
Why are you all staring at me?’
The possession was over.

Such cases sound preposterous: yet by the time I came to research
Mysteries
in the mid-1970s I had come across so many of them that it was impossible to ignore them.
One of the oddest was told to me by the head of BBC television drama, Bill Slater.
In the early 1950s, when he was a drama student, he had attended a party where the guests began to
experiment with an ouija board — an inverted glass with a circle of letters around it.
The glass moved around the table at an incredible speed, spelling out answers to questions so quickly that it seemed unlikely that the guests were pushing it.
Bill Slater made some facetious remark which the glass seemed to resent: asked if it would like anyone to leave the circle it shot unmistakably towards him.
He went off to flirt with a pretty girl.

That night, in his room, he woke up with some ‘presence’ sitting on his chest and apparently trying to take over his mind and body.
He concentrated his energies and fought back: the struggle seemed to go on for about twenty minutes.
During this time there was a feeling of paralysis and he was unable to speak.
At last he was able to cry out, and his room-mate woke up and switched on the light — ‘to find me’, says Slater, ‘well-nigh a gibbering idiot’.
This was his one and only encounter with the ‘supernatural’.

All this sounds rather frightening — so much so that we may feel that even if possession really
does
take place it might be better not to talk about it.
After all, mentally-ill people have enough problems without worrying about evil spirits.
But the view of Hyslop, James and others who have accepted the possibility of possession is that it is rare, because there are ‘barriers’ between the human world and the world of ‘discarnate entities’.
Most mediums are also firmly convinced that every human being possesses his own ‘guardian spirit’ and that other well-disposed entities also act as policemen to prevent incursions.

As we have seen, the psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen, whose views were quoted in
chapter 5
, came to the conclusion that not all patients who ‘heard voices’ were suffering from hallucinations.
In his book
The Presence of Other Worlds
, a study of Emanuel Swedenborg, Van Dusen goes rather further than this.
The chapter called ‘The Presence of
Spirits in Madness’ begins with the words, ‘By an extraordinary series of circumstances I seem to have found a confirmation for one of Emanuel Swedenborg’s more unusual findings: that man’s life involves an interaction with a hierarchy of spirits.
This interaction is normally not conscious, but perhaps in some cases of mental illness it has become conscious.’
He describes how, working in the Mendocino State Hospital in California in the 1960s and examining thousands of mentally-ill patients, he began to notice the similarity between their hallucinations and Swedenborg’s description of ‘spirits’.
Like Kardec, Swedenborg states that there are two types of spirit, low and high, and that low spirits are basically the earth-bound spirits of the dead.

Van Dusen’s breakthrough came one day when he asked a patient suffering from hallucinations if he could talk to the ‘spirit’.
From then on he made a habit of engaging the hallucinations in conversation as often as possible and found that it immensely enriched his psychiatric experience.
In some cases psychotics had been so overcome by their hallucinations that the two had blended and they were unable to distinguish: ‘the ego had been overrun with alien forces.’
But patients who were still able to see their hallucinations as objective realities were able to provide invaluable insights.

Van Dusen soon observed that the hallucinations seemed to come in two varieties, and that they acknowledged that they belonged either to the ‘higher’ or ‘lower order’.
Lower order voices seemed stupid and malicious, ‘similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment for the fun of it’.
They found out a patient’s weak point and then worked on it interminably.
They threatened disaster and death, or allowed the patient to hear voices plotting his death.
Significantly, they seemed to have no identity and no memory (or no memory that they would acknowledge).
They were often violently anti-religious, which seems to suggest that they may have been identical with the ‘spirits’ who possessed the nuns of Loudun.
Van Dusen also discovered that they were quite willing to accept identities suggested to them — which may again help to explain why so many ‘possessing entities’ in the past insisted that they were demons.
On the other hand the higher-order spirits were helpful and considerate: they respected the patient’s individuality and made no attempt to ‘invade’.