Beyond the Occult

  In spite of its success The Spirits’ Book was soon causing severe controversy in the French spiritualist movement. Generally speaking spiritualists do not accept the doctrine of reincarnation, which lies at the heart of Kardec’s doctrine. Kardec’s main rival as a channel of ‘spiritual’ information was a man named Alphonse Cahagnet, who obtained his information about the next world through a somnambule (hypnotic subject) named Adèle Maginot, who said nothing about reincarnation. The French spiritualist movement soon split into two, and since Kardec was to die in 1869, sixteen years before Cahagnet, his own doctrines were the first to be generally rejected. But The Spirits’Book and its successor The Mediums’ Book made their way across the Atlantic to Brazil, where a powerful spiritist religion already flourished (based, to some extent, on voodoo) and where they became religious classics, held in almost as much esteem as the New Testament. Spiritism (or Kardecism) is still Brazil’s most widespread religious belief. And it was there that Guy Playfair came upon it when he arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1961.

  In The Flying Cow Playfair has described his own startling introduction to spiritism. Suffering from some minor stomach ailment, he was taken by a friend to see a healer named Edivaldo Silva who gave him some pills and told him to come back for an operation. Lying on the table was an old man whose abdomen had been ripped wide open, exposing his entrails. Yet a few minutes later the old man was being helped out by his wife, and Playfair was told to lie down. Moments later Playfair felt a distinct plop as Edivaldo’s hands entered his stomach, which suddenly felt wet all over as if he was bleeding to death. He experienced a tickling sensation and a smell like ether. Then he was told it was over: someone slapped on a bandage and he was helped out of the room feeling strangely stiff and rather weak. He took a taxi home. The next day he felt normal again. A few months later the stomach complaint was still not entirely cured and he went through the whole thing again: on this occasion he felt as if there were two pairs of hands inside him. Then he was told he could go. This time the pains (presumably caused by an ulcer) vanished for a year. Playfair began to spend all his spare time in Edivaldo’s surgery, watching him plunge his hands inside people’s bodies and then leave the flesh intact after the operation.

  For the unprepared reader this part of Playfair’s narrative sounds so preposterous that it is bound to raise suspicions that he is either (a) mad (b) a liar or (c) hopelessly gullible. Fortunately I was not entirely unprepared. While writing The Occult I had come across Pedro McGregor’s book The Moon and Two Mountains, an important study of magic and spiritism in Brazil which preceded The Flying Cow by nine years and which spends a whole chapter discussing José Pedro de Freitas, better known by his nickname Arigó, the simple one. In 1958, Arigó claimed, he had been ‘taken over’ by the spirit of a German surgeon who had been killed in the First World War: now he was performing complicated operations like removing tumours with a kitchen knife, a scalpel, scissors and a pair of tweezers. I had quoted a passage in which a number of eminent doctors witnessed Arigó thrusting scissors and scalpels into the vagina of a young woman who was suffering from a tumour in the womb: the witnesses noticed that Arigó was holding only one handle of the scissors, yet the other moved in and out as he cut. After Arigó had said, ‘Let there be no blood, Lord’, the bleeding had stopped and Arigó had removed the tumour and sealed the cut by pressing its edges together with his fingers.

  Arigó was to die in a car crash in 1971, but not before a team of American doctors and scientists had been to his village to witness his operations. What they saw has been described by John G. Fuller in a book called Arigó — Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, and it describes so many of these operations and cites so many eminent witnesses that the reader finally becomes slightly punchdrunk. By the time I read the book I had become a friend of two of the scientists — Andrija Puharich and Ted Bastin — and so had their first-hand confirmation. I had also seen the amateur film that Ted Bastin made of Arigó, which showed him thrusting a penknife into the eyes of two patients and extracting a lump of pus. Compared to the things described by Fuller it was rather disappointing, but I could not share the view of two companions at the showing, the late Dr Christopher Evans and the magician ‘the Amazing Randi’, that the whole thing was a fake. It was true that a film such as this was no final proof of Arigó’s genuineness, but unless all the other witnessed accounts were part of a conspiracy then it was 99 per cent certain that Arigó was genuine (he had in any case nothing to gain from fraud since, like Edivaldo, he charged nothing), in which case it followed that the operations on the film were genuine too.

  As I read Guy Playfair’s account I could suddenly see the essence of the problem of ‘the occult’. To someone like Playfair or Bastin or Puharich, who have actually witnessed such things, it is self-evident that if they contradict medical theory, then medical theory must be wrong. And people like myself, who have not actually witnessed the phenomena but have read about them and talked to obviously honest people who have witnessed them, are also struck with a conviction that such things really happen and that therefore the world of the paranormal is a reality, not some fairy tale. But sceptical scientists living in London or New York have already concluded that the paranormal does not exist because it cannot exist. Almost without exception they would not take the trouble to go and see a psychic surgeon even if one lived round the corner: they tell you wearily that they know nothing will happen, or that if it does it will be trickery. All they are prepared to do is to consider the evidence at second hand, preferably in some easily digestible form, for they all lack patience, and then think up objections. And the result of their deliberations is then accepted by the rest of the scientific community as the unbiased conclusions of hard-headed scientists. In fact it is little more than a regurgitation of the opinions they have been expressing for years, opinions which are change-proof because the scientists have no intention whatever of studying the evidence.

  One of the chief culprits, Christopher Evans, was an old friend and colleague — we had even edited a series of books together — and I found ‘the Amazing Randi’ likeable and plausible. The leading American sceptic, Martin Gardner, was also an old friend. (No longer, alas: he became increasingly bad tempered at my criticisms and finally broke off the correspondence.) But once it had become clear that they were entrenched in a kind of lazy dogmatism then it was obvious that they simply had no right to pronounce on the facts; they really had nothing whatever to say, except to repeat their old convictions, which, however sincerely held, were quite irrelevant as evidence. I could only endorse the irritable comment made by the American researcher Professor James Hyslop, who remarked, ‘I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose to argue with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.’ And whether such waspishness is scientifically defensible or not, I understand just how Hyslop felt — as, no doubt, do most readers of Guy Playfair’s account of his own experience of ‘psychic surgery’.

  In fact for Playfair this was only a beginning. He joined the IBPP — Brazilian Institute for Psycho Biophysical Research — moved to Sao Paolo, and studied more psychic surgeons. Then he heard of a case of poltergeist haunting and agreed to look into it for the Institute. In October 1973 he sat in the home of a divorced Portuguese woman reading Frank Podmore — the highly sceptical investigator of the Society for Psychical Research — on poltergeists and waiting for something to happen. It all began as he was falling asleep: a series of loud bangs that shook the house yet failed to cause things to vibrate as bangs normally do. In fact laboratory analysis has shown that poltergeist bangs seem to differ from ordinary bangs. Shown on a graph an ordinary sound has a curve that rises and falls like a mountain: spirit bangs begin and end abruptly, like cliffs. Later a fo
otstool bounced down the stairs, a drawer full of clothes was shot out into the yard and a pillow was pulled from under the head of Nora, the daughter-in-law of the house. Again and again Playfair noticed that such things seemed to happen when people were falling asleep or waking up: he assumed that this was simply clever timing, to avoid observation. But Mavromatis’s investigations into hypnagogic states suggest another explanation. If the twilight state between sleeping and waking makes human beings more ‘psychic’ (i.e. allows them entry into another condition of being), then it may be a two-way door that also allows the denizens of the psychic realm to invade the physical world.

  Once the IBPP team was convinced they were dealing with a genuine poltergeist and not with a mischievous child or malicious adult, they took steps to get rid of it. The Pritchard family of Pontefract had sent for the vicar, unaware that exorcism is quite useless in poltergeist cases. (This, Kardec explains, is because poltergeists are not evil spirits but merely mischievous practical jokers.) The Brazilians, more experienced, know that the best way is to use mediums to contact the spirit. A team of four mediums came to the house, and although they failed to ‘make contact’ they asked their own ‘spirit guides’ to persuade the poltergeist to go elsewhere. For two weeks it looked as if this had worked: then the manifestations began again. (The poltergeist had a nasty habit of starting small fires.) So the family decided to take the ultimate step. They called in a candomblé specialist — candomblé being an African-influenced cult allied to voodoo. The candomblé team spent several days burning incense and invoking their own spirits to drive away the poltergeist. And this apparently worked: when Playfair checked three months later, all was silent.

  At this point in his narrative Playfair makes a statement that would undoubtedly cause raised eyebrows among the members of the Society for Psychical Research:

  Hernani Guimaraes Andrade, the spiritist scientist; Father Carlos, the Catholic professional exorcist; and the young candomblé father-in-sainthood have one view in common. They are convinced that poltergeists are the result of black magic, except where the premises rather than the people are being haunted.

  ‘In every case of person-directed poltergeist activity where I have been able to study the family background,’ says Mr Andrade, ‘there has been evidence that somebody in the house could be the target of revenge from a spirit. It may be a former lover who has committed suicide, a jealous relation, a spiteful neighbour, or even a member of the same family bearing some trivial grudge. Any Brazilian is well aware that this country is full of backyard terreiros of quimbanda (black magic centres), where people use spirit forces for evil purposes.’

  For anyone educated in the West this seems a breathtaking statement, startling in its absurdity — nothing less than primitive superstition. Playfair’s experiences in Brazil convinced him that it is the literal truth, as Max Freedom Long’s experiences in Hawaii had convinced him that poltergeists (low spirits) can be used for malevolent purposes. In fact when Playfair read Max Freedom Long’s Secret Science Behind Miracles, he recognized immediately that Long and Andrade were in fundamental agreement about spirits. According to the Hunas, man’s three ‘souls’ may be separated at death. The low self, which possesses memory, may be persuaded to commit mischief by a magician-priest or a practitioner of black magic: these are poltergeists, the spirits used in the death prayer. If the middle self becomes detached it becomes a ghost, a mindless wanderer around the scenes of its past life, for it has no memory.

  In the case of the Portuguese household the candomblé specialist was of the opinion that this was a case of black magic, and the IBPP was inclined to agree. The case had been going on for six years, ever since Nora had married the son of the household. Family members had received hostile telephone calls; photographs of one of the daughters, stitched with thread, had been found on the floor — a sign of witchcraft; the family had changed houses three times during the haunting, and Nora had attempted suicide twice. Most poltergeist hauntings last only a short time — perhaps, as in the case of the Black Monk of Pontefract, a few months. For a case to continue unabated for six years it seems that the entity needs to have some purpose apart from its own juvenile sense of mischief. That purpose, according to the IBPP, can only be provided by a black magician — probably, as Andrade says, some ‘backyard terreiros’ who will cast spells for payment.

  In his book Drum and Candle Playfair’s friend David St Clair has described his own experience of being ‘bewitched’. For eight years he had lived in a pleasant Rio de Janeiro apartment, served by a pretty brown-skinned maid named Edna. She was, he assures the reader, nothing more than a maid. Finally, when St Clair decided it was time to leave Brazil, he gave her six months’ notice. Suddenly everything began to go wrong: the book he was working on jammed firmly; his publisher rejected it; an inheritance failed to materialize; a love affair went wrong; he fell ill with malaria. His plans for moving to Greece had to be shelved.

  Then a psychic friend stopped him in the street and told him that someone had put a curse on him: ‘all his paths had been closed’. In fact it seemed to be general knowledge in umbanda, (voodoo) circles. St Clair’s suspicions finally came to rest on his pretty maid Edna. It was true that she was a Catholic who claimed to disapprove of umbanda, but when St Clair learned that a curse could be invoked by using some personal item of his clothing he recalled that his socks had been disappearing recently, and that Edna had claimed they had blown off the line. He told Edna that he wanted to go to an umbanda session. After much protest she agreed to take him.

  Towards midnight the ritual dance began. Then the umbanda priestess came in and danced as if possessed. After some ceremonial drinking of alcohol — a mouthful of which she spat in St Clair’s face — a medium was asked who had put a curse on him. The reply was, ‘The person who bought him here. She wants you to marry her or buy her a house with a piece of land.’ Then Edna was ordered to leave, after which there was more ritual drumming and dancing to lift the curse. Finally the priestess told him, ‘Now you are free.’

  Immediately afterwards St Clair’s luck changed: money came in, the book was accepted, the love affair restarted. But Edna herself became seriously ill with a stomach growth. An umbanda priest whom she consulted told her that the curse she had put on St Clair had rebounded on herself and would continue as long as she stayed with him. At this point Edna admitted that she had tried to make him marry her by means of black magic: she then walked out of his life, acknowledging that she had brought her misfortune on herself.

  When St Clair had come to Rio he had been astonished by the superstitions of his intellectual friends. He tells of seeing a clay statue of the devil surrounded by burning candles on the pavement in a main avenue: when he leaned forward to touch it a friend pulled him back, saying, ‘It’s despacho,’ an offering to a spirit. ‘You surely don’t believe all that stuff?’ asked St Clair incredulously. His friends replied that they didn’t — but still would not allow him to touch. After this St Clair saw many such pavement offerings. And he noticed that even starving beggars would not touch offerings of cooked chicken, and dogs would sniff them and back away.

  Playfair was intrigued by a case that seemed to show that contrary to the usual assumptions, poltergeists do sometimes commit lethal mischief. In December 1965 a Catholic family living in the small town of Jabuticabal were visited by what Playfair calls ‘one of the most persistently malevolent poltergeists in history’. It began with stone-throwing — or rather brick-throwing. A spiritist named Volpe came to survey the situation and decided that the focus of the activity was a pretty eleven-year-old girl named Maria José Ferreira, a natural medium who was unconsciously lending the spirits her energy. He took the girl into his own home and soon bricks were flying around there too. But at this stage the spirits seemed fairly amiable: if Maria asked for a flower or a piece of candy it appeared at her feet. Then the honeymoon period came to an end and the spirits began hurling glasses, plates, flower vases and other items around th
e house. While Maria was asleep there were apparent attempts to suffocate her by placing cups or glasses over her mouth, and an attack in the genital region suggested an attempt at rape. Then the poltergeist began sticking needles into her left heel, and the fact that she was wearing shoes and socks made no difference: one day fifty-five needles were removed at the same time. When the foot was bandaged the bandages were wrenched off without being untied. One day at school her clothes began to smoulder from a burn that looked as if it had been made by a cigarette. Finally the Volpes took her to an umbanda centre where a ‘spirit’ came and spoke through Chico, Brazil’s best-known medium. It declared that Maria had been a witch in a previous life and that many people had suffered through her — including the spirit itself, whose death she had caused. Pleas were ignored, and although the more painful attacks ceased the poltergeist continued to throw fruit and vegetables around. Finally Maria died from drinking ant killer in a soft drink. Whether it was suicide or whether the spirits introduced the poison was never established.