A case described by Jacob also involved a gypsy alter-ego. A sixteen-year-old girl named Isabel had periods of amnesia during which she wandered the streets dressed in gypsy clothes and earrings (garments she normally liked to wear during carnival). Isabel’s mother, a possessive and strong-willed woman, brought her daughter to Jacob for therapy. Under hypnosis Isabel recalled a past life as a French gypsy who had enjoyed a carefree life of travelling, singing and dancing. The gypsy had chosen her present incarnation as Isabel because she felt that the fight for independence in her new environment would add a certain strength to her character. Jacob proceeded to merge the two personalities and Isabel began to confront her mother and resist her possessiveness — to her mother’s dismay. Yet in spite of this conflict Isabel reported that she was far happier than before … .
Krippner’s attitude towards these theories is one of detachment: he notes simply that they seem to work and that from the doctor’s point of view, this is all that matters. But we should also bear in mind that this is not a question of either/or. Like the Brazilian doctors, Allison and Crabtree are not denying that most cases of multiple personality are a form of psychological self-defence against some unbearable trauma: they are simply asserting that in their own clinical experience some cases fail to fit this category but do seem to fit the category of what used to be known as ‘possession’. They are not attempting to overturn current psychiatric theories, only to broaden them. Their aims are therefore consistent with those of the present book. What I have attempted to argue is that in the course of becoming ‘civilized’ man has deliberately suppressed certain paranormal faculties — like Jim Corbett’s ‘jungle sensitiveness’ — because he no longer needs them. But one unwelcome side-effect of this suppression is that he finds himself trapped in an apparently futile material world whose processes go on repeating themselves idefinitely. Jung explained why he felt this to be dangerous:
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. This is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being ‘brings over’ at the time of his death is so important. Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man’s metaphysical task — which he cannot accomplish without ‘mythologizing’. Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.*
At this point in the development of civilization the aim is to re-establish that ancient contact with the ‘unconscious’, the realm of myth. This realm of myth is also the realm of man’s ‘hidden powers’. What the last two chapters should have made quite clear is that whether we like it or not it is also the realm of ‘spirits’. Ancient man believed in spirits not because he was a superstitious ignoramus, but because he often saw them. In that sense Voltaire and the French rationalists were completely wrong. Voltaire writes condescendingly in his article on superstition in the Philosophical Dictionary, ‘All the Fathers of the Church without exception believed in magic. The Church always condemned magic, but it always believed in it; it didn’t excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were deceived, but as men who really had intercourse with devils.’ And this, to Voltaire, was so preposterous that it was not even worth discussing. We can hardly blame Voltaire for taking what after all strikes us as a sensible attitude. The fact remains that we now possess factual evidence that enables us to go beyond Voltaire, and the evidence indicates that the world is a more strange and complex place than we assumed. Jung and Kardec seem to be in agreement on one fundamental point: that the road that will take us forward is also the road that will take us inward.
*Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 289.
*Celia Green and Charles McCreery, Apparitions, p. 102.
†The story is told more fully in The Occult, pp. 54–5.
*‘The Cure of Two Cases of Paranoia’, Bulletin 6 of the Boston Society for Psychical Research, December 1927.
*I must express my indebtedness to the chapter on ‘The Work of Dr Titus Bull’ in The Infinite Boundary by D. Scott Rogo, and to D. Scott Rogo himself for providing me with additional information.
*Reprinted in Exorcism — Fact Not Fiction, edited by Martin Ebon.
*Quoted by J. Finley Hurley in Sorcery (1985), p. 191.
*Cross Cultural Approaches to Multiple Personality Disorder: Practices in Brazilian Spiritism.’ Ethos (Journal of the American Anthropological Association), September 1987.
*Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 288.
4
Visions
If man could return to that primitive ‘visionary’ state, what would the world look like? The autobiography of Eileen Garrett offers some interesting clues. As a four-year-old child she was lying in bed one morning and looking into the shadows when she noticed globules of light bursting at intervals in the beam of sunlight. They were egg-shaped light balls which seemed to be full of colours, and they swelled and exploded like bubbles. As they swirled around in the sunlight they also moved in a well-regulated pattern like a dance. She observed at the same time that the air was full of ‘singing sounds’. As she stared at the ‘bubbles’ she felt herself drawn into their dance so that she seemed to be split up — ‘as though divided into little pieces and each piece was located in a different place’. She began to develop this ability to project some ‘fluid’ part of herself into flowers and trees and rocks — and sometimes into people — so as to experience their identity.
This sounds like Wordsworth’s description of childhood in ‘Intimations of Immortality’, with its sense of ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream’. In fact we can all experience something like this in states of deep relaxation — even sinking into a warm bath. What happens is that in focusing on the joy of relaxing, we somehow side-step the left-brain ego, the personality, and simply see things as they are instead of seeing them from the viewpoint of their usefulness to ourselves.
Eileen Garrett was also aware of what she called the ‘surrounds’ of living creatures, which clairvoyants usually call their auras.
As a child I knew that the, character of people depended on their surrounds. By the quality of light and colour they gave forth, I could judge their personality. Some people moved in grey shadows and some in glowing lights … . This was equally true for me of plants and of animals: I knew, according to the condition of the envelopes, when the vitality of trees and flowers was high or low … . I noticed how animals behaved towards each other … and I could tell that they sensed these surrounds. As a mouse reacts to the presence of a hawk before it sees its form, so did I know that all animals reacted to their enemies and friends, by means of these enveloping forms.
When she was four Eileen Garrett also became aware of the presence of three children in the garden of the farmhouse she lived in. These children seemed to be made entirely of the light that merely surrounds solid human beings. She was able to communicate with them without words, ‘as I did with everything that was alive; for it seemed to me that I knew what the flowers and the trees were saying without the use of words.’ Ralph Allison mentions that many of his multiple personality patients had imaginary playmates in childhood who seemed to them as real as solid human beings, and also that some of them could see auras around people. But then most of his multiple personality patients also possessed Eileen Garrett’s strange ability to ‘withdraw’ inside herself. Aldous Huxley, describing his reactions after taking mescalin, speaks of the sense of intense meaning that seemed to radiate from everything he looked at — from a flower to a deckchair — as if they were somehow speaking to him. And Ouspensky has described how wandering around St Petersburg at night and practising ‘self-remembering’, he would feel that the houses were communicating with him. In reading such descriptions we assume that they are a manner of speaking, a kind of poetic licence. But in doing so we are failing to grasp the basic mechanisms of perception: our pe
rsonalities cut out most of the meaning of the world around us; it becomes in a sense like a television set with the sound turned down. Clairvoyants like Eileen Garrett are simply seeing the world with the sound turned up. There is a sense in which their perception is far more normal than ours.
There are many different degrees of clairvoyance. Eileen Garrett possessed a high level; some people possess almost none at all. Sartre’s novels, for example, reveal that he saw the world as a dull, solid reality that oppressed his senses. But most artists and poets possess a slightly higher degree than most people. The result is that when they are feeling fresh and wide-awake they sense a meaning that is exuded by everything that surrounds them. Most of them are inclined to believe that this is simply a pleasant illusion, a way of being drunk on one’s own vital energy: in fact they are catching a glimpse of the world in its primitive ‘visionary’ state.
Whenever I visit a picture gallery I become aware that art is an attempt to communicate this sense of ‘the meaning exuded by objects’. The artist who merely paints what he sees in front of him is no more than a journeyman. The genuine artist is struck by the ‘interestingness’ of lines and colours and wants to isolate them on canvas. He is in fact catching a glimpse of the world of the clairvoyant. There is a case for arguing that all artists are undeveloped clairvoyants or visionaries.
Albert Tucker is one of Australia’s finest living artists. When I asked him whether he had ever had any paranormal experiences he replied, ‘Very few.’ Yet these few emphasize that he lives in a very different world from the rest of us — a world that is already halfway to that of Eileen Garrett.
The first ‘paranormal’ experience he could recollect happened at the age of about seventeen. Every night as he lay down to sleep a heavy weight would come and settle down on his leg — the weight of a human being which was rather soft and warm. As soon as he turned from his side on to his back the weight vanished. Oddly enough he knew exactly what his visitant looked like: he had a clear mental image of a small, short, plump elderly woman with frizzy grey hair and a brown coat. This continued for a number of weeks, then ceased. It has never happened since.
Not long after this Bert and his mother were eating lunch one day when there was an appalling crash from the next room — the whole house shook. Mrs Tucker said, ‘Good God, the bookcase has fallen over,’ and they both rushed into the room. There was no disturbance whatsoever. Puzzled but relieved, they went back to their lunch.
A few years later Albert Tucker had his only experience of clairvoyance or precognition. Walking along a street in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, approaching a corner, he was startled by a powerful visual image that came into his mind. It was of the street he was approaching, and it stood still, like an arrested film, so that he could scan it in detail. Halfway down the street a man was standing talking to someone in a gateway: he was wearing a grey felt hat and a tweed overcoat with a very strong and marked herringbone pattern. And even though the man was halfway down the street Tucker could see every detail in the cloth of the coat, every warp and woof in the material. Seconds later he reached the corner, looked down the street, and saw the same man standing in the gateway talking to someone.
Ten years later Tucker was living in a rooming house in Powlett Street, east Melbourne, with his first wife Joy. The two single beds in the room were at right angles to one another. Just about to doze off to sleep Tucker was suddenly awakened by a loud crash at the foot of his wife’s bed. He sat up and leaned on one elbow, then saw that his wife was sitting on the end of her bed. He assumed that she had got up to go to the bathroom and had kicked the dressing table. To his surprise his wife continued sitting on the bed and — as in the case of the man in the overcoat — he was aware of being able to see every detail of the material of her nightdress and every hair on her head. This struck him as odd since the faint moonlight hardly illuminated the room. As he was about to open his mouth to speak his wife vanished ‘as if a light had been switched off’. At the same time the sound of stertorous breathing came from her pillow. Tucker went across to her and looked down: she was curled up in a foetal position, breathing so heavily that it sounded like gasping. Then, slowly, her breathing became normal again. In the morning he asked if she recollected any dreams: she said no. When he described what he had seen she was as bewildered as he was. Never having heard of the ‘astral double’ Tucker had no idea of what to make of the experience.
A later experience seems to belong in the same category as the episode of the man in the tweed coat. One evening Tucker was sitting watching television and waiting for his second wife, Barbara, to return home from a book launch; his Doberman pinscher, Gretel, was lying on the settee dozing. Suddenly they both heard the sound of Barbara’s returning car; Gretel’s ears went up and she ran to the door. The car went past the house to the garage; the tyres gripped on the gravel and the motor revved. He opened the door and looked towards the garage; no rear lights were visible and the garage light was not on. The dog raced up to the garage while Tucker walked to the end of the terrace. A few moments later Gretel came back looking bewildered. There was no car. They both went back indoors. Ten minutes later they heard the identical sounds; the tyres gripping on the gravel, the engine revving as the car passed the house. This time it was Barbara returning home. The previous time had been a kind of ‘rehearsal’, or what the Norwegians call a vardoger or forerunner — an event that seems to occur some time before it happens in reality.
But by far the strangest of all Tucker’s paranormal experiences took place in the same room in east Melbourne where he lived with his first wife. One weekend Joy went away to see her mother, leaving Albert alone in the room for the first time in five years. He experienced an odd pang of nervousness at the thought of spending the night alone, which he assumed to be some throwback to childhood — he later wondered if it was a premonition. That evening he went over to see some friends in the adjoining suburb of south Yarrow. Some time towards midnight he set out to walk home, a distance of approximately a mile. As he strolled along the bank of the river he became conscious of a feeling of uneasiness — which he again attributed to the knowledge that he would be spending the night alone. The closer he drew to home, the stronger became the feeling of nervousness. It was so strong that he began to lecture himself on being infantile. Yet by the time he was close to home it had become a feeling of acute anxiety. This turned to fear, then to terror. As he turned into Powlett Street he was driven along by pure will, determined not to give in to a nameless dread that had no object. He went into the house and groped his way upstairs in the dark — there was only one light-switch at the bottom of the stairs — then switched on the light in his own room. As he stepped inside he was assailed by what he describes as ‘a most revolting stench — I can only describe it as the kind of smell you’ve probably picked up yourself in zoos — a kind of wet, hot fur and acute animal stench.’ He stood in the centre of the room, rigid with terror yet still fighting it as childishness, then noticed something on the coverlet of his bed. It was a dead mouse. (In fact the Tuckers had never seen a mouse in this house.) It was lying on the bed with its back legs spread out, and as he bent over it he could see drops of urine sprinkled along the coverlet for about a foot behind the mouse. He bent over and touched it with his forefinger. It was still as warm as if it were alive. ‘All of a sudden, instantly, I knew that if I spent the night in the room I wouldn’t see the morning — I knew that with inner and absolute certainty.’ He turned round and went downstairs. As soon as he went into the street the terror vanished. He went back to his friends’ house and spent the night on their sofa. The next morning he returned to the room. It was full of sunlight and the terror had evaporated.
Thinking about this later Tucker came to the conclusion that ‘somehow an opening had been created through which demonic forces could emerge’. The landlady had an idiot son who was institutionalized: periodically he came home for the weekend, and he was at home that weekend, in the room directly belo
w the Tuckers. Bert Tucker felt that it was his presence that had somehow ‘opened the door’ to the demonic entity. And what of the dead mouse? His conclusion was that he became a ‘kind of battleground’ between the evil forces and a force that was trying to preserve him. It was this ‘guardian’ force that had filled him with terror on his way home and which — recognizing that he was too stubborn to accept the warning — killed the mouse as he entered the room and finally convinced him that this was not some purely irrational fear.
These various episodes all seem so unlike one another that it is hard to see any overall pattern. Yet the first and most obvious thing that emerges is that Albert Tucker is naturally ‘psychic’, which means, quite simply, that he is to some extent aware of that ‘invisible world’ that shamans like Ramon Medina take for granted. He mentions that he became aware of this in his early teens but that there was nothing he could pin down as a ‘paranormal event’. Like many artists he was probably a late developer, so the grey-haired lady who sat on his legs was simply taking advantage of the peculiar energies of adolescence. (Could it be significant that she vanished when he turned on his back, removing the pressure from the region concerned?) The same explanation applies to the thunderous crash: since it occurred only once it might be interpreted as the poltergeist saying farewell.