This account makes it clear that Didier possessed the same powers that enabled Eileen Garrett to locate the whereabouts of the missing doctor. But these powers were the result of hypnosis, not of some inborn ‘psychic faculty’. What Flammarion’s chapter demonstrates is that the powers that can be released by hypnosis are far greater than modern medical science would admit. (The same point is demonstrated repeatedly in Dingwall’s Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena.) In the twentieth century we have come to take it for granted that the powers displayed by hypnotized subjects are merely the result of ‘suggestion’. At the time of writing Dr Graham Wagstaff, a Liverpool professor, has just announced that all the effects of hypnosis can be explained away in terms of role-playing (i.e. play-acting), a return to the kind of total scepticism that prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But unless Robert Houdin and many eminent Victorian scientists were downright liars, such a view is grotesquely inadequate to explain the observed facts.
Flammarion had no doubt that both telepathy and will power play some part in hypnosis — or can do. ‘The action of the will at a distance is not subject to doubt, as those who have studied this subject know very well.’ Mesmer, the discoverer of a form of hypnosis, demonstrated this to the scholar Seifert, who viewed mesmerism as ‘all humbug’. When Seifert demanded proof Mesmer offered to demonstrate his powers through a brick wall. The subject — one of Mesmer’s patients — was placed on one side of the wall and Mesmer on the other, while Seifert stood where he could watch them both. When Mesmer made some angular movements from right to left the subject complained that he felt ‘as if everything within me were swinging from right to left’. When Mesmer began to make oval motions with his fingers the man complained, ‘Now everything is turning about in a circle.’ All this happened in 1775, some years before Mesmer’s pupil Puységur discovered hypnosis, so Mesmer’s subject was fully conscious. But a century later two eminent psychologists, Pierre Janet and Julian Ochorowicz, collaborated on a series of experiments that proved beyond all doubt that people could also be hypnotized from a distance and would then respond to telepathic commands. Janet was puzzled by the results of a doctor in Le Havre, J. H. A. Gibert, who was able to hypnotize a peasant woman by ‘peripheral muscular stimulation’ — pressure on her hand. But Gibert found that it only worked if he concentrated: if he tried to do it without proper attention the woman did not respond. This clearly indicated that Gibert’s ‘thought pressure’ played some part in the hypnosis. So Gibert tried hypnotizing the woman by thought alone — and it worked. Janet began working with the same peasant woman and found that he could induce a hypnotic trance from the other side of Le Havre merely by thinking about her, and could call her to him.
Ochorowicz, a hard-headed medical man, began to move beyond his materialistic assumptions when he discovered that his hypnotized subjects obtained unusually high scores in card guessing games. Ochorowicz and Janet began to collaborate with Dr Gibert, using his peasant woman, Mme B., as a subject. They established that even when Mme B. was half a mile away from the hypnotist (either Janet or Gibert) she could be put into a trance and then given mental orders which she would obey. Moreover if the hypnotist pinched himself Mme B. would react as if she were being pinched in the same place. It was the old ‘community of sensation’ that had been observed by Alfred Russel Wallace and William Barrett (and which would later be observed by Dr Pagenstecher). But Mme B. (later known as Leonie) also demonstrated powers of ‘travelling clairvoyance’. Asked to visit the famous paranormal researcher Charles Richet in Paris, she declared that his laboratory was on fire — and proved to be correct. The result of all these researches, published in Ochorowicz’s Mental Suggestion (1887) caused a sensation, and many medical men hastened to confirm these results. A Dr Dufay of Blois conducted experiments with a subject called Maria in which she displayed remarkable psychometric powers. In the Revue Philosophique Dufay described how Maria had been hypnotized then handed a package containing a small portion of a necktie belonging to a man who had used it to commit suicide in gaol. She was able not only to describe the man’s crime — murdering someone with a hatchet — to the examining magistrate, but was also able to tell them where to find the murder weapon. She went on to demonstrate that simply by handling objects belonging to various prisoners, she could tell what crime they had been gaoled for.
The result of all these experiments points to the same unmistakable conclusion: that suggestion can be transmitted direct from one mind to another and that the will can play an active part in hypnosis. Flammarion might have strengthened his case by citing a criminal trial of 1865 in which a club-footed beggar named Timotheus Castellan was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the rape of a twenty-six-year-old peasant girl named Josephine. Castellan had begged a night’s lodging from her father, a poor peasant, claiming to be a healer. The next morning the girl’s father and brother went to the fields leaving her alone with Castellan. A neighbour who called claimed that she saw Castellan making signs in the air behind the girl’s back. Over the midday meal Castellan made a sign with his fingers, as if dropping something on the girl’s plate, and she felt her senses leaving her. He carried her into the next room and raped her; she said she was conscious but unable to move. Later Castellan departed, taking her with him. At one farm where he stayed the night he demonstrated his power over her by making her crawl around on all fours like an animal and burst into peals of laughter. He was eventually arrested.
The well-known Heidelberg case of 1934 has many of the same features. A woman was arrested for attempting to kill her husband. The police psychiatrist, Dr Ludwig Mayer, eventually discovered that she had made six attempts on her husband’s life on the orders of a criminal named Franz Walter. Walter had met the woman on a train and told her he was a healer. As she accompanied him for a cup of coffee he touched her hand, and she suddenly felt as if all her will power had deserted her. She accompanied him to a room in Heidelberg where he placed her in a trance by touching her forehead and raped her. He subsequently made her earn money for him by prostitution, then ordered her to murder her husband. Walter was sentenced to ten years in prison.*
These cases throw an interesting light on the experience of the girl cited in Phantasms of the Living who became a man’s sexual slave in her dreams (see p. 258). The obvious hypothesis about the women who became victims of Castellan and Walter is that they were prone to hysteria and allowed themselves to be ‘paralysed’ by suggestion. But in the case cited in Phantasms of the Living this is obviously impossible, since the girl did not even see the man of her dreams until months later. In this case, the likeliest explanation is that the man immediately recognized her as the kind of person whom he could bend to his will by means of telepathic suggestion and deliberately set out on a course of long-distance dream-seduction. And if that possibility can be admitted then it seems likely that Castellan and Franz Walter used a similar method. This view is supported by the observations of a modern researcher, Dr Ferenc Andras Völgyesi, whose Hypnosis of Man and Animals has become a classic. Völgyesi came to accept that will power plays a part in the hypnosis of animals and birds by snakes and often witnessed ‘battles of will’. His book contains photographs of these mental struggles taking place between a giant toad and a cobra and between a rattlesnake and a bird of prey.
The implications of these ideas may seem more revolutionary than they actually are. After all if we can accept the evidence for telepathy — and the evidence in its favour is now overwhelming — then we have already accepted the idea that one mind can influence another. The only surprising thing that emerges from Flammarion, Ochorowicz and the rest is that it seems far easier than we might assume. In Over the Long High Wall J. B. Priestley tells how, at a boring literary dinner in New York, he decided to try an experiment in telepathic suggestion: to make one of the poets wink at him. He chose a sombre looking woman, ‘obviously no winker’, and concentrated on her: suddenly she turned to him and winked. Later she came over to apologize. ‘It
was just a sudden silly impulse.’
The same ‘knack’ was apparently possessed by Elsie, Lady Abercrombie, who is described in Joyce Collin-Smith’s autobiography Call No Man Master.
At an early age she had discovered it to be possible to influence other people’s words and actions. Once, in India, banished by her mother from a formal gathering, she had returned to her schoolroom and set herself in pure mischief to influence events downstairs. They would all start talking compulsively of something silly, something irrelevant, and be unable to stop, she determined.
Her mother, knowing her gift, came sternly half an hour later and shook her: ‘Stop it at once, you naughty girl! They’re all talking and talking about… .’
‘Camels?’ said Elsie with an innocent look. And so it proved to be.
Pressed for further information about Lady Abercrombie, Joyce Collin-Smith sent me the following anecdotes:
… I do know she had no clear idea how she did it … . Once at a meeting in a studio behind a house belonging to Michael Macowen, head of LAMDA, Elsie muttered to me, ‘Cold. Better end it.’ She was quite elderly then, and felt the cold a lot. A moment later Michael said, ‘It seems to have got cold in here. We’ll stop early and go in for coffee.’ It might have been a coincidence but for the wicked twinkle and chuckle which made me sure she had manipulated it somehow.
Another curious episode was when I took her a large potted hydrangea, which I thought lovely. I put it near her chair. An hour later I was astonished to notice it had drooped completely as though absolutely dead, though it had stood the long journey in my car without harm. When I mentioned it, she glanced at it and said balefully, ‘I hate hydrangeas.’ As I apologized for bringing her an unacceptable gift she stared at it for a long time, then went on talking. Ten or fifteen minutes later I was absolutely astonished to find it had perked up, and was almost visibly lifting its petals, as though exorted to live after all, rather than hurt my feelings.
One of my correspondents, John Jacobs, has suggested that the ‘knack’ involved is a quality he calls ‘in-betweenness’. This is a state that combines relaxation with a certain degree of deliberate purpose. He describes how as a child he was astonished to see his younger brother opening a good-quality padlock with a paper-clip. ‘I asked him how he did it and he replied, “It’s easy”, and did it again for me. After I finally expressed my great amazement, it was curious that he could no longer open the padlock. My postulation is that he did not realize that people weren’t supposed to be able to do such things. After I expressed my amazement I succeeded in indoctrinating him into the world-view that such things are impossible.’
Jacobs described another incident that took place when his brother was five.
We were cleaning the corn crib and … there were quite a few mice and rats liberated in the process. I was standing by my brother when a rat ran by about five or ten feet away. My brother had been pretending he was an Indian and had become totally involved in the imaginary play-acting. When he saw the rat he hurled his paper-weight knife at it and — amazingly — it went through the animal and killed it. Under normal circumstances, that knife would have bounced off a balloon, let alone killed an animal. I believe that, in his child innocence, my brother caused another reality to manifest — the reality of himself as a mighty Indian hunter.
This story immediately brings to mind Dr Albert Mason’s ‘miracle’ cure of the boy with fish-skin disease by hypnosis (p. 81). Mason had no idea that fish-skin disease was incurable and the result was that he cured it: as soon as he knew it was incurable he began to fail. And all this in turn suggests that ‘magical’ powers may be no more than the powers we can naturally exercise when in a relaxed and confident state. Everyone who has been actively involved in sport has noticed the same phenomenon: there are certain states when ‘everything goes right’ and when the most unlikely kick will score a goal. I have occasionally noticed the same thing when playing darts: I am normally an indifferent player but on a few rare occasions I have begun to play with an accuracy that astounded me. On such occasions I have noticed that I have reached a high degree of inner tension combined with deep relaxation: the result is John Jacobs” in-betweenness’.
Since the use of such powers involves relaxation it would seem to follow that the first step towards learning to use them would be to learn to relax — so, for example, they ought to be enhanced by transcendental meditation. Joyce Collin-Smith tells a number of stories about the Maharishi that suggest that this is so. When he was holding court in an Oxford hotel an aristocratic old lady on the same floor complained to the management about the noise, and the Maharishi was asked if he would mind moving to another floor. Joyce Collin-Smith was deputed to deliver the message. The Maharishi replied that he had no intention of moving, then added casually, ‘Don’t worry — she won’t bother us again.’ And to Joyce Collin-Smith’s amazement, she didn’t. The Maharishi, it seems, could exercise the same peculiar power as Lady Abercrombie. Joyce Collin-Smith’s account of her ‘initiation’, and the deep relaxation she experienced immediately thereafter, suggest that the Maharishi may have used the same power to positive effect on his followers.
What seems clear is that these powers somehow involve the positive use of the imagination. This was an observation I made a few years ago when trying out an experiment in psychokinesis recommended to me by the dowser Robert Leftwich. The apparatus required is extremely simple: a needle, a cork, and a two-inch square of paper. The paper is first folded diagonally from corner to corner twice, thus making an X, then in half again, vertically and horizontally — so the resulting pattern looks rather like a Union Jack. This can then be pinched into a paper dart with four ‘fins’. The needle is stuck in the cork and the paper dart placed umbrella-wise on top of it, so the end product looks like a tiny roundabout. After tying a handkerchief round his face (to prevent him breathing on it), Leftwich placed his hands around his ‘roundabout’ and concentrated for a moment: the roundabout began to revolve — first clockwise, then counterclockwise. But when I tried it, the utmost efforts of concentration failed to make it move. I tried keeping it at the side of my typewriter and trying to “will” it to move whenever I felt relaxed. And one day, as I stared at it and imagined it moving, it began to move. It was no fluke; I found that I could make it stop, then revolve the other way. The trick, obviously, was to use the imagination as well as will power.
In Mysteries I have described a similar experiment, suggested by the theatre historian John Kennedy Melling. I was made to stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed. Four people stood around me with their hands raised to the level of my shoulders but not touching me and tried to ‘will’ me to sway in a pre-selected direction. After a few minutes I began to feel dizzy, then found myself swaying forward — the direction they had chosen — as if an invisible force was pushing me. The ‘trick’ worked with everyone in the group. Yet when I tried demonstrating the same thing in front of television cameras at eleven o’clock in the morning it failed utterly. At that hour and in that setting we were not in the correct mood of ‘in-betweenness’.
If these powers are so easy to demonstrate, why do we not bother to develop them? The answer seems to be because they are irrelevant. The snake needs its power to ‘hypnotize’ a rabbit. But of what earthly use would it be to be able to make strangers wink at you? Myers’ story of the man who tried to seduce a girl by means of ‘dream telepathy’ seems to underline the point: the man went to an enormous amount of trouble, all to no effect. But in fact these objections are really an illustration of our human tendency to laziness and inertia. If such powers exist they are of immense importance and deserve to be investigated and understood: their implications could be as momentous as those of splitting the atom.
The bewildering variety of evidence presented in this chapter all seems to point in the same direction: a human being is not merely a physical body that happens to be ‘alive’. A more representative picture is that a human being is a presiding entity
— let us call it a mind or spirit — whose basic function is the control of the physical body and the emotions. This in turn seems to amount to an assertion that the mind is somehow independent of the body and might therefore be expected to survive physical death. But at this point a basic objection arises. When I fall asleep I ‘disappear’ and have no more memories until I begin to recover consciousness. In other words, when the body falls asleep I fall asleep. This seems to suggest that ‘I’ am my body.
What seems equally puzzling is that in the majority of cases of ‘phantasms of the living’, the ‘projector’ has no idea of whether he has succeeded or not. S. H. Beard had no idea of whether he had ‘appeared’ to Miss Verity and her sister yet his ‘apparition’ stroked the sister’s hair and took her hand. Yeats ‘appeared’ to his student friend, and later reappeared in the middle of the night and gave him a message, while his body was sleeping, oblivious, in bed. Hereward Carrington succeeded in ‘appearing’ to his woman friend yet had to ask her if the experiment had been successful.
Equally strange is an anecdote in Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body in which he described ‘projecting’ himself into the study of the paranormal investigator Andrija Puharich, with whom he was in correspondence. He spoke to Puharich and says that he replied and apologized for neglecting their project. Later Monroe discovered that his memories of Puharich’s study were accurate, yet Puharich had no memory of speaking to him. This implies either that the ‘visit’ was basically a dream or that Monroe’s ‘astral body’ was able to communicate directly with Puharich’s ‘astral body’ without Puharich’s physical self being aware of it.