Strange Powers (16 page)

My ten-year-old daughter took an immediate and warm liking to him—so much so that she asked him if he would mind being her godfather. She'd been looking out for a godfather for some time, ever since we'd called on the godfather of her brother Damon—the Blake scholar Foster Damon—at Annisquam, Mass. Arthur seemed agreeable; he is now Sally's godfather...

The only other thing I recollect about his two-day visit is that he talked a great deal about the south of France, and places he'd visited; he also produced some bottles of an odd sweet champagne from the Languedoc. I don't particularly like travel, and traveler's tales usually bore me; but there was something about his description of small French villages in the Midi—the heat and the laziness and the local wines—that fascinated me. It was obvious that he loved the area—that, in a way, he was obsessed by it.

Later in the year, I visited the Guirdhams at their home near Bath—we were driving back from the north of England. We were only staying overnight, so there wasn't time for a great deal of talk; but he told me that he was working on an even more remarkable story than that of Mrs Smith—a record of a whole group of reincarnations. He let me see some of the manuscript. As I read the first page, I began to feel—no, not excited; that would be the wrong word; a kind of satisfaction, as when something turns out very much to your liking. This manuscript—which I have with me now as I write—was clearer and more straightforward than the earlier book on reincarnation. And it raised and answered most of the questions—and doubts—that had occurred to me as I read the earlier book. He says on the first page:

'I am naturally of a skeptical and cautious nature, and am known in my family as Doubting Thomas. I am astonished that the phenomena I have encountered have been revealed to me of all people. I have occupied myself in discovering the significance of names and messages produced in dreams, visions, in states of clairaudience and dictated by discarnate entities. Because of the unusual origin of my data I have to stress all the more carefully that I was for forty years a run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. In the National Health Service I was the Senior Consultant in my clinical area. I hold a scientific degree, as well as being a doctor of medicine. It is all the more necessary to make these points since I claim that this, my own story, is, of its kind, the most remarkable I have encountered.'

And in the first chapter, he makes an observation that aroused my interest: that most of the cases of reincarnation he has come across were rather healthy, active people with 'more than average energy'; not, as you might expect, 'sick sensitives'. This is certainly what I would have predicted, on the basis of the psychology I have developed in
New Pathways.
Knowledge of previous existences is certainly not necessary to our everyday survival; all we need is a narrow, commonplace consciousness. Flashes of this kind of knowledge would only come, like 'peak experiences', to very healthy people, with energy to spare.

I was also intrigued by something he says about Miss Mills, an acquaintance who asked him one day whether the words 'Raymond' and 'Albigensians' meant anything to him. (They kept recurring in her head.) Miss Mills mentioned childhood dreams—following an illness—of running away from a castle, and of being led towards a stake with heaped faggots. She commented that, as a child, the rest of the family had enjoyed the spectacle of a building on fire, while she had been hysterical. I recall similar feelings in my own childhood. There was a weekly serial on at the local cinema, with a character called the Eagle—a Lone Ranger type who always found himself in some dangerous situation at the end of every episode. But one day, he was trapped in a burning church; and I was so horrified that I couldn't bear to ever watch him again. Not long after
The Occult
came out, a friend asked me if he could bring someone along to meet me, a woman who ran a nursing home in Cornwall, and who was interested in occult matters. We spent an interesting evening talking about all kinds of things; but at one point, she suddenly told me that she was certain I had been a monk in a previous existence, and had been burned to death...

In many respects, Arthur Guirdham's account of his experiences with Miss Mills parallels that of his experiences with Mrs Smith. Miss Mills would wake up in the night with names in her head—names like Montserver, Braida, Cisilia; these he was able to identify, through his knowledge of the siege of Montsegur and the burning of the heretics two days after its surrender. After a while, she would find notes written on a notepad she kept by her bed, scrawled in a hand resembling her own. One said: 'Raymond de Perella. Sun—No. Treasure—No. Books—Yes.' Arthur Guirdham interpreted this as a reference to questions about Montsegur. It had been suggested that Montsegur had been the site of a sun-worship temple; Miss Mills's 'instructor' was apparently denying this. As to the treasure of Montsegur, this is another question debated by historians. Four 'parfaits' (the highest Cathar grade) were lowered from the walls of the citadel just before its surrender, carrying unspecified 'treasure'. It has been suggested that this was money, or even the Holy Grail. Miss Mills's instructor was asserting that the 'treasure' consisted of Cathar sacred books.

In his eighth chapter, Guirdham has an interesting and important discussion of a basic doctrinal point: reincarnation. He comments that many of the biblical quotations dictated to Miss Mills were from St Paul—which, he says, is natural enough, since St Paul is the 'supreme interpreter of Christianity from the occult point of view'—an observation that had certainly never occurred to me. Paul lays emphasis on the difference between the corporeal body and the spiritual body. Guirdham says: 'His outlook tied up directly with modern conceptions of etheric and astral bodies and the like. Orthodox Christians may jib at the idea that early Christianity was characterized by psychic communication and spiritist phenomena. What was to be revealed later to Miss Mills indicated clearly that primitive Christianity was of this nature.' He goes on to state that the verse from Corinthians I (Chapter 15, verse 45) '... the first Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit' is specifically Cathar, although orthodox Christians tend to accept it without really asking what it means. 'This particular verse implies that a living soul is in man from the Beginning... Man is born with his full psychic complement. This is an essential feature of the doctrine of reincarnation. After death, the psyche does not pass into any such state of cosmic somnolence as is represented by limbo. It embarks on a process of reincarnation. 'The last Adam was made a quickening spirit' refers to our ultimate development in being emancipated from matter. To the Cathars, this was the raison d'etre of our existence. They recognized that there was every gradation between matter conceived of as inert spirit, and, at the other extreme, as so spiritualized that Christ could appear on earth and reveal the true nature of his spiritualized body to the disciples at the Transfiguration.'

But I must move on to the central point of this strange book. The adjective 'strange' is an understatement. It is either a piece of sheer nuttiness, or one of the most important books ever written. For its central assertion is that a whole
group
of Cathars from Montsegur have been reincarnated in England in the twentieth century. Miss Mills was only the first. And although she began by having to ask Guirdham whether Raymond and Albigensian meant anything to him, she ended by actually
seeing
Braida de Montserver, a 'Parfaite' (i.e. a kind of female priest) who was burned; Braida began to pay her nightly visits, and instruct her in the history, philosophy and healing techniques of Catharism. Later, she was visited by two male Cathars, Guilhabert de Gastres, and a bishop, Bertrand de Marty. And here, we might say, the plot thickens. Miss Mills became convinced that Bertrand de Marty was her father—that is to say, that her own twentieth-century father had been a reincarnation of Marty.

In October 1971, Miss Mills was contacted by a friend from the Midlands, whom Guirdham calls simply 'Betty'. Betty's husband had died of a heart attack, and she was badly shaken. She decided to take a holiday abroad—in the Pyrenees. Guirdham was asked to supply names of places worth visiting, Inevitably, many were associated with Catharism. Betty went to the Pyrenees, and apparently found the experience profoundly satisfying. And on her return to England, she began to mention names of thirteenth-century Cathars that soon convinced Miss Mills that here was yet another character from Montsegur, reincarnated in twentieth-century England. Unfortunately, before this exciting new development could be studied, Betty died of a stroke. Her mother, Jane, began sorting through her papers, and found references to various names—Braida, Isarn, and so on. She also discovered drawings made by Betty as a child—during a serious illness at the age of seven. These drawings, mostly of a crude, matchstick variety, contain references to people present at the siege of Montsegur, and are full of Cathar references. They seemed to trigger off some reaction—or buried memory—in Jane, who now herself began 'recalling' her own life in the thirteenth century in snatches.

Another person enters the story—an old schoolfriend of Miss Mills named Kathleen. She enquired after Betty—whom she had also known—and on being told she was dead,described a dream in which she had seen Betty in a wood with a man dressed in dark blue with a chain around his waist... This man was actually Guirdham's earlier incarnation, Roger Isarn; Guirdham goes into the evidence for this with his usual scholarly precision. It becomes clear that Kathleen is another of the group of reincarnated .

And there are still 'more to come. There is Penelope, who had been a business associate of Miss Mills' some years ago. One evening, Penelope died unexpectedly, a hundred miles from Bath; Miss Mills, who was with Guirdham at the time, had a sudden powerful premonition that 'something is happening to somebody'. Penelope's husband Jack said that the last word she spoke was 'Brasillac'—the name of a sergeant-at-arms who fought at Montsegur, and had been burned at the stake. Jack came to call on Miss Mills, describing his wife's dreams of a castle on a hill, of men dressed in blue robes; he spoke of her horror of fire, and of having stones thrown at her. (The castle was bombarded with stones thrown by giant catapults.) After this, Jack himself began to have dreams of fighting in a castle on the hill, accompanied by names. Guirdham finally concluded that Jack was Brasillac, and that his wife Penelope had been his sweetheart in his thirteenth-century existence...

At the end of the book, Guirdham mentions that Miss Mills continues to practise 'healing', under Braida's direction, and he concludes:

'To me, as a doctor, there is something of specific importance transmitted by Braida's messages. Dualism is an important antidote to the materialism of medicine. The next step in our evolution as doctors is to recognize more the influence of the psyche imprisoned in matter. Its recollections of experiences in past lives are related to present symptoms. The recognition of two basic energies of good and evil is vital to any cosmic concept of medicine. Healing is a particular expression of the emanation of goodness. On the other hand, it is indisputable that many disease symptoms and syndromes are attributable to the power of evil. Discussing such factors is beyond the scope of this book. All one can say here is that Braida's messages enlarged enormously one's medical horizons.'

Obviously, this book—entitled
We Are One Another—
answers the basic objections that can be made to
Cathars and Reincarnation.
It is possible to accept that a patient should have detailed memories of a previous existence in the thirteenth century; but much more difficult to believe that the doctor himself is a reincarnation of a man with whom the patient was involved seven hundred years ago. It also presents a problem for the total skeptic, who is inclined to dismiss the whole thing as self-delusion or downright lies. Arthur Guirdham is an intelligent man; this was plain to me from his books, before I met him; if he is inventing the whole thing, why should he go out of-his way to make his story unbelievable?
We Are One Another
reveals that the Puerilia-Roger relation is just part of a much larger pattern; it would seem that dozens of the Cathars of Montsegur have been reincarnated in the twentieth century for a specific purpose. The purpose, presumably, is to prove the reality of reincarnation.

Let us agree that both explanations—the skeptical and the non-skeptical—fit the facts as presented in these two books. A
News of the World
reporter—the kind who publishes investigations of mediums, healers and astrologers—would have no difficulty explaining what has happened. Guirdham has always been an unorthodox doctor, with tendencies to occultism. He becomes interested in the Cathars and Catharism. And when Mrs Smith talks to him about her own thirteenth-century incarnations, he is willing to believe that he was her lover. In fact, of course, all that has happened is that a patient has become fixated on her doctor, and looks around for ways to gain his interest... Miss Mills is also, significantly, an unmarried lady. She gets drawn into the fantasy, and she draws others into it, until a whole group of her friends are convinced that they were thirteenth-century Cathars. An interesting case of group hysteria or group suggestibility...

Now Guirdham is fully aware of these objections, and he takes a great deal of trouble in both books to emphasize that the complex facts cannot be accounted for by suggestibility or even by telepathy. Mrs Smith's notes about the Cathars date back to her childhood, and various historical details—which she mentioned in the notes—were not even known to scholars at the time. A great deal of space in both these books is taken up with the examination of such details, which makes them, in some ways, rather tedious for the ordinary lay reader. If one accepts the genuineness of Betty's notes and drawings in the second book, then it is quite impossible that she could have been drawn into the fantasy by Miss Mills.