Beyond the Occult (57 page)

It struck Van Dusen as extraordinary that hallucinations should fall so neatly into these two categories: after all one might expect psychotic patients to believe they were tormented by birds, animals, perhaps even machines or hat stands.
Yet this was not Van Dusen’s experience.
As we have seen the experiences of patients sounded strangely like Swedenborg’s high and low spirits, or the ‘demons’ described in the literature on possession and witch trials: one woman declared that her sexual experiences with a male spirit were far more pleasurable and ‘inward’ than normal intercourse.

Van Dusen’s observations on high spirits seem to be supported by the curious case of the science-fiction writer Philip K.
Dick.
Dick’s early work had a strong tinge of neurosis and pessimism.
He was obsessed by the idea that each of us lives in an individual universe and that therefore there is no such thing as an objectively real world — a dangerous notion that can obviously undermine our ‘reality function’.
In an interview with fellow writer Charles Platt, Dick described how as a child he saw a newsreel of a Japanese soldier hit by a flame-thrower and burning like a torch, and how he was dazed with horror as the audience cheered and laughed.
He continued to be obsessed by pain and suffering and finally, in his forties, reached a ‘trough’ in his life when he saw only inexplicable suffering.
At this point, he says, ‘my mental anguish was simply removed from me as if by a divine fiat… .
Some transcendent divine power which was not evil, but benign, intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world.’
It sounds as if some unconscious ‘will to health’ had intervened: but Dick is emphatic that it was more than this.
In 1974 (when he was forty-six) he experienced ‘an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.’
This rational mind,

’… assumed control of my motor centres and did my acting and thinking for me.
I was a spectator to it.
It set about healing me physically, and my four-year-old boy,
who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of.
This mind, whose identity was totally obscure to me, was equipped with tremendous technical knowledge — engineering, medical, cosmological, philosophical knowledge.
It had memories dating back over two thousand years, it spoke Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit.
There wasn’t anything it didn’t seem to know.

It immediately set about putting my affairs in order.
It fired my agent and my publisher.
It remargined my typewriter.
It was very practical: it decided that the apartment had not been vaccuumed recently enough; it decided I should stop drinking wine because of the sediment … .
It made elementary mistakes such as calling the dog ‘he’ and the cat ‘she’, which annoyed my wife, and it kept calling her ‘ma’am’.

… I made quite a lot of money very rapidly.
We began to get cheques for thousands of dollars — money that was owed me, which the mind was conscious existed in New York… .
And it got me to the doctor, who confirmed the diagnoses of the various ailments that I had … .
It did everything but paper the walls of the apartment.
It also said it would stay on as my tutelary spirit.
I had to look up ‘tutelary’ to find out what it meant.’

Dick was later to describe the experience in his novel
Valis
.
But his fellow science-fiction writers found it impossible to swallow: Ursula Le Guin told him she thought he was crazy.
And the bewildered interviewer recorded, ‘I can’t suddenly believe that there really are extraterrestrial entities invading the minds of men.’
Yet he admits that ‘I do believe that something remarkable happened to him, if only psychologically… .’
On the evidence of Dick’s interview it is hard to decide whether the ‘possession’ was purely psychological or genuine — although the half million words that he wrote about his experience may eventually shed some light on it.
(Dick died of a stroke in 1982.) But if Dick is correct in stating that the entity could speak Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit and that it had memories dating back for two
thousand years, this would undoubtedly be powerful evidence for regarding it as one of Swedenborg’s ‘higher order’.
Which of course raises the interesting question of why such an entity should wish to help Dick tidy up his life.
One possible answer is that by the early 1970s Dick had become one of the most widely admired science-fiction writers of his time and was therefore worth converting to the conviction that life is not a meaningless nightmare after all.

This notion of benificent possession is of course older than civilization.
In his classic work
Possession, Demoniacal and Other
(1930) Professor T.
K.
Oesterreich concluded that the ‘possession’ of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece was a case of benevolent possession.
Joseph Rock, a member of the National Geographic Society’s expedition to Yunnan in 1928, described an extraordinary performance in which a
sungma
(a kind of medium) was possessed by the ‘demon’ Chechin.
The
sungma
took his seat in the temple while the Tibetan monks chanted, rang bells and blew conch shells: he was wearing a tall iron hat strapped under his chin.
When the spirit arrived his face swelled so much that the chin-strap split and blood trickled from his mouth and nose.
Then the
sungma
was handed a Mongolian steel sword a third of an inch thick and proceeded to twist it into knots as though it were paper: presumably the spirit possessed the same kind of metal-bending powers as Uri Geller.
He ended by performing a spectacular dance in a pile of burning straw, ‘whirling like a demon’ in the flames without getting burnt.
^*

Dr Titus Bull carefully concealed his belief in possession from his professional colleagues and ordinary patients.
In recent years at least two American psychiatrists, Adam Crabtree and Ralph Allison, have shown a bolder spirit.
Crabtree was a theological student in Minnesota when he came upon a pamphlet called
Begone Satan
, which described one of the most extraordinary cases of ‘possession’ on record.

In 1896, when she was fourteen, Anna Ecklund found
herself unable to enter a church building, although she was a devout Catholic.
She was troubled with fantasies of committing ‘unspeakable sexual acts’ and an impulse to attack holy objects.
In her mid-twenties she asked for help, but the Church was sceptical and it was not until 1912 that an exorcism ceremony seemed to bring relief.
In 1928 she was still suffering from attacks and Fr Theophilus Reisinger, a Capuchin monk from the community of St Anthony at Marathon, Wisconsin, decided to carry out a second exorcism at a convent in Earling, Iowa.
As soon as he began the formula of exorcism Anna shot up from the bed — in spite of the vigilance of several strong nuns — and stuck on the wall above the door.
As he continued the exorcism her howls and screeches brought the townspeople running to see what was happening.

Anna spoke in a variety of hoarse voices even when her mouth was closed, and when it was open her lips did not move.
Her head swelled to the size of a water-pitcher and her face was fiery red.
She vomited incredible quantities of foul matter — another sign of ‘possession’ (Fr Tranquille in the Loudun case had also vomited).
If food had been sprinkled surreptitiously with holy water, she knew instantly.
When the priest was reciting sections of the exorcism rite in German and Latin, ‘the devil’ would reply correctly in the same tongue.
And a devil who called himself Beelzebub explained finally that they were tormenting her because her father had cursed her.
Attempts to summon her now deceased father were finally successful, and he admitted that he had made many attempts to commit incest with her but she had resisted him: this was why he had cursed her and wished that devils would enter into her to entice her into sex.
His ex-concubine also appeared and confessed to killing four of her children — probably in abortions.
All this went on for twenty-three days, during which time several nuns had to be moved to another convent because of the disturbances and the pastor was involved in a strange car accident.
Anna remained unconscious during most of the exorcism, but speaking in multitudes of voices.
Then, on the twenty-third
day, her body shot erect as if propelled by a spring, only her heels touching the bed.
She collapsed on to her knees while a terrible voice repeated the names of the tormenting spirits until it died into the distance.
At this point Anna opened her eyes and smiled.

The monk who had translated the pamphlet from the German was in the same monastery as Crabtree and was able to verify the details of the story.
He naturally believed that Anna was contending with demons from Hell.
But it seems far more likely that they were the same ‘earth-bound spirits’ that caused so much trouble in the Harper household in Enfield.

In 1969 Crabtree decided to leave the cloister and become a psychiatrist.
He soon came to accept the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance.
But it was not until 1976 that a colleague told him about a ‘possessed’ patient and he witnessed the phenomenon for the first time.
He flatly declined to believe that he was witnessing anything ‘paranormal’.
But in the following year he began to encounter cases among his own patients.
These finally led him to the highly unorthodox conclusion that living persons
can
be possessed by the dead — and, incredibly enough, by the living.

His first case was of a young woman whom he calls Sarah Worthington, who was referred to him by a colleague.
Crabtree started by asking her if she had heard ‘voices inside her head’, and she admitted that she had.
Then he persuaded her to go into a deep state of relaxation on the couch.
Suddenly Sarah spoke in another voice, a stronger, more authoritative voice, declaring she was hot.
Asked to name itself, the voice said it was Sarah’s grandmother, Sarah Jackson.
Her aim, she said, was to help Sarah.
And the comment about being hot referred to a traumatic experience in Sarah Jackson’s early married life when she thought her seven-year-old son was trapped in a blazing house.
It became clear that Sarah Jackson — who claimed to have ‘entered’ her granddaughter while she was playing the piano and was therefore in an ‘open’ state of mind — had as many psychological problems as her granddaughter, possibly more.

In the long run it turned out to be unnecessary to ‘dispossess’ Sarah Worthington.
Now that she understood that the voice inside her was her grandmother she ceased to worry, and even came to derive a certain comfort from her grandmother’s presence at the back of her mind.
In this case the cure was effected simply by understanding what was happening.

In another case a social worker named Susan had been ‘possessed’ by her father, who had died in a car crash and who had been so sexually obsessed by his daughter that he used to creep into the bedroom when she was asleep to fondle her genitals.
The possession was not deliberate: the car crash had left him in a state of confusion.
Crabtree was able to persuade him to leave her alone.

Crabtree worked with a female colleague on the case of a girl called Jean who was obsessed by the memory of her mentally-retarded sister Amy, who had died at the age of twenty.
Jean felt a kind of ‘alien mass’ inside her which she had tried — unsuccessfully — to get rid of through bio-energetics.
Now, lying on Crabtree’s couch, the childish voice of Amy began to speak through her mouth.
Amy told the doctors that she had first ‘entered’ Jean when she was five years old and had then ‘lived through’ her.
‘She could go places and learn things that were otherwise impossible in her condition.’
The family background was full of violent, negative emotions, so their ‘partnership’ was important.

Under Crabtree’s instructions Amy ‘looked around her’ and observed a grey-haired, elderly man who told her that he had been appointed to be her teacher.
It was hard to persuade Amy to go away and listen to her instructor, but eventually Crabtree succeeded — after a ‘heated exchange’.
Following this Jean continued to feel Amy as a vaguely benevolent presence, but the ‘alien mass’ inside her went away.

If we can accept that Jean was really ‘possessed’ by Amy and was not simply experiencing guilt about her — as she herself believed at one point — then the most interesting part of the case is the fact that Amy ‘entered’ her sister while both were still alive and was able to use her for the sake
of vicarious experience.
Presumably what happened was that she established some sort of telepathic contact which enabled her to share her sister’s life.