Strange Powers (3 page)

The association between Hippie culture and occultism can be seen at Glastonbury, a town whose small population (just over four thousand) is almost outnumbered by the influx of Hippies during the summer months. The man largely responsible for this is a shy, rather aloof scholar named John Michell. Michell's book
The View Over Atlantis
appeared in 1969; in it, he discusses the theories of Alfred Watkins, a Hereford businessman, first expounded in
The Old Straight Track
(1925). Watkins had noticed many straight tracks associated with prehistoric mounds (or lumps), marked at intervals with large stones; he assumed that these were the roads of prehistoric man. John Michell's first book had dealt with 'flying saucers', and he observed that UFOs are often associated with spots where leys intersect—like Cradle Hill, at Warminster. In
The View Over Atlantis
, he suggests that these leys were 'lines of power' analogous to the Chinese 'dragon paths', lines associated with the power called
fung-shui
, the ancient energies of the earth. Certain leys link up St Michael's Mount in Cornwall with Glastonbury Tot and Stonehenge; all Britain is intersected with these paths, which were associated with some ancient civilization that was of a far higher order than anyone has so far guessed. (This is his 'Atlantis'.) In a subsequent book,
City of Revelation
, Michell expands this theory that the Golden Age is more than a legend; that it really existed at some remote epoch, and that information about it is concealed in coded form, in many ancient buildings, including Stonehenge. Two central conclusions emerge from all this. One is that, during this remote epoch, man was in spiritual harmony with nature, in the way that native magicians and
shamans
(like don Juan) still are; the other, that man owed his knowledge, in this remote epoch, to extra-terrestrial beings. (This is an idea that seems to be in the air of our time; Arthur C. Clarke gave it popular currency in his film script for
2001, A Space Odyssey
, in which beings from outer space land on earth, and leave behind a monolith whose vibrations have the effect of heightening the intelligence of man's remote ancestors.)

In the fifties, Michell's books would have been classified with 'the lunatic fringe' (as Watkins' book was), and would have reached the tiny audience who study the measurements of the Great Pyramid and the mediaeval cathedrals. It is an interesting sign of our time that they should have inspired the Hippie invasion of Glastonbury. It seems unlikely that his basic ideas can have wide appeal; the form in which he presents them is too abstruse, often mathematical. But what certainly
does
appeal is this romantic idea of lines of power connecting spots like Stonehenge, Woodhenge, Salisbury Cathedral, Maiden Castle, and so on. The imaginative appeal of Michell's work is related to that of Lovecraft and Tolkien; but again, like Castaneda, he has the advantage of presenting his work as fact, or, at least, serious speculation.

The occult boom shows no sign of letting up. If history runs true to form, it should continue until about the turn of the century. For there have been magical revivals in almost every century for the past five hundred years. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, there was John Dee and a host of other practising magicians and alchemists. It skipped a century—the intellectual atmosphere of the age of Newton, Leibniz and Descartes was not conducive to magic—but the late eighteenth century was the age of Mesmer, St Germain, Cagliostro, and the late nineteenth century was the age of Madame Blavatsky, Eliphas Lévi, the Golden Dawn. In terms of the number of people actually affected, the latest revival is the greatest of all. For example, it is a curious fact that the best-selling author in the whole world at the moment is Erich von Däniken, a German whose
Chariots of the Gods?—Unsolved Mysteries of the Past
, appeared in 1969 and became a bestseller; since then,
Return to the Stars
and
Gold of the Gods
have broken all records. I say it is a curious fact because von Däniken's books say nothing that has not already been said many times by various writers. His basic thesis is the one we have already mentioned: that in some remote age, 'gods' from flying saucers landed on the earth, and helped create a highly evolved civilization, whose ruins can still be seen in the jungles of South America, on Easter Island, etc. His theses are fascinating, if not new; but the manner in which he states them is, to put it mildly, highly unsatisfactory. He gives the impression of being unable to stick to a point, rambling wildly so that it is difficult to follow the argument. There is an element of boastfulness which unsympathetic critics have interpreted as paranoia. (
Chariots of the Gods?
begins, typically: 'It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it,' both statements being patently untrue.) The style is often infantile, full of jibes and jeers at his critics; speaking of a gold hemisphere with a circular brim: 'To anticipate fatuous objections, it is not a sculptural representation of a hat with a brim. Hats have hollow spaces for even the most stupid heads to fit into.' And in places, he displays a lack of logic that amounts almost to imbecility. Describing a skeleton carved out of stone which he located in an underground chamber, he says: 'I counted ten pairs of ribs, all anatomically accurate. Were there anatomists who dissected bodies for the prehistoric sculptor? As we know, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen did not discover the new kind of rays he called X-rays until 1895!' The mind boggles at the mad illogicality: the idea that a sculptor would need X-rays to see a skeleton, when every graveyard must have been full of them. It is equally puzzling how his publishers allowed him to put such an absurdity into print.

At the beginning of
Gold of the Gods
, he claims to have investigated a system of underground tunnels in South America, 'thousands of miles in length', containing the ruins of the ancient civilization for which the astronaut 'gods' were responsible. He even offers a map of the area in which the 'secret entrance' is located, but since the area covered by the map is a few thousand square miles, it cannot be regarded as conclusive evidence of his good faith. Obviously, if von Däniken leads investigators to his tunnel system, he will achieve a celebrity that will outshine that of his best-selling books, and will confound all his critics. But at the moment, it must be admitted that the chaotic nature of his books
does
support the view that he is a charlatan and a crank.

But again I must emphasize: it is the
presentation
of the books that suggests this, not their subject matter. Ever since UFO sightings began, soon after the Second World War, many people have pointed out that ancient texts—including the Bible—refer to objects that sound like UFOs, that ancient drawings and carvings often show disc-like objects that could be flying saucers, and odd-looking men who could be astronauts in flying kit. It is an unproved hypothesis; but to give it serious consideration is not necessarily the sign of a crank.

I was asked if I would care to write a book on the occult in 1968. It sounded an amusing idea. Ever since those early days in London, I had been interested in the subject, although I tended to treat it as light reading. When I was in America, on a lecture tour, in 1961, I bought paperbacks about flying saucers and allied topics at every airport bookstall, and I also purchased most of the books on occult topics issued by University Books in New York: Montague Summers on witches, werewolves and vampires, reprints of the books of A. E. Waite on the Rosicrucians, the Kabbalah, and so on. Moreover, since an experience with mescaline in 1963, I had developed my own theory of man's 'unused powers'. I had disliked the mescaline experience. There were none of the usual visual effects; everything looked much as usual; it was rather like being drunk, but with less control. For some odd reason, I had a strong intuition that the district in which I live—in south Cornwall—was once associated with witchcraft. I have never tried to verify this; my wife can find nothing about it in books of local history. What interested me was that my mind seemed more intuitive, more telepathic, as it were. I recalled that Jim Corbett, the famous tiger hunter, said that after years of hunting man eaters, he had developed a sort of sixth sense about danger, which he called 'jungle sensitivity'. I could understand this. The mind has sensitive areas, rather like the nerves in a fish's sides, that register delicate pressures. Most animals seem to possess this 'sixth sense'—in
The Occult
I cited many cases; of the homing instinct in birds and animals, of 'foreknowledge' in dogs—for example, how Hugh McDiarmid's dog knows when he is going to return home from a long journey, and sits at the end of the lane a couple of days before he is due back, waiting. Man must also have possessed this same 'psychic sensitivity' in the distant past. But he doesn't need it in modern civilized life; in fact, it would be a nuisance. My mescaline experience may have made me more sensitive, more intuitive; but it also ruined my normal powers of concentration. In order to tackle the complex business of civilized living, we must
narrow
our powers, concentrate on what has to be done. Intense will-drive and this telepathic intuition are incompatible. Neither would it be accurate to say that city life destroys the sixth sense;
we
destroy it in ourselves.

However, that is not the end of the matter. These powers have only gone into cold storage; they can be brought out again if needed—for example, if, like Jim Corbett, we return to circumstances where they become necessary for survival. But there is another possibility. They may return as a kind of by-product of another kind of power, a power that man is only now slowly learning to develop. A dog may be able to sense ghosts in an empty house. But no animal could experience the kind of excitement Heinrich Schliemann felt as he uncovered the walls of ancient Troy, or Howard Carter as he entered the chamber containing the coffin of Tutankhamen. This excitement is based on what we might call 'a direct sense of otherness', of other times and other places. It could be objected that this sense of other-ness is 'nothing but imagination', but a moment's thought will show that this is careless thinking. It is true that Schliemann could not really look into the past, to the Troy of eleven centuries B.C. But the words 'Homer's Troy', which, for most of us, are merely words, suddenly became a reality for Schliemann. Troy
was
a reality, and for a moment, Schliemann was able to gasp it as such, as if he had been transported back three thousand years.

This is a point of vital importance. The mind possesses a power to focus reality. Everyone has experienced this on the first day of a holiday, when everything seems clearer and fresher than usual. In the mood of holiday excitement, we seem to see things in sharper focus, and we also experience a stronger sense of the reality of other times; if I happen to read something about Michelangelo or Beethoven in this mood, they no longer seem remote figures of history; I can grasp that they were real men, like myself. This power to 'focus reality' is the ability to project a
beam of interest
. All creatures have this ability—you have only to see the way a dog hangs around the house of a bitch on heat to see that dogs can be as single-minded as humans—but animals can only direct it at the present moment. When you take your dog for a country walk, you can watch his beam of interest switching from object to object—a rabbit hole, a gap in the hedge, an old bone. If an aeroplane goes overhead, he does not look up into the sky; that is too remote. And if you meet a friend on your walk, and stop to have a leisurely conversation about a neighbor who died ten years ago, your mind has gone into a realm where your dog cannot follow you; you have, casually and without effort, directed your beam of interest to another time and another place.

Human beings can not only direct their beam of interest to distant realities; they can direct it to realities that never existed. A novel like Wells's
Time Machine
or David Lindsay's
Voyage to Arcturus
demonstrate this extraordinary power of the human mind to evoke a non-existent reality as vividly as if the novel were a volume of travels in Central Africa. And a man like H. P. Lovecraft, bored and dissatisfied with his life in Providence, Rhode Island, can create a fictional 'reality' that reveals that he has trained his mind to focus on a self-created mental world. What is interesting here is that Lovecraft led a rather unsatisfying, unfulfilled existence; it would have been understandable if, like an undernourished child, he had drifted aimlessly and died without having achieved anything. In fact, he learned to
generate
some of the 'psychological vitamins' he needed by an act of imagination; in spite of a thoroughly frustrating life, he managed to grow into a remarkable human being. This is as startling as if a half-starved man put on weight by imagining five-course meals. Man's power to direct his 'beam of interest' at distant realities obviously has some fascinating implications; it gives him a new kind of power over his own life.

This power is not yet highly developed in human beings. I have called it 'Faculty X'; for it is, in effect, a new faculty, the faculty that distinguishes man from all other animals: the faculty that may be considered the real aim of human evolution.

But this Faculty X is not an
alternative
to the animal's intuitive powers. Man discarded his sixth sense because he couldn't afford to keep it; civilization used up all his surplus energies, and he had none left over to operate a sixth sense. But Faculty X represents a new level of power over himself; psychic energies are freed: it could be compared to the flood of manpower that occurs at the end of a war, when the army is demobilized. Once again he can afford to develop his 'psychic radar', his sixth sense. This is why I believe that, as man develops Faculty X, his so-called psychic powers will also increase—second sight, telepathy, the ability to dowse, even astral projection.