Beyond The Occult: Twenty Years' Research into the Paranormal

410 Pages·2013·1.95 MB·English

by  Colin Wilson

COLIN WILSON

Colin Wilson is one of the most prolific, versatile and popular writers at work
today. He was born in Leicester in 1931, and left school at sixteen. After he had
spent years working in a wool warehouse, a laboratory, a plastics factory and a
coffee bar his first book The Outsider was published in 1956. It received
outstanding critical acclaim and was an immediate bestseller.

Since then he has written many books on philosophy, the occult, crime and

sexual deviance, plus a host of successful novels which have won him an
international reputation. His work has been translated into Spanish, French,
Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian,
Finnish and Hebrew.

By the same author

NON-FICTION

The Outsider cycle
The Outsider
Religion and the Rebel
The Age of Defeat
The Strength to Dream
Origins of the Sexual Impulse
Beyond the Outsider
Introduction to the New Existentialism

Books on the Occult and Paranormal
The Occult
Mysteries
Poltergeist
Psychic Detectives
Strange Powers
The Geller Phenomenon
A Dictionary of Possibilities (with John Grant)
Other Non-Fiction
An Encyclopedia of Murder (with Pat Pitman) An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder (with Donald Seaman) A
Casebook of Murder
Order of Assassins
Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs
Bernard Shaw — A Reassessment
New Pathways in Psychology
The Quest for Wilhelm Reich
The War Against Sleep — The Philosophy of Gurdjieff
The Lord of the Underworld — A Study of Jung
The Craft of the Novel
The Strange Genius of David Lindsay
Frankenstein’s Castle
Access to Inner Worlds
Eagle and Earwig (Essays on books and writers)
Poetry and Mysticism
A Book of Booze
Starseekers
The Brandy of the Damned (Essays on Music) Anti-Sartre
The Misfits

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Voyage to a Beginning

FICTION

The ‘Sorme Trilogy’:
Ritual in the Dark
The Man without a Shadow (retitled The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) The God of the Labyrinth

Other Fiction:
Adrift in Soho
The World of Violence
Necessary Doubt
The Glass Cage
The Mind Parasites
The Killer
The Philosopher’s Stone
The Black Room
The Space Vampires
The Schoolgirl Murder Case
Rasputin: A Novel
Spider World: The Tower
Spider World: The Delta

CONTENTS

Analytical Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction to the New Edition

Part One: Hidden Powers

Introduction
1 Mediums and Mystics
2 The Other Self
3 Down the Rabbit Hole
4 The Information Universe
5 Intrusions?
6 Memories of the Future
7 Minds Without Bodies?

Part Two: Powers of Good and Evil

1 The Search for Evidence
2 The Truth About Magic
3 The World of Spirits
4 Visions
5 Completing the Picture
6 Towards the Unknown Region
Bibliography

Analytical Table of Contents Part One: Hidden Powers

Introduction

I am asked to write a book about ‘the occult’. The moments of ‘mystical
freedom’. Muz Murray’s experience in Cyprus. My own experience in Alsace.
Derek Gibson sees inside the trees. Jacob Boehme’s vision of ‘the signature of
all things’. Yuliya Vorobyeva develops X-ray vision. Jim Corbett and his ‘jungle
sensitiveness’. Why man has lost his ‘occult faculties’. Calculating prodigies.
How to gain control of our ‘hidden powers’. My original scepticism about ‘the
occult’. Impressive consistency of reports. ‘Reading’ through the skin of the
stomach. ‘Community of sensation’ under hypnosis. Buchanan and the discovery
of psychometry. Peter Hurkos and precognition. My attempts to create a
‘Newtonian theory’ of the occult. My increasing doubts.

1 Mediums and Mystics
Lawrence LeShan studies Eileen Garrett. She ‘psychometrizes’ his daughter’s
hair. The case of the missing doctor. The case of Marmontel’s memoirs. Eileen
Garrett on mediumship: ‘A kind of turning inward’. Warner Allen’s ‘timeless
moment’ at the Queen’s Hall. Is time an illusion? Poets as ‘natural psychics’. A.
L. Rowse is almost decapitated. The ‘superconscious attic’ of the mind. The
mystical experience. Wendy Rose-Neill lies on her lawn. Claire Myers Owen
and the ‘golden light’. Bucke’s flash of ‘cosmic consciousness’. ‘A brilliant shaft
of light from out of the sky.’ Vision of God in a cow-barn. Moyra Caldecott and
the ‘Timeless Reality’. Ouspensky’s vision of ‘connectedness’. Steppenwolf’s
mystical insight. Henri Bergson is converted from materialism to mysticism. The
inability of thought to grasp experience. Two ways of grasping reality. The left
and right brain. Peak experiences. Anne Bancroft’s mystical experience. The
branch of rhododendron. Douglas Harding loses his head. Is it desirable to have
no head? William James’s ‘Suggestion about Mysticism’. Robert Graves and
‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. Another mathematical prodigy.

2 The Other Self
My dream of the amusement park. Thomson Jay Hudson watches a hypnotic

demonstration. Return of the dead philosophers. Charcot and hypnosis. Man’s
‘two minds’ — the subjective and the objective. The power of the subjective
mind: Henry Clay speaks for two hours. The artist who saw a picture before he
painted it. Puységur and ‘magnetism’. Councillor Wesermann makes telepathic
contact with a friend. The Verity Case. Hudson practises ‘distant healing’. His
success. Doctor Albert Mason performs a miracle. Why Shakespeare was not
Bacon. Learning to use the right brain. The Laurel and Hardy theory of
consciousness. The ‘robot’. Negative feedback. The power of the Spectre.
Graham Greene and the revolver in the corner cupboard. The gloominess of the
great philosophers. Schopenhauer complains about life. Dylan Thomas’s ‘foul
mousehole’. Thomas Mann’s ‘Disillusionment’. Schizophrenic patients ‘stop
seeing things’. Artsybashev’s Breaking Point. The Master Ikkyu writes,
‘Attention’. Hesse’s Journey to the East. My experience of being caught in a
snowstorm. Raising consciousness by an act of will. The journey to
Northampton. Rilke’s solution: ‘To praise in spite of.’

3 Down the Rabbit Hole Arnold Toynbee’s vision of the battle of Pharsalus.
Frank Smythe’s vision of the massacre near Glen Glomach. Toynbee’s ‘time-
slip’ in Crete. His experience in the ruins of the temple at Ephesus. His vision at
Monemvasía. The destruction of Mistrà. The nature of Faculty X. Doctor
Johnson and the Happy Valley. Toynbee’s vision of ‘all history’. Proust and the
madeleine dipped in tea. Other experiences of Faculty X described in Proust.
‘The past was made to encroach upon the present.’ G. K. Chesterton and ‘Absurd
good news’. Helen Keller learns to spell ‘water’. Why Faculty X is so difficult to
achieve. Sartre and ‘nausea’. Camus and ‘the Absurd’. ‘Ordinary consciousness
is a form of nausea.’ Roquentin is ‘sickened’ by a tree. Maupassant and sexual
failure. The ‘erase key’. The demon Screwtape heads off a conversion. Physical,
emotional and intellectual values. ‘Upside-downness’. Sartre in the French
Resistance. The parable of the emperor and the grand vizier. The mechanism of
‘upside-downness’. Arthur Koestler joins the Communist Party. Koestler’s
mystical experience in a Spanish jail. Einstein on science and mysticism.
‘Holiday consciousness’.

4 The Information Universe Mr Chase sees a cottage that no longer exists.
‘Time-slips’. The English ladies at Versailles. Jane O’Neill and Fotheringhay
Church. Falling ‘down the rabbit hole’. J. B. Priestley on Faculty X. Ivan
Sanderson’s ‘time-slip’ in Haiti. Can ‘time-slips’ be explained scientifically.
Lethbridge and the ‘tape-recording’ theory. The Long Gallery at Hampton Court.
Buchanan and ‘psychic bloodhounds’. Denton experiments with geological

fragments. Hudson attacks Denton’s results. ‘The memory of the subjective mind
seems to be practically limitless.’ Sulla’s villa. Pascal Forthuny psychometrizes a
letter by a murderer. Pagenstecher’s experiments with Maria de Zierold. Walter
Franklin Prince and the ‘sea bean’. Maria ‘shares’ Pagenstecher’s consciousness.
Rilke’s experience at Castle Duino. How to make time stand still. Bentov’s
Stalking the Wild Pendulum. Stephen Jenkins sees a phantom army in Cornwall.
Joan Forman sees ghosts at Haddon Hall. ‘Tape-recording’ of the Battle of
Edgehill. Stephen Jenkins on ley lines. Doctor Robin Baker’s experiments with
earth magnetism. Is dowsing a superstition? Harvalik’s experiments with
electrical fields. ‘The human body is a magnetic detector.’ Harvalik detects
brainwaves. Lethbridge and the long pendulum. Tom and Mina Lethbridge throw
stones. Edgar Devaux traces a missing housewife. Edison invents the
gramophone record. Robert Leftwich and the underground water main. My wife
investigates Bodmin gaol. Doctor Maximilien Langsner solves a murder case. Is
reality ‘out there’? ‘The holo-gramatic universe.’ Karl Pribram and David Bohm.
Could the world be a hologram? Bohm’s theory of reality as ‘implicate order’.
Wing Commander Goddard flies over Drem airfield and sees into the future.
Eileen Garrett on clairvoyance.

5 Intrusions?
J. B. Priestley’s dream of being shot. Visions seen on the edge of sleep. Wilson
Van Dusen on hypnagogic images. Woman who murdered a useless husband.
Her powers of prediction. The ‘Feminine Aspect of the Divine’ writes in Greek.
Doctor Houston’s patient talks to Socrates. An illiterate servant girl speaks
Greek, Latin and Hebrew. ‘Sleep learning’. Mavromatis and hypnagogic images.
Could they be telepathy? Upton Sinclair experiments with ‘mental radio’. Guy
Playfair learns to induce hypnagogic states. Playfair transmits mental pictures to
an audience. The powers of Marcel Vogel. The girl who woke up in bed with a
male colleague. Rudolf Steiner and ‘inner space’. Steiner and Faculty X. Blake
on imagination. The Akashic Records. Denton’s son travels to Mars. Cosmic
memory. Swedenborg and the ‘spirit world’. The Dutch Ambassador’s wife.
Jung falls ‘down the rabbit hole’. Active imagination. ‘Thoughts are like animals
in a forest.’ ‘Some intelligent entity … .’ Nelson Palmer solves the murder of Joy
Aken. Jung’s patient commits suicide. Ghosts dictate Seven Sermons to the
Dead. Jung and the haunted cottage. Jung and the I Ching. Jung on
synchronicity. Pauli’s power to cause accidents. My own experiences of
synchronicity. Jacques Vallee and the cult of Melchizedec. Rebecca West in the
London Library. Camille Flammarion and M. Fortgibu. Helmut Schmidt’s
experiments in psychokinesis. ‘As above, so below.’ Can the human mind ‘make

things happen’?

6 Memories of the Future Wilbur Wright’s best friend foresees his own death.
Wilbur Wright dreams winners. Earl Attlee dreams the winner of the Grand
National. Lord Kilbracken wins £450. Peter Fairley develops second sight.
Wilbur Wright’s dreams of the future: the red airliner. J. W. Dunne and An
Experiment with Time. Dunne’s theory of ‘serial time’. Lethbridge’s dreams of
the future. Dunne’s ‘real time’. J. B. Priestley’s theories of time. Ouspensky’s
‘three-dimensional time’. Arthur Osborne’s experiences of precognition. Can the
future be altered? Air Marshal Goddard and ‘the night my number came up’. Is
the future predetermined? G. K. Chesterton on predetermination. Premonitions
about the Titanic. Amazing ‘coincidences’ of identical twins. The ‘Jim twins’.
Glimpses of future romance: Arthur Osborne, J. B. Priestley. Parallel time?
Priestley’s archives. Woman foresees her son’s death. ‘A dog is going to bark a
long way off.’ The ‘super-computer’ theory. Priestley’s ‘three selves’. Wilbur
Wright’s theory of time. Robert Morris is killed by a salute. Wilbur Wright’s
‘Fixed Time Field’. The paradoxes of quantum physics. Can a photon interfere
with itself? Erratic behaviour of electrons. Einstein exclaims, ‘God does not play
dice.’ Einstein proves to be mistaken. Bell’s inequality theorem. Identical twins
again. The Allans go to Wotton Hatch. Their ‘time-slip’ experience. Do human
beings possess freedom?

7 Minds Without Bodies?
Mrs McAlpine’s vision of a suicide. ‘Paralysis’. Robert Cracknell’s experience
of ‘paralysis’. Sylvan Muldoon and Projection of the Astral Body. ‘Out-of-the-
body experience’. Miss Z reads a five-digit number in the next room. Robert
Monroe floats out of his body. Goethe sees his doppelgänger. W. B. Yeats and
accidental astral projection. Cases from Phantasms of the Living. Susie Bauer’s
experience of astral projection. The girl and the ‘magician’. Cases cited by
Camille Flammarion. Arthur Ellison’s experience of ‘astral projection’. Ellison’s
experiments in the laboratory. Jack Seale is bitten by a twelve-foot black mamba.
He recovers eight days after ‘dying’. Van Eeden and ‘lucid dreams’. The ‘dream
body’. Albert Heim falls from a ledge. Caresse Crosby is almost drowned. Lyall
Watson’s ‘out-of-the-body experience’. ‘Seeing with the eyes of the spirit.’
Alexis Didier and ‘astral travel’. Didier solves a crime. Mesmer ‘influences’ a
man through a brick wall. Doctor Gibert hypnotizes a woman from a distance. Is
it possible to hypnotize someone against his will? The case of Timotheus
Castellan. The case of Franz Walter. Hypnosis in animals. Lady Abercrombie’s
ability to influence other minds. ‘In betweenness’. Robert Monroe visits Andrija

Puharich. Divided consciousness. Rosalind Heywood splits into ‘White Me’ and
‘Pink Me’. Sir Auckland Geddes leaves his body. Do we have ‘a whole
collection of consciousnesses’?

Part Two: Powers of Good and Evil 1 The Search for Evidence

My own involvement in the ‘search for evidence’. Screwtape on how to keep
human beings stupid. The inability to believe in the unfamiliar when the familiar
is at hand. Rimbaud on becoming a visionary. Holidays fill us with courage. The
Outsider problem. Can civilization survive without religion? Abraham Maslow
and peak experiences. Yeats and the ‘partial mind’. Multiple personality: the
case of Clara Fowler. The three faces of Eve. Are multiple personalities
doppelgängers? The Doris Fischer case. My panic attacks. ‘Discouragement’.
The problem of self-division. The case of Billy Milligan. Max Freedom Long
and The Secret Science Behind Miracles. The Huna theory of the ‘three selves’.
Doctor Brigham and the ‘death curse’. Doctor Leapsley’s case of multiple
personality. Could multiple personality be ‘spirit possession’? Does the soul
exist apart from the body? The case of Shanti Devi. The case of Jasbir Lal Jat.
Case of Imad. The case of Mary Roff and Lurancy Vennum. William James’s
theory of multiple personality. The case of Ansel Bourne. The beginning of
spiritualism. The Hydesville knockings. Why Hudson did not believe in
spiritualism. Nandor Fodor and the poltergeist. The case of Esther Cox. The
Rosenheim case. The Pontefract poltergeist. Guy Playfair tells me that
poltergeists are spirits. My experiences in Pontefract. The story of the Black
Monk.

2 The Truth About Magic The life of Allan Kardec. Kardec questions the spirits.
The success of The Spirits’ Book. Introduction to spiritism. The spirit healers of
Brazil. Arigo, surgeon of the rusty knife. Playfair investigates poltergeists in
Brazil. Black magic centres. David St Clair is bewitched. The girl who was
driven to suicide by a poltergeist. The story of Marcia and the statue of Yemanja.
Why the ‘paranormal’ is always unbelievable. My reassessment of witchcraft.
The North Berwick witches. Witchcraft in Africa. Was the Rosenheim
poltergeist the spirit of a murdered girl? The case of the bewitched housewife.
Montague Summers and his views on witchcraft. The Shaman Ramon Medina.
Steiner and the ages of civilization. Margaret Murray and The Witch Cult in
Western Europe. Stan Gooch on the paranormal. Martyn Pryer is attacked by an
‘invisible entity’. Stan Gooch is seduced by a succubus. The case of Ruth.
Gooch’s ‘hypnosis’ theory of apparitions. Guy Playfair and the case of the

Enfield poltergeist.

3 The World of Spirits The case that convinced Jung of life after death. The case
of Nils Jacobsen. Wilbur Wright sees a ghost. The ghost that shook hands. John
Cowper Powys appears to Theodore Dreiser. Are ghosts mental television
pictures? The case of the murdered Filipino nurse. The Eric Tombe case. Spirit
‘possession’ and multiple personality. The nuns of Loudun. Walter Franklin
Prince’s case of Phyllis Latimer. How James Hyslop came to believe in spirit
possession: the case of Frederic Thompson. The cases of Doctor Titus Bull. The
case of the ‘possessed’ Arab youth. Bill Slater fights off possession. Wilson Van
Dusen and Emanuel Swedenborg. How Van Dusen learned to talk to ‘spirits’.
Philip K. Dick is possessed by a benevolent entity. Tibetan spirit possession.
Adam Crabtree and the case of Anna Ecklund. Crabtree’s case of Sarah
Worthington. The case of the girl possessed by her father. Possession by family
spirits. The girl possessed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The case of Marius.
Arthur Guirdham on obsession. Ralph Allison and the case of Janette. The case
of Carrie Hornsby. The case of Babs. The case of Elise and Shannon. Was
‘Dennis’ a spirit? Allison’s categories of spirit possession. Beyond rationalism.

4 Visions
Eileen Garrett and visionary consciousness. Albert Tucker–an unwilling psychic.
The woman who sat on his legs. The man in the tweed overcoat. Rosalind
Heywood’s psychic experiences. ‘The Singing’. Non-human presences. Eileen
Garrett’s career as a psychic. Death of her children. ‘Uvani’. Her increasing
dislike of spiritualism. Work in experimental psychical research. An experiment
in astral projection. Failure with Zena cards. The haunting of Ash Manor.
Paranormal powers among primitive people. The ‘telephone’ system of the
Montagnais Indians. Doug Boyd and Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder at
Leavenworth Penitentiary. Donald Wilson’s story of Hadad. Was Hadad a
hypnotist? Daskalos on hypnosis and the Indian rope trick. Daskalos and the
Nazi spirits. Daskalos on ‘elementals’. Daskalos takes on the karma of his son-
in-law. How Markides was convinced. The story of the vampire. An epidemic of
black magic. The demon in the bottle. Daskalos and Skylab. Daskalos on
concentration. Communication with Nature. Daskalos and Steiner. Daskalos on
reincarnation. The three planes of existence. The ‘borderland’ between two
worlds.

5 Completing the Picture Does it matter whether there is a ‘psychic world’?
More about mystical experience. Daly King’s experience on a railway platform.

Compton Mackenzie on a street corner. The leakage of energy. ‘To be free is
nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ Freedom and the peak experience. Barbara
Tucker’s experience listening to Beethoven. Albert Tucker and the Museum of
Modern Art. What prevents us from experiencing mystical awareness? Franklin
Merrell-Wolff’s mystical experience. ‘The great Tragedy — the failure of man to
realize his own Divinity.’ Beethoven on the power of music. Focusing the ‘me’.
Sex and the peak experience. Daskalos on the two personalities. The problem of
‘upside-downness’. The concept of ‘completing’. Development of the
‘completing’ faculty. Kierkegaard: ‘Take me to see the director.’ The mystic and
‘hidden powers’. John Heron and ‘astral projection’. ‘Protective entities’? Anita
Gregory on ‘survival’. Lodge and Conan Doyle. T. S. Eliot on Steiner.

6 Towards the Unknown Region The weak anthropic principle. The strong
anthropic principle: the universe had to bring life into existence. Fred Hoyle and
the ‘superintendent’. John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle. The
single photon experiment. Is the universe created by observers? The final
anthropic principle: life will never die out. Did life come from ‘outside’? The
vitalism of Bergson and Shaw. Human evolution. What the mystics say about the
nature of the universe. The mystical experience more real than ordinary
consciousness. R. H. Ward’s experience under dental gas. The near-death
experience. The ‘connectedness’ of everything. Ouspensky’s vision of a flower.
The seven levels of consciousness. What are we doing in this ‘wooden world’?
The problem of the ‘robot’. Non-robotic consciousness. ‘The spirit that negates.’
Margaret Lane’s experience of schizophrenia. The purpose of language. The
problem of ‘doubt’. The billiard balls. What is imagination? The evolution of
human creativity. The ‘Outsider’ problem. Why Shakespeare thought life ‘a tale
told by an idiot’. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. Grasping the mechanisms
of the peak experience. ‘Psychic powers’ are evidence of man’s evolutionary
potential.

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

As usual, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the Society for Psychical
Research (particularly its librarian Nick Clark-Lowes), the College of Psychic
Studies, and the London Library. Many friends have also provided me with
information, pointed out cases I was unaware of, and recounted personal
experiences. These include Muz Murray, Nona Coxhead, John Kennedy Melling,
Lyall Watson, Lawrence LeShan, Andrija Puharich, Guy Lyon Playfair, Adam
Crabtree, William Arkle, Anne Bancroft, Christopher Bird, Douglas Harding,
David Peat, Bill Corliss, Bob Cracknell, J. Finley Hurley, Brian Inglis, Mina
Lethbridge, Stanley Krippner, Scott Rogo, Peter Russell, John Heron, David St
Clair, Ian Kimber, Joan Forman and Joe Gaute. Wilbur Wright’s kindness in
allowing me to quote from his unpublished typescript on the I Ching was a major
stimulus in the writing of this book. My friend Howard Dossor introduced me to
Albert and Barbara Tucker, whose contribution also proved to be of immense
importance. I wish to thank Sir Stephen Runciman for information that enabled
me to correct Toynbee’s account of his Mistra experience. Finally, I am deeply
grateful to Jim Cochrane for endless editorial suggestions and for his incredible
patience.

C.W.

Introduction to the New Edition

This is my most important non-fiction book.

It was first published in 1988, and unites two main currents in my thinking:

the ‘existentialist’ ideas developed in The Outsider, and the ideas that developed
from my study of ‘the occult’.

Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was

approached by an old friend who had been the editor of many of my early books
— among them, The Space Vampires and A Criminal History of Mankind. He
was now working for another publisher and wanted to commission another
‘occult’ book from me. I was anxious to oblige, but had no desire to write
another book about ‘the occult’. Finally, I allowed myself to be persuaded. In
retrospect, I have never been so satisfied with any decision I have ever made.

Thirty years earlier, in 1956, my first book The Outsider had appeared, and

brought me an overnight notoriety that I found astonishing and exhausting. Since
the ideas of The Outsider play such an important part in Beyond the Occult, I
must begin by trying to explain them.

Ever since childhood, I had been baffled by a strange phenomenon: how we

can want something badly, and then feel bored almost as soon as we get it. I had
noticed it particularly at Christmas time. For months before Christmas Day, I
would look forward to owning some long-coveted toy; yet a few hours after
receiving it, I was already beginning to ‘take it for granted’, and even to find it
slightly disappointing. I noticed the same thing about school holidays — how
eagerly I would look forward to them during the school term, and how easily I
became bored with them. I glimpsed the solution to this problem when I was still
a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. One day, at the beginning of the six-week-long
August holiday, I went to a church bazaar, and bought for a few pence some
volumes of an encyclopedia called Practical Knowledge for All. It contained
‘courses’ on every imaginable subject, from accountancy, aeronautics,
astronomy, biology, botany and chemistry, to philosophy and zoology. I had been
fascinated by astronomy and chemistry since the age of ten, and now I conceived