Beyond the Occult

  Daskalos lit a candle and proceeded to perform a cabbalistic ritual using a six-pointed star and a white eagle. Markides noticed that when Daskalos concentrated on the candle flame it behaved in a peculiar way, becoming elongated and producing black smoke, then shrinking and guttering. As soon as Daskalos stopped staring at the flame — which was several feet away — it became still. The ritual went on for a long time, with Daskalos sternly addressing the flame. Finally, with an expression of relief, Daskalos told them that the spirits had been driven out and could no longer do anyone any harm. As always, he refused to accept money for his services.

  A week later Markides talked to the girl, who had ceased to hear voices after the ritual of exorcism. She told him how the trouble had started after a quarrel with her boyfriend: as she lay in bed something seemed to enter her head. She became ill and nervous and vomited a great deal. A rabbi told her that on the fortieth day she would vomit more than usual, and that the problem would then go away. This proved to be true. But after a later quarrel with another boyfriend she felt something enter her stomach. After this she began to hear voices that told her they would torture her and make her go mad. Every night they tried to make her commit suicide. Then, through her aunt who lived in Cyprus, she had heard of Daskalos, who had now cured her.

  Daskalos elaborated further. Possession, he said, could be of three types: by ill-disposed human spirits, by demons and by elementals. However possession can only take place if the vibration of the victim is identical with its own. ‘In other words the person must himself have a predisposition to hurt.’ He seemed to be hinting that it was the girl’s vengeful thoughts about her boyfriend that had made her vulnerable to the attack.

  ‘Elementals’, Daskalos explained later, are thoughts and desires of human beings which come to have a life of their own. This may be either subconsciously or consciously. When human beings brood on any strong desire, ‘psychic (or noetic) matter’ is created, and this is the basic stuff of the universe. The ‘elemental’ is an inner mental picture. If the thought-desire is a negative emotion, like envy or hatred, it takes on a life of its own and moves towards the person at whom it is directed: but sooner or later it returns to its creator.

  Daskalos describes an interesting experiment which throws some light on an incident in the life of Rolling Thunder. He told his students to close their eyes and imagine they were holding a snake. Their reaction told him that many of them found the idea horrifying, so he told them to change it to a golden snake. When they had carefully imagined it, Daskalos said, it would become an ‘elemental’. They should then imagine releasing it on to the ground. ‘I am telling you, you will have nothing to fear from snakes from now on. This elemental will enter inside any snake which may be ready to hurt you and will calm it down. This is a method you can use to tame animals around you.’ One day when Doug Boyd was watching Rolling Thunder control ants by merely pointing his finger at them, a rattlesnake brushed his boot. Rolling Thunder knelt by the snake and held out his hands towards it. The snake coiled and raised its head to meet the hand but made no attempt to strike. When the hand went forward, the head went back; when the hand went back, the head went forward. Then Rolling Thunder raised both hands on either side of the snake’s head and the snake swayed slowly between them, from one to the other. Finally, when Rolling Thunder stood up and dismissed it, the snake uncoiled and slid away. Markides spoke to an eye witness who had seen Daskalos place sugar in his mouth then invite a snake to help itself from it: the eye witness had almost fainted as the snake licked up the sugar. Rolling Thunder and Daskalos, it seems, had the same basic understanding of animals.

  In 1981 Markides had a chance to observe an example of almost miraculous self control. He had heard that Daskalos was seriously ill with a foot wound that refused to heal. But Daskalos explained that he had deliberately taken on this illness in order to relieve his son-in-law of a heavy ‘karmic debt’. His doctor had warned him to remain in bed; if he stood on the infected foot the wound would open up again. At this point in the conversation Daskalos offered to demonstrate what he was talking about with a ‘phenomenon’. (‘Normally I am not allowed to do phenomena but I’ll make an exception.’) Daskalos then went into a state of deep meditation for a few minutes and passed his hand over the infected right leg. Then he stepped lightly out of bed and proceeded to hop vigorously around the room on his right leg, in spite of Markides’ remonstrances. When he climbed back into bed he went into meditation again and waved his hand over the leg. ‘Now I must get the Karma back,’ he told Markides cheerfully. He told Markides that the karma would take about another week before it was exhausted: in fact when Markides visited him six days later he was painting in his studio.

  In spite of the ban on ‘phenomena’ Daskalos frequently gave proof of apparently paranormal powers. He was able to describe Markides’ house in Maine in ‘stunning detail’, although he would have had no way of learning these details. One day Markides dreamed that Daskalos was talking to him, then he suddenly disappeared: he turned round and saw Daskalos approaching him from behind. The next day Markides mentioned to Daskalos that he had dreamed about him, and before he could say more Daskalos remarked casually, ‘Oh yes, I was giving you a lesson on the nature of space in the fourth dimension.’ On another occasion Markides and a friend were trying to find Daskalos, without success, and Markides remarked humorously that perhaps Daskalos was visiting a mistress. When they finally found him and asked where he had been he snapped, ‘Visiting a mistress,’ then went on to say that he had overheard their ‘silly conversation’.

  It must be admitted that for the reader who is not a convinced ‘occultist’, The Magus of Strovolos is an extremely difficult book to swallow. When studied in isolation some of Daskalos’s claims seem so extraordinary that the natural reaction is to regard him as either a charlatan or a practical joker. Yet when they are read in the context of his teachings and his remarkable healing powers they become altogether more credible. Markides himself confesses that his own original intention of studying Daskalos from the detached viewpoint of a sociologist gradually faded as he witnessed miraculous healing sessions and encountered ‘coincidences’ like the ones described in the last paragraph. It was events like these that convinced Markides that Daskalos was a genuine magus and not merely a healer with some peculiar beliefs and assumptions. He also noted that the longer he spent in the atmosphere of these beliefs and assumptions the more he himself became subject to unusual experiences. He describes how when he was struggling to translate a Byzantine hymn dedicated to St Spyridon (whom Daskalos claimed to be one of his past incarnations), he finally decided to give up and take a stroll to the library to read the newspapers. Having read the news that interested him in the Hellenic Chronicle he turned casually to another page and found an article about St Spyridon which ended with a translation of the hymn into English. ‘Are these things,’ Markides asks, ‘coincidences? Perhaps. But I cannot afford in all honesty not to raise questions in my mind whether perchance Daskalos and Iacovos [his chief follower] live in a world that, no matter how exotic and radically divergent from ours it seems, is nevertheless just as real if not more so.’

  Soon after this Markides discovered that he ‘felt as if I were a sociologist by day, transformed into a mystic by night’. On one occasion he dreamed that his son was being attacked by a whale: at that moment his son’s screams woke him up. After this he began having ‘lucid dreams’ — dreams in which the dreamer knows he is asleep — in one of which he passed through the doorway into the psychic world. In each of these dreams he felt that the world he entered was more real than the waking state. In one of his dreams he was about to address a girl when she shrank back and said, ‘You are not of our world.’ Markides prefers not to speculate whether these were really dreams or whether he had gained a certain borderland access to the psychic world.

  If the ‘exotic and radically divergent’ world of Daskalos is as real as our physical universe then it must be admitted that it
sounds more like the world created by Bram Stoker or M. R. James than the universe Westerners take for granted. For example, Daskalos tells of a young girl he encountered on a visit to southern Greece who was suffering from psychological problems. Daskalos learned that her parents had refused to allow her to marry a shepherd many years her senior. Five years after the shepherd’s death the girl claimed that she had seen him as she was looking after the goats. She fled and he followed her and hypnotized her. Three days later he came into her home and took her virginity. A doctor who examined her insisted that she had been deflowered by her own fingers but she denied it. Daskalos noticed red spots on her neck and she told him, ‘He kisses me there, but his kisses are strange. They are like sucking, but I like them.’

  So far it sounds like the fantasy of a frustrated virgin. But Daskalos went on to describe how, a few days later, he saw the shepherd — whose name was Loizo — coming into the house. He greeted him, and Loizo proceeded to explain that during his lifetime he had never had sexual relations with a woman — only with goats and donkeys. Now that he had a mistress he did not intend to let her go. Daskalos pointed out that he was no longer alive. ‘What are you talking about? Here I am talking to you, I fuck, and you are telling me I’m not alive?’ But Daskalos finally succeeded in convincing him that if he continued to draw energy from the girl he would ‘remain in a narcotized state like a vampire’, and he left, the dogs barking after him. When the local doctor asked Daskalos what had happened he explained that the girl had been suffering from illusions and that he had cured her by means of psychoanalysis. That night the doctor gave a lecture on psychoanalysis to the villagers while Daskalos listened, chuckling.

  Daskalos went on to explain that many young men become ‘possessed’ by the masturbatory images of young women that they create, and that such elementals might begin to suck the etheric vitality of the individual. (According to Daskalos the succubi described by Stan Gooch would be such elementals.)

  Daskalos explained there was an epidemic of black magic on Cyprus after the civil war in Lebanon had driven out many black sorcerers; they offered their services for money. One sorcerer agreed to kill a young couple for three hundred pounds, and to do it, trapped a demon inside a bottle which contained an image of a demon carved from an old tyre. He managed to place it under their bed, and they began to lose their energy and bleed from the nose and mouth. The young couple found the bottle and took it to Daskalos, who performed one of his rituals and cut off the connection between the demon and the young couple: their bleeding immediately ceased. Such a story would sound like the wildest absurdity were it not that Playfair witnessed so many similar cases in Brazil. The implication seems to be that in societies where there is a strong link with the primitive past, sorcery continues to be practised as a matter of course. But that is not the end of Daskalos’s story. When he placed the bottle in his own private sanctum the demon struggled so hard that he escaped: there was a loud explosion that Iacovos also heard. But according to Daskalos the demon came back. ‘He appeared to me like a mythological satyr. His colour was dark green. His eyes were red and he had protrusions on his forehead that looked like horns.’ When Daskalos was holding a meeting of his inner circle the demon came in — presumably invisible to the others — and handed Daskalos an image of himself in baked clay which was still hot because of the change from one dimension to another. Daskalos and the demon became affectionate friends.

  While Markides was listening to this story Daskalos assured him — to Markides’s secret alarm — that the demon had just come into the room and sat next to him. It sounds as if Daskalos was indulging in a leg-pull. But the rest of the book makes it quite clear that although Daskalos has a sense of humour he does not indulge in leg-pulls. He is perfectly serious when he explains, ‘Demons are archangelic emanations in the opposite side of existence in order to create the realms of separateness.’

  Equally extraordinary was an incident concerning the American satellite Skylab. On the day Skylab was due to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere Daskalos decided to go and take a look at it. In the presence of Markides and Iacovos he went into a trance, and when he returned said he had been trying to push Skylab into the southern hemisphere, where there was more sea for it to fall into. (At this point the Americans had lost control over it.) He did this by creating a moonlike disc in his mind and bouncing it off Skylab. The next time he went into a trance Daskalos declared that he had encountered intelligent beings in three flying saucers who were trying to divert Skylab by their own methods. ‘These entities are really advanced. They live in the higher noetic world and have no form.’ He went into another trance and when he emerged from this claimed that he and the flying saucer entities had changed the trajectory of Skylab. Daskalos explained that these ‘superintelligences’ are the guardians of the planet earth and that ‘they truly love us’. In the event Skylab, which was expected to fall in the northern hemisphere, re-entered in the southern hemisphere; parts fell into the Indian Ocean and parts on Australia.

  Obviously the individual reader must make up his own mind how far he can credit Daskalos’s claims. It seems clear that Markides ended by accepting most of them: for example he had no doubt that when Daskalos claimed to be wrestling with Skylab something important and interesting had really occurred. Yet the most important parts of The Magus of Strovolos are not the stories of healing or exorcism but the exposition of cosmology and ‘psychological teaching’. This, for example, might have been said by Gurdjieff or by some Zen master:

  Let me ask you a question. How many things do you concentrate on with full awareness during your everyday life? Very few. When you train yourself to concentrate you will become aware of much more in your life. At first you devote a quarter of an hour every day. During that time you may take a walk and will fully notice everything around you. Nothing should escape your attention, nothing. You may feel tired at first because you are not accustomed to paying attention to everything around you, the ant walking, the flowers, the sounds, the voices. You perceive everything, you feel everything. When you start this exercise you learn that during that quarter of an hour you live much more fully, much more intensely, than at any other period of the day. You will discover that what is considered ordinarily as the awaking state is in reality a form of semihypnosis … .

  Daskalos claims that his ‘teaching’ is not his own but comes to him from an entity called Father Yohannan — the biblical St John. It is Yohannan who takes over at the meeting of the ‘Circle of the Research of Truth’, delivers the lectures and answers the questions. And what Yohannan says is remarkably consistent with what has been said by other mystics and psychics. For example:

  Can one communicate with a flower or a plant? Ordinary people, no matter how much they may love plants and flowers, cannot consciously communicate with them. They appear as objects to them, outside themselves. A poet may be inspired by the beauty of a flower, but can he incorporate into his consciousness the semi-consciousness of the flower? In the psychic world it is very different. When you advance you will be able to communicate with all forms of life. All things are alive and have their own language, vibrations and luminosity that you can feel in your psychic body.

  This is a restatement of Eileen Garrett’s comments on communication with nature. Other remarks of Daskalos throw light on the process of psychometry: ‘Within the psychic world there is no separation between us and an object outside us. When we co-ordinate ourselves and focus on something we are simultaneously one with that object. We are within it and around it.’

  We may recall that when Maria de Zierold held an object and focused on it she became identified with the object so that if it was pricked with a pin she felt the prick, and if it was moistened with alcohol she could taste the alcohol. As Anne Bancroft looked at the branch of rhododendron she felt ‘a sense of communication with it, as though it and I had become one’. Again and again it becomes clear that there is no basic distinction between the experience of the psychic and the expe
rience of the mystic.

  Again, students of Western occultism will be struck by the remarkable similarity between the basic ideas of Daskalos and those of Rudolf Steiner. This is obviously not because Daskalos has derived ideas from Steiner, for it is quite plain throughout the book that everything he says is the result of direct experience. It seems to be because there is a very close correspondence between Steiner’s experience of the ‘spirit world’ and Daskalos’s. Steiner, for example, is unique among Western mystics in insisting that the ‘spiritual world’ is man’s inner world. Daskalos (or Yohannan) is on record as making the strange statement, ‘When we leave our bodies, either through death or exomatosis, we actually enter within ourselves.’ And a chapter dealing with the passage from death to rebirth might be inserted into one of Steiner’s books without anyone noticing the difference.

  According to Daskalos death is the separation of the physical body and the ‘etheric double’ (or ‘aura’). The aura takes about forty days to dissolve away. At the moment of death there is an enormous sense of freedom and serenity. Then the individual enters the ‘psychonoetic world, carrying with him his virtues and vices. In the psychic realms, feelings acquire far greater intensity, because they are no longer diluted by our physical bodies, so those who are subject to powerful negative feelings — like envy, rage, lust — will suffer from them with agonising intensity.’ These are in effect the sufferings of Hell — or rather of purgatory, for Daskalos denies the existence of Hell or retributory punishment. The purpose of these sufferings is ‘so that we may find out who we really are’.

  In the psychonoetic world the individual lives at once on the psychic plane and in his own subjective world. Even on earth human beings live inside their own heads as much as in the real world. On the psychic plane they can virtually ignore objective reality. So although, according to Daskalos, the psychic plane has trees, mountains, oceans and rivers (he says that our ‘real world’ is only a reflection of this psychic realm), ‘most persons who live there perceive it through the elementals they themselves create.’ Daskalos instances a gambler who died of tuberculosis and who has created with others an environment like that he knew on earth: dirty windows and tables and the same fights and quarrels. Iacovos’s dead grandfather still looks after an orchard, sells the fruit and worries about the rainfall. Sooner or later such people will realize that they could be doing far more interesting things, and move on to higher psychic planes. And finally the ‘masters of Karma’ will order the individual to return to earth to learn more lessons. Markides asked why all this was necessary: the reply was, ‘to realize, perhaps, who one is and to acquire self-consciousness.’