Supernatural (18 page)

A piece of mosaic from Pompeii brought an interesting description of an ancient town with narrow streets, and a populace in the grip of war fever; Denton had hoped for some mention of the destruction of Pompeii.
But a piece of volcanic rock from Pompeii brought far more satisfying results.
It was the size of a small bean, and the psychometer was not allowed to see it.
(Denton does not explain how he did this, but presumably it was wrapped in paper or cloth.) Mrs Denton saw coloured figures on a wall—frescoes—and observed that the building overlooked the sea.
Out of the window, she could look towards the mountain-top, and see smoke and cinders rising up in a column.
The black cloud of dust was spreading across the countryside.
From a situation higher up the mountain she was able to observe the eruption.
‘I feel the influence of human terror that I cannot describe.’
The land below finally became a desert of cinders.
Watching crowds fleeing from Pompeii (in fact, most of the population escaped before the final catastrophe) she is surprised that it resembles a modern town more than she had expected.

One interesting observation was that the volcano had also vomited water.
In fact, Pompeii was engulfed by a kind of mud, not by molten lava.
Bodies found encased in the hardened material were unscorched.
A description of the eruption by Pliny the Younger describes a tree-like column of smoke rising from the volcano, then spreading out like branches—or a mushroom-cloud—which then descended and covered the town.
Elizabeth Denton’s description was startlingly close.

Almost a decade later, Denton returned to the subject of Pompeii.
By now, his son Sherman was in his mid-teens; he had been practising psychometry since he was a child, and was in some ways more sensitive than his mother.
The tests Denton conducted occupy more than fifty pages of his second volume, and they provide a remarkably rich and complex picture of life in Pompeii.

Sherman’s first session—with a piece of plaster from the ‘House of Sallust’—immediately brought one remarkable ‘hit’.
Over a doorway, Sherman ‘saw’ a painting of two winged children drawing a cart with another winged child riding in it.
Denton later discovered an engraving of the painting in a book on Pompeii (which, he insists, neither he nor Sherman saw before the test), and he reproduces it in his text.

When Sherman spoke of wide streets, Denton was dubious; most streets in Pompeii were hardly six feet across.
But he later discovered that the House of Sallust was not in the residential section, but on a square, in an area with wide streets.
Sherman described a Pompeian boat with a prow like a swan’s head and neck.
Denton found engravings from nearby Herculaneum (also engulfed in the eruption) of the
cheniscus,
a birdlike head and neck attached to the prow of Roman vessels.

Sherman also comments: ‘The labouring people seem to hate the rich.
Where there is a number of them together, the rich pass them quickly, and seem to regard them as a man would a snake.’
Denton makes no attempt to verify this statement.
But from a modern book,
Pompeii and Herculaneum
(1960) by Marcel Brion, we learn that the walls of Pompeii contained such graffiti as ‘This city is too rich’ and ‘I propose a share-out of the public wealth among the inhabitants’.
The attitude of the rich must have added fuel to this feeling of social injustice; in the hall of the House of Vedius Siricus there was an inscription,
Salve Lucrum
—‘Hail, Profit!’
It also, comments Brion, meant ‘Welcome to money’, addressed as a welcome to other moneyed people who came to the house.
The Pompeians, it becomes clear, took money-making very seriously indeed.
In her earlier examination of a fragment from Pompeii, Mrs Denton had commented on the difference she sensed between the Pompeians and the ancient Egyptians: that for the Egyptians, religion was inherent in their way of life, while for the Pompeians, it was largely a matter of forms and observances.
But the wealthy had statues of Mercury in their houses to bring luck to their business and ward off evil spirits that might harm it.
‘Hail, profit!’

Another of Sherman’s comments was that women seemed to play a prominent part in the life of Pompeii; Brion remarks that in Pompeii the women took a hand in business; even a rich woman advertised that she had shops to let.

Sherman’s description of a theatrical performance makes it sound more like a circus with clowns and acrobats, and makes no mention of the kind of things a modern reader would expect—comedies by Plautus, Statius and Terence, Greek tragedies and so on.
Denton remarks that his son’s description of acrobats and comics sounds very modern.
But Marcel Brion comments that the favourite form of dramatic entertainment at this time was the
atellanae,
popular farces that took their name from their town of origin, Atella; originally intended to relax the audience after performance of tragedies, they became so popular that they were performed on their own.
Brion says of these performances: ‘They might be compared to music-hall numbers of a rather low level, interspersed with dancing, clowning, obscenities, feats of skill and athletic exhibitions, the whole ending with a procession of nude girls.’
Apart from the nude girls (which Denton would no doubt have censored out) this is a fairly accurate summary of Sherman Denton’s lengthy description of a theatrical performance in Pompeii.

The descriptions of Pompeii are certainly the highlight of Denton’s second volume; but there are other impressive things.
By this time, Denton had become aware of the possibility of mind-reading, although he was inclined to discount it simply because he had noticed that his own expectations failed to influence the ‘visions’ of the psychometrist.
But he devised one interesting experiment to show that the visions could be just as accurate when all possibility of mind-reading had been excluded.
He had made the interesting discovery that the psychometer could look at a map, then close his eyes and experience a sensation of flying through the air until he came to the place he had seen.
This faculty is known as ‘travelling clairvoyance’, and has been the subject of a great deal of modern research (for example, at Stanford University in the mid-1970s where, under laboratory conditions, the psychic Ingo Swann was able to demonstrate his ability to travel mentally to other places and describe accurately what was happening there).
They chose at random the island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden, and Mrs Denton was first asked to describe it.
She stated that it was a rocky island, ‘almost a rock in the sea’, with one coast high and mountainous and the other—the inhabited coast—low.
There seemed to be two types of people.
Those inland, the natives, were poor, and ‘there seems to be a wandering disposition about them’.
Near the coast the people were ‘yellowish’ and engaged more in business.
All this proved (from an encyclopedia article on Socotra) to be remarkably accurate.
The geographical description is precise.
The population consisted of two types—the original inhabitants, Bedouins, who lived inland and who were nomadic, and Arab traders and agriculturalists who lived near the coast.

By comparison, Sherman Denton’s description sounds vague and inaccurate; he described it as a green island without mountains (in fact, the mountains are five thousand feet high), and continued with descriptions of natives who lived a hand-to-mouth existence.
But the fact that Denton includes this relative failure is a testimony to his honesty.

These first two volumes of
The Soul of Things
are both impressive and exciting; with their long descriptions of past ages, they read almost like a novel.
Denton was as convinced as Buchanan that psychometry was a normal human faculty, a ‘telescope into the past’ that could be developed by anyone who was willing to take the trouble.
He gives the impression of being a rather better scientist than Buchanan, more anxious to exclude possible error, and to explain psychometry in terms of scientific theory.
For example, he devotes a chapter to the psychological curiosity that is now known as ‘eidetic imagery’ or photographic memory—the ability some people (especially children) possess to look at some object, then to project an exact image of it onto a blank sheet of paper.
Newton discovered that, during his optical experiments, the image of the sun (seen in a darkened glass) kept returning like a hallucination.
It would vanish when he forgot about it; but he only had to call it to mind to make it appear in front of him.
Denton discovered many other descriptions of the same phenomenon: not just of simple images like the sun, but of whole scenes.
He quotes Professor Stevelly who, after watching bees swarming from hives, continued to have visual hallucinations of swarms of bees for days afterwards.
A doctor named Ferriar described how, in the evening, he could conjure up in detail some scene he had looked at during the day—an old ruin, a fine house, a review of troops; he had only to go into a darkened room to see it as if in a coloured photograph.
The geologist Hugh Miller had a similar ability.
He wrote:

‘There are, I suspect, provinces in the philosophy of mind into which the metaphysicians have not yet entered.
Of that accessible storehouse, in which the memories of past events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal; but of a mysterious cabinet of daguerreotype pictures, of which, though fast locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar, they seem to know nothing.’

More than a century later, Dr Wilder Penfield proved the truth of this observation when, during a brain operation, he touched the patient’s temporal cortex with the electric probe, and the patient suddenly ‘replayed’ precise and lengthy memories of childhood, all as minutely detailed as if they were happening in the present.

It is difficult to see at first what connection Denton saw between these visual hallucinations and psychometry—after all, they seem to have little enough in common.
But it slowly becomes clear that his wife and sister—and later his son—actually
saw
these visions of the past; if the cinema had been invented at the time, he might have compared it to a mental film show.
These experiences of hallucination seemed to offer a clue to this strange faculty of psychometric vision.
Particularly interesting is Newton’s observation that he could make the image of the sun reappear before his eyes by
imagining
it.
What is suggested here is that the image was so vividly imprinted on his brain that it could be ‘projected’ like a film by merely wanting to.
This also seems to explain Stevelly’s visions of the swarming bees and Ferriar’s of old ruins of fine houses.
The philosopher Berdyaev has a passage in which he describes his own hallucinatory vision of a woman called Mintslova—a disciple of Rudolph Steiner—whom he regarded as a pernicious influence:

I was lying in bed in my room half asleep; I could clearly see the room and the corner opposite me where an icon was hanging with a little burning oil lamp before it.
I beheld the outline of Mintslova’s face: its expression was quite horrifying—a face seemingly possessed of all the power of darkness.
I gazed at her intently for a few seconds, and then, by an intense spiritual effort, forced the horrible vision to disappear.
¹

It is significant that Berdyaev was half asleep, so that what might have been merely a dream-image was projected as a hallucination.

The third volume of
The Soul of Things
makes us aware of the drawbacks of this ability.
The frontispiece is a ‘Map of Jupiter’, with a key underneath listing such items as ‘Houses and city, seen 19 March 1870’, ‘Sugar loaf hills, seen 23 March 1870’.
And the longest section in the book is a chapter called ‘Astronomical Examinations’, beginning with ‘A boy’s visit to Venus’, ‘Visit to a comet’, and including accounts of Mars and Jupiter.
Sherman Denton’s observations on Venus begin promisingly with the comment that its mountains are higher than those on earth—which is true.
But he then goes on to describe giant trees shaped like toadstools and full of sweet jelly, and an animal that was half-fish and half-muskrat.
The 1962 Mariner space-probe revealed that the temperature on the surface of Venus is 900°F, hot enough to melt solder, and therefore too hot to support life.
Sherman’s visit to a comet is equally disappointing; he states that it is a planet that has become a kind of fireball.
We are still not sure of where comets originate; but we know that they are of low density, and almost certainly very cold.
Sherman’s visit to the sun revealed that it is made of molten lava which is hardening in places into a crust.
Modern astronomy has shown that the sun is a ball of gas.
A visit to Mars revealed that it was much like earth, but peopled with men with four fingers, wide mouths, yellow hair and blue eyes.
‘It seems warm, like summer weather.’
(In fact, Mars would be very cold indeed, since it is more than 50,000,000 miles further from the sun than earth is.) Mrs Cridge and Mrs Denton also visited Mars, and described its religion, its art and its scientific inventions.
Sherman and Mrs Cridge both described Jupiter, also peopled by blue-eyed blondes who can float in the air, and whose women all have plaits down to their waists.
Modern space probes have revealed that Jupiter is basically a ball of freezing gas with a hot liquid core.

Volume three of
The Soul of Things
is undoubtedly an anticlimax, and no one could be blamed for being inclined to dismiss the whole work as an absurd piece of self-deception.
But before we throw the baby out with the bath water, we might recollect the parallel case of Emanuel Swedenborg.
That remarkable mystic devoted the first fifty-six years of his life to science and engineering; then he began having strange dreams, hallucinations and trances.
In these visionary states, he believed he had visited heaven and hell, and his books contain detailed accounts of the ‘afterworld’, all of which his disciples—who were soon numbered in thousands—accepted as literal truth.
A century before the rise of spiritualism, Swedenborg claimed to be able to converse with spirits of the dead.
When the queen of Sweden asked him to give her greetings to her dead brother, the prince royal of Denmark, Swedenborg said he would.
Soon after, he told her that her brother sent his greetings, and apologized for not answering her last letter.
He would now do so through Swedenborg .
.
.
As Swedenborg delivered the detailed message, the queen turned pale, and said, ‘No one but God knows this secret’.
On another occasion, in 1761, the widow of the Dutch ambassador told Swedenborg that she was having trouble with a silversmith who was demanding payment for a silver tea-service; a few days later, Swedenborg told her he had spoken to her husband, and that he
had
paid for the tea-service; the receipt would be found in a secret compartment in his bureau drawer.
Swedenborg also mentioned some secret correspondence that would be found in the same drawer.
Both the receipt and the correspondence were found where Swedenborg had said.