Supernatural (2 page)

CSICOP was embarrassed but unrepentant; they obviously felt that, in spite of their misdeeds, they were right to take an uncompromising stand against the ‘black tide of occultism’ (Freud’s phrase).
Since then, CSICOP has expanded, and now has branches all over the world.

My own attitude to the dispute is obviously influenced by the fact that I am an interested party.
But when I recently read large parts of Gardner’s
The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher,
I think my reaction had little to do with its sideswipes at my father.
It was a feeling of sadness that a mind as brilliant as Gardner’s (and I still reread his
Fads and Fallacies
with pleasure) should remain so relentlessly
negative.
There is a passage in Shaw’s
Man and Superman
where the president of the brigands insists on reading aloud verses of sentimental poetry about a girl who jilted him.
The hero slaps him on the shoulder and says: ‘Put them in the fire, president.
You are sacrificing your career to a monomania.’
The president replies sadly: ‘I know it.’
Mr Gardner does not know it.
He is like a man who wants to tell you his grievances at length, unaware that you do not find them as fascinating as he does.

What seems so odd is that a committee for the
investigation
of claims of the paranormal does so little actual investigating.
It seems to prefer appeals to ‘reason’ that are actually restatements of its basic prejudice—that paranormal phenomena do not and cannot exist.
It seems that no one in this organisation of scientists can recognise the purely logical objection to the ‘debunking’ method, the objection that William James stated in a single sentence: ‘If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.’
In other words, it would not make the slightest difference if 99% of claims of the paranormal were exploded, if just 1% stood up to the most rigorous investigation.

This book is full of flocks of white crows.
But since my father has omitted it, perhaps I can offer my own favourite example—the odd story of Frederick Bligh Bond and the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey.

In 1907 the Church of England bought Glastonbury Abbey—which had been destroyed by Henry VIII—for £36,000, and chose Bond, who was an architect, to excavate the ruins.
What the Church did not know was that Bond was keenly interested in Spiritualism and telepathy.

There was one minor problem—there was no money to organise a full-scale dig.
So Bond decided to try a short cut.
He asked a psychic friend, John Allen Bartlett, to try ‘automatic writing’.
On the afternoon of November 7, 1907, Bartlett and Bond sat facing one another, Bartlett holding a pencil and Bond resting his hand gently on it.
Bond asked: ‘Can you tell us anything about Glastonbury?’, and the pencil wrote: ‘All knowledge is eternal and open to mental sympathy.
I was not in sympathy with the monks—I cannot find a monk yet.’
This, it seemed, must be Bartlett’s ‘guide’.
Bond suggested that he knew a few living monks who might form a sympathetic link.
Soon after, the pencil traced an outline that they recognised as the abbey, but with a long rectangle —which they did not recognise—stuck on its eastern end.
The sketch was signed ‘Gulielmus Monachus’—William the Monk.
And when Bond asked for more details, he obliged with a more precise sketch of the rectangle—which was obviously a chapel—and added two smaller rectangles—probably towers—to the north.
Another monk who called himself Johannes Bryant the Lapidator (stonemason) added more details.
Other monks, including the Abbot Bere, Ambrosius the Cellarer and Peter Lightfoot the Clockmaker provided more information in Latin and Old English.

By the time the money was finally available to start excavations—in 1908—Bond had accumulated remarkably detailed information about the abbey from his ghostly informants.
In May 1909 the workmen began to dig trenches along the lines indicated by William the Monk.
Bond’s rival Caroe came to look, and must have been mystified by their apparently random arrangement.
A few days later, Bond proved he knew exactly what he was doing when the digging revealed an immense and unsuspected wall running north and south for 31 feet—the east chapel.
Digging at the other end revealed two towers.
From then on, discovery followed discovery.
The monks told Bond of a door in the east wall leading into the street; this sounded unlikely, because east doorways are rare it proved to be exactly where they said it was.
Bond was slightly sceptical when they told him that the chapel was 90 feet long—that seemed too big; but it proved to be 87 feet, and the wall and plinth added the extra three feet.
They even told him that he would find the remains of azure-coloured windows, although most of the stained glass of that period was white and gold; but the azure glass was duly found.
When a skeleton was uncovered, with its damaged skull between its legs, the monks explained that it was one Radulphus Cancellarius, Radulphus the Treasurer, who had slain in fair fight an earl called Eawulf of Edgarley.
No one had ever heard of an earldom in Edgarley (a nearby village), but ancient records unearthed a nobleman called Eanwulf of Somerton, very close to Edgarley.
.
.

After nine years of non-stop success, Bond decided that it would now be safe to tell the true story of the ‘Company of Avalon’ (as the monks called themselves).
In 1918, he did so in a book called
The Gate of Remembrance.
The effect was instantaneous and disastrous.
Budgets were cut; Bond was obstructed by red tape, and in 1922 was dismissed.
He lived on, a lonely and embittered man, for another quarter of a century.
While the abbey became a tourist attraction that brought the Church a satisfactory return for its investment, Bond’s book was not even sold in the abbey bookshop.

Oddly enough, Bond himself did not believe that his information came from dead monks; he thought it probably originated in the ‘racial unconscious’.
That made no difference; the Church of England was not only opposed to Spiritualism, but to anything that sounded ‘supernatural’.
Fourteen years after Bond’s dismissal, Archbishop Cosmo Lang recognised the absurdity of this position, and appointed a committee to look into the claims of Spiritualism.
The committee sat for three years, and finally concluded that the claims of Spiritualism were probably true, and that, in any case, there is nothing in the idea of communication with the dead that contradicts Christian doctrine.
Embarrassed by this report, the Church decided to drop it into a drawer, where it remained for another forty years, until its publication in 1979.

The problem remains: why is it that CSICOP and the Church of England can both take up the same uncompromising position on the paranormal?
On one level, the answer is obvious.
Coping with this complex material world requires a down-to-earth attitude, and the most successful copers will be the down-to-earth materialists.
We all want to be successful copers, therefore we are all inclined to be impatient with anyone who seems to live in a world of ideals and abstractions.
We all agree that ideals and abstractions are important for the progress of humanity; but we would like to keep them at bay until they have proved their worth.
Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft remarks: ‘That is what is wrong with the world at present.
It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions.
What’s the result?
In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankrupcy every year.’

In 1962, Thomas S.
Kuhn’s book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
set out to investigate this reluctance to scrap old prejudices.
He points out that when scientists have accepted a theory as satisfactory, they are deeply unwilling to admit that there might be anything wrong with it.
They ignore small contradictions, but get furious if the contradictory facts grow larger.
They are unaware that there is anything wrong about this reaction; they feel that it is the natural attitude of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities.
New ‘paradigms’ are always seen as time-wasting absurdities.

All this is as natural as the urge to self-preservation; in fact, it
is
a part of the urge to self-preservation.
William James made the same point in an essay called ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’.
Cart-horses used to be blinkered to stop them from shying in the traffic; human beings need blinkers to keep them relaxed and sane.
Kuhn tells a story of an experiment using playing cards, in which some of the cards were deliberate ‘freaks’—black hearts and red spades.
Subjects were asked to call out the suits as the cards were shown to them.
When the ‘freak’ card was shown only for a moment, nobody noticed anything wrong.
But if the exposure was slightly longer, they became puzzled and upset; they knew there was something wrong, but didn’t know what it was.
Some suffered ‘acute personal distress’.
When they fathomed what was wrong, the distress was replaced by relief.
But a few failed to spot the deliberate mistake, and suffered an increasing build-up of anxiety.
According to Kuhn, the demand to introduce new factors into our belief systems causes the same distress and anxiety—and encounters the same resistance.

What we are talking about, of course, is preconceptions.
What is a preconception?
It is a kind of mental map that enables you to find your way around, and saves you a great deal of trouble and anxiety—and no anxiety is worse than the anxiety of not knowing where you are and where you are going.
Once we have gone to the trouble of acquiring a map, we are naturally anxious not to have to alter it.
Small changes are not too difficult to accept.
But large changes produce a sensation like the ground quaking under your feet.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow described an experiment that takes this argument a stage further.
The subjects this time were baby pigs.
The most timid pigs wanted to stay close to their mother in the sty.
More enterprising ones explored the sty, and, if the door was left open, went outside.
If the door was then closed, they squealed pitifully until let in.
Next time the door was left open, they hesitated about venturing out.
Then curiosity overcame them, and they decided to take the risk.
These ‘explorers’ were, in fact, the most dominant and healthy among the piglets.

I shall not press the comparison too far, since the members of CSICOP may be offended at being compared to non-dominant piglets.
Besides, some of the most obstructive conservatives in the history of science have been highly dominant.
I simply want to plead my point that CSICOP is not furthering the progress of science by shouting abuse at scientists who are engaged in paranormal research and demanding that they be driven out of the workshop of science (which means suspending their grants).
By trying to repress research into the paranormal they are striking at the very essence of science.
And in telling the rest of us to stop thinking about the frontiers of science and leave it to the professionals (i.e themselves), they are ignoring the fact that anyone who applies his intelligence to the solution of a problem is, by definition, a scientist.
And that includes all the readers of this book.

I am not trying to argue that we should drop all standards, and give serious consideration to every crank theory.
But when I look at the number of fairly well-authenticated white crows in the field of paranormal research—telepathy, dowsing, psychometry, precognition—the attitude of CSICOP seems akin to Nelson clapping his telescope to his blind eye and declaring that he could see nothing.

In a chapter of
The New Age
entitled ‘PK (Psycho-Krap)’, Martin Gardner remarks that ‘most professional parapsychologists will be embarrassed by .
.
.
the scribblings of such irresponsible journalists of the occult as Colin Wilson, Lyall Watson and D.
Scott Rogo’.
Whether my father’s work on the paranormal amounts to embarrassing scribbling I leave to the reader to decide; you are undoubtedly less biased than I am.

Contents
Foreword by Damon Wilson

Preface

1 The Rebirth of Magic

Publication of
The Morning of the Magicians.
The ‘Magical Boom’ of the ’60s.
Ouspensky’s fascination with the paranormal.
The success of
The Outsider
and the subsequent attacks.
I flee to Cornwall.
My conviction man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough.
I write
The Occult.
Osbert Sitwell visits a palmist.
Charles Dickens dreams the future.
Wordsworth’s mystical experience.
Richard Church flies through the air.
The girl who floated off the table.
Saint Joseph of Copertino.
Richard Church wears his first pair of glasses.
The Robot.
Ouspensky and the Peter and Paul fortress.
Maslow’s peak experiences, Doppelgangers—the ability to be in two places at the same time.
W.B.
Yeats ‘projects’ his astral body.
John Cowper Powys ‘appears’ to Theodore Dreiser.
Emilie Sagée and her Doppelganger.
S.H.
Beard ‘appears’ to Miss Verity.
Human beings possess the ability to be in two places at the same time.
The Elizabethans and their lack of imagination.
Samuel Richardson invents the modern novel.
The importance of
Pamela.
The ecstasies of the romantics.
Richard Church’s piano tuner plays Beethoven.
Hoffman and his tom-cat.
‘Every man wants to be a balloon.’
Powys’s
Wolf Solent.
‘Mythologising.’
‘A certain trick of turning inwards.’
‘Romanticism in a nutshell’—Jean Paul’s
Titan.

2 The Powers of the Hidden Self

Mesmer and the invisible energies of nature.
Illness is due to ‘energy blockage’.
His miraculous cures.
‘Animal magnetism’.
He cures Baron Haresky.
His failure with Maria Paradies.
He flees to Paris.
Initial successes.
Benjamin Franklin signs a denunciation.
Mesmer flees again.
Wilhelm Reich and ‘Orgone energy’.
The vital aura.
The Marquis de Puységur discovers hypnosis.
Victor Race reads Puységur’s mind under hypnosis.
Lavoisier declares that meteorites cannot exist.
Charcot rediscovers hypnotism.
Freud learns from his discovery.
Does hypnosis involve the will of the hypnotist?
The story of the wicked magician Thimotheus.
The Heidelberg case—a woman is hypnotised into becoming a sex slave.
The case of the Notting Hill hypnotists.
Doctor who raped his patient under hypnosis.
Robert Temple on hypnosis.
J.B.
Priestley makes a woman wink at him.
Wolf Messing hypnotises a bank clerk into handing over a fortune.
Janet’s case of Leonie.
Thomson Jay Hudson and ‘man’s two selves’.
The subjective mind and the objective mind.
Maeterlinck and the ‘unknown guest’.
The Borodino case.
Man’s two brains.
Völgyesi on animal hypnosis.
The ‘will-beam’.