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By the same Author L PHILOSOPHY The Garden of the Golden Flower Qate of Dreams NOVELS Lion Rock Away, Come Away BIOGRAPHY A Subjective Autobiography His Country was the World | Ferdinand de Lesseps CHARLES BEATTY 'i; X ■j GEOFFREY CHAPMAN LONDON 1972 4 I; Chesterfield Public Library* I i! Geoffrey Chapman (Publishers) 35 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4SG Geoffrey Chapman (Ireland) Publishers 5-7 Main Street, Blackrock, County Dublin Contents © 1972, Charles Beatty First published 1972 AUTHOR’S NOTE ISBN 0 225 65882 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi A WORD FROM A witness Dennis Wheatley xiii One EXIT DELIA 1 Two THE LEOPARD MAN 18 Three WINGED PHARAOH 34 Four DANCE, PERACLETINl 47 Five NOR IRON BARS 61 Six A CUP OF BRINE 75 Seven THE ANSWERER 93 Eight A PACK OF WOLVES 104 Nine spider’s WEB 115 Ten ALLEZ! 127 Eleven MILORD ABBOT 144 Twelve APHRODITE VIRGO 159 Thirteen DAUGHTER OF ARADIA 175 Fourteen KING CEDAR 185 Fifteen MIDNIGHT FIRES 193 APPENDIX: SOME CHANNELS OF EXPERIENCE 207 [ Printed by A. Wheaton & Co., Exeter I. Phantom upon a phantom road, I left them for the gate of dreams, moon-silence and the outer cold, a solitary lunatic. In the chill emptiness of dawn you too have paused between the restless unreality of men and the still terror of eternity. And now, no more alone, dwell I among the dead. C.B. Trelydan Hall, Welshpool 9 December 1938 AUTHOR’S NOTE because it is more difficult to translate between levels of con sciousness than between languages, experience out of the body is difficult to describe and apt to become garbled in the process. Lacking objective criteria, I can only indicate what I believe to be true: an honest witness with only hazy recollection of what ‘really’ happened. Even so, for reasons apparent in each context, people and places cannot always be correctly named. Sometimes memory of an event is unconsciously distorted in the process of retrieval, and occasionally the need for condensation adds an element of drama. In spite of these and other defects there may be enough truth in my story to make its point. Life is continuous. So are we. C.B. Beaulieu 1971 J ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce copyright material on the following pages: 17, 66, 94, 109-110: from C. G. Jung: Memories, Dreams and Reflections, published by William Collins & Sons Co Ltd. 52-53, 199: from Joan Grant: Life as Carola, by permission of the author. 71, 72: from Sir James Frazer: The Golden Bough, by permis sion of the executors of the estate of the late Sir James Frazer. 73: from Simone Weil: First and Last Notebooks, translated by If Sir Richard Rees and published by Oxford University Press. The Pre-War Notebook was first published in the Cahiers, copyright Librairie Pion 1970. 117-118: reprinted from The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, with permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran; renewal copyright 1951 by Administra tors C.T.A. of the Kahlil Gibran Estate, and Mary G. Gibran. 142, 160-161, 172-173, 190: from William A. Younger: The Singing Vision, published by Hutchinson and Company (Pub lishers) Ltd. 143, 198, 201-202: from the collected poems of W. B. Yeats, I' by permission of M. B. Yeats and Macmillan & Co. 166-167: from C. G. Jung: Psychological Types, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 194: from Joan Grant: Winged Pharaoh, by permission of the author and Methuen & Co Ltd. 205: from Simone Weil: First and Last Notebooks, translated by Sir Richard Rees and published by Oxford University Press. The New York Notebook (from which this extract is taken) was first published in French as La Connaissance sumaturelle, copy right Editions Gallimard 1950. xi * A WORD FROM A WITNESS I AM writing this introduction because I have been a close friend of Charles Beatty for over thirty years. I met Joan Grant at a cocktail party just before her first book, Winged Pharaoh, came out. Having reviewed this remarkable document myself in Current Literature, a journal for the book trade, I sent my copy on to my good friend Howard Spring. So impressed was this great writer that he gave it the whole of the double-page that he wrote every week for the Evening Standard. His review ended with the words, ‘worthy to be the handbook I of a new Order of Chivalry’. Later my wife and I stayed many times at Charles’s lovely old home, Trelydan Hall, near Welshpool, and saw Joan with closed eyes while ‘out of the body’, slowly dictating to Charles the scenes and emotions she had known many centuries past in a different envelope of flesh. Still later we saw a lot of them when they came to live at Beaulieu, as we lived near by at Lymington. Winged Pharaoh came as no revelation to me. From the time I was old enough to think about such matters I had instinctively xiii / I A WORD FROM A WITNESS A WORD FROM A WITNESS recognized the childish absurdity of a teaching that one survived people who were in grave trouble. His cheerfulness in adversity, death but would be judged for all eternity on one’s performance and, at times, poverty, has remained unfailing; his belief, that the during a single lifetime. . • • divine spark which lies dormant in even the most evil human can Either we have an intangible something in us that survives be reanimated, has never been shaken. In my long life I have met death, or we have not. It seems unlikely that any cast-iron proof only one living saint—Charles Beatty. of life after death will ever be forthcoming, but the cumulative evidence for the belief that some portion of our personality docs Dennis Wheatley survive is overwhelming. If one accepts that belief, the only just and logical explanation for what happens to our egos when they leave our bodies is reincarnation. f From time immemorial the vast majority of die people who have inhabited this world have believed in reincarnation. Yet, like all but a very small percentage of them, I have always assumed that this consists in the straightforward transference, after a period of rest, of a person’s ego into a new body. A body chosen for it so that it will have opportunities to pay off debts it has incurred in previous incarnations, learn new lessons, acquire a wider understanding of human problems and become more tolerant, kindly, and unselfish. But, while agreeing that, in the main, my assumption is correct, z Charles Beatty tells us that, for some people, matters are not quite as simple as that. As a disciple of that great thinker Dr Carl Gustav Jung, he has spent many years delving into the mystery of the several planes of consciousness, often going ‘out of the body’ to release unfortunates who, owing to spiritual blindness and the evil they have done, have become trapped in limbo. To do this has needed great courage; and he has not always been successful. But his modest accounts of these spiritual adven tures make fascinating reading, and it can fairly be said that the story of his life is extraordinarily intriguing, because it is utterly different from any other autobiography. Upon Charles’ deductions as to the result of his occult ex periences I am far too ignorant to express an opinion. But to the following I gladly bear witness: He has walked in the footsteps of the Master. He sacrificed his lovely old home at Trelydan and gave all his worldly possessions to help the innumerable lame ducks who came to him and to Joan. Through the years he has had a number of well-paid jobs, but given them up so that he could be free to ‘hold the hands’ of xiv XV I. Hl ii ONE Exit Delia my first recollection of someone close as my skin yet not of this world goes back to my third or fourth year. Hers was only a vague presence, but we used to play games. My favourite was I when she turned me into a horse. Seeing me prancing around the I nursery, Father—who was a Master of Hounds—proudly gave me a pony called Zulu. I hated the beast, but tried not to betray my feelings. For what would he say if he knew I wanted to be a horse, not to ride one? Aged seven, the horse faded out, partly because Zulu gave me a bad fall and was sent away, partly because my other person, whom later I would call Beryl, became tired of playing that particular game. By then she was already longing for the feel of flesh, the company of the incarnate. Probably because they are incomplete, even unwholesome, ghosts do not seem to be able to incarnate on their own, so her only hope was to create an affinity with someone, the younger the i better, before the new character was strong enough to keep her out. Any such affinity must affect vitality, which may be why I nearly died, of peritonitis, in that year. Beryl in those days may 1 « I gate of dreams EXIT DELIA have been a bit of a vampire, taking energy from me to build I was led to believe that schools were much nicer for boys than her peculiar version of a castle in the air. But I do not think she being at home on your own, so that place in North Wales was a intended to kill me, because then she would have had no effective big disappointment. I was shy, a bad mixer, and knew nothing link with the living, which was the thing she most desired. During of the mentality of the other boys with their strange conventions. slow convalescence her presence became familiar. I could even In all my life I have never been quite so lonely as I was in that understand her feelings to some extent, but I never saw her. first, endless, term. There was only one escape—into fantasy. And Instead, it sometimes seemed as though she entered into me, an that was made much easier when by chance I was put in an ideal embarrassing sensation, like being somebody else. It had been position for getting out of the body to meet my childhood play entirely acceptable to grown-ups when I played at being a horse. mate. Although it involves a considerable flash forward, this If I seemed to be playing at being a girl they would take a very development will make better sense if I describe briefly who she different view. So, in order to keep nty secret, I developed a really was and where she came from. streak of toughness and a vile temper. Also I was very lonely, Beyond personality everyone has a permanent identity which because she seemed to come between me and other children. At is very, very old. From time to time it incarnates a new person, about the same time I began to have nightmares, of which the so that most of us have several hundred predecessors, often a worst were geometrical. A dot, a pin-point infinitely far ahead, century or more apart. Only under exceptional stress is the in would accelerate and expand, rushing upon me, filling the uni terval much shorter, and that is what happened to the person verse. There were also other things of terror. Tigers lurked in the incarnate before me. She was a Victorian lady who lived in St shadows of my room. Spiders of astonishing size hid under my John’s Wood, London, and for present purposes I will call her bed. I was denied a light. All nonsense, the grown-ups said, Delia. The ghost who used to play with me was not the same I particularly Humpy, mj’ nanny. But I knew better. Those things woman, but a development or projection of her. That, I hope, 1 were real, even though it was a different kind of reality. will become clearer in due course. For the time being it is neces Not that all out of the body experience was grim or embarrass sary only to summarise what I now know of Delia as a background 1 ing. When they told me my father was dead I soon knew better for the rest of my story. because he was -with me on the day he was buried. Everyone After taking another dose of laudanum, which she kept in except cook and I went to the military funeral. We lived at Ather- the bedside cupboard along with a bottle of brandy and some stone then, the very middle of England, 1917. In confused misery smelling-salts, Delia died suddenly, probably in June 1882, con I gave cook the slip and took refuge under the big acacia by the fident that would be the end of her. It was not. Though not green gates. Father’s presence was as definite as if he could touch earthbound, she entered a kind of limbo in retreat from circum me, but, as usual, there was no visual impression. We had been stances which she had failed to direct, control, or enjoy. Almost separated since he joined his unit at the beginning of the war so a year before her undignified exit, Harriet, the only child, died I did not remember much about him. It was different after he while Mama was dancing. As a dedicated social climber, nothing, died, but of course I could not tell anyone. The burden of my except divorce, could have been worse for Delia’s aspirations than secret world became heavier on that account. I spent much time gossip about how she had deserted the child when that afternoon up trees, defying anyone to get me down. I made mud pies, the the doctor had diagnosed diphtheria. No doubt the story did get size of a cricket ball, with a pebble in the middle, then baked them about and contributed to her depression. Her death may have been hard on top of the greenhouse boiler. They were capital missiles. accidental, brought on by an effort to get out of bed and lock One day I even defeated the governess, chased her into the toy the door. On the other hand she was deeply depressed, and ‘Little cupboard and turned the key. After that there was nothing to be Harry’ was haunting her to distraction. done but send me to boarding school, the further away the better. Though by no means a reigning beauty, Delia usually contrived 3 2 gate of dreams EXIT DELIA to be the centre of attraction, and took a great deal of trouble to to lock the door’. They both knew what that meant. Father had achieve that effect. She had an enigmatic, mask-like expression, come to believe that the only cure for Mama’s miseries lay in a cryptic smile which men found challenging and women mocked another baby, and Delia was determined not to accommodate him. as a mere act. She had to conceal from everyone, even herself, Pregnancy would ruin her act. It would keep her offstage for that marriage was a failure—which meant her whole life. The months. It would spoil the fashionable figure of which she was so honeymoon, at Brighton’s new hotel, had been the kind of contest vain, despite the discomfort entailed. So when in her drugged for which she had been totally unprepared, being nothing if not stupor she heard Big Harry’s heavy tread on the stairs—he had ladylike. Since then she hardly noticed Big Harry, except when probably been drinking again, as well he might—she remembered he signed a cheque. the voice of the dead, called on her considerable will-power, and Mental frustration was added to physical. Her days contracted collapsed halfway between the bed and the door. He found her to a repetitive act of chatelaine, hostess and mother. Her nights becomingly crumpled on the carpet. in consequence were filled with wishful dreams which soon became Only gradually did she realize that her down-here body was no organized fantasy. Outwardly sweet, inwardty bitter, she came to longer at home, for her dream-house was as familiar, seemed as resent anything and anyone who failed to conform to what she solid, as the moderate establishment where she honestly believed expected; as though her home were a stage and other people only she had unselfishly cherished people who neither appreciated nor the supporting cast. She even became jealous of Harriet as a understood her. Up-there was nothing to thwart her, and nobody potential rival, and at the same time resented as personal insult came to call, least of all Big Harry. For which reason, what had the child’s obstinate refusal to play her ‘proper’ role. A rebel from been contrived as a refuge gradually became more like a prison birth, Little Harry soon saw through Mama’s act and foolishly as she realized she was alone, not from choice but because, when let her know it. Soon, except when shown off to company in the she tried to lock others into her routine, she had somehow locked drawing-room, the child was left almost entirely in the charge of herself out. Perhaps based on some mansion seen in The Queen the governess. Beyond the nursery wing most of the house was or Country Life, that dream-house was rather too grand, with forbidden territory, and her only visitors wrere little girls, horribly portico, terrace, park and pinery. The supporting cast were only neat, docile as dolls. Even on her twelfth birthday there was staff. There was no part for a man. In proportion as she tried and Nursery Tea. failed to alter the act, paradise became purgatory. Regardless of On the night of the Ball of the Season, when a membrane the feelings of this leading lady, the show must go on—playing closed Harriet’s airway in what must have been a singularly fast to an empty theatre. As she could no longer pretend to the role moving infection, the rift between mother and daughter was of autocrat, she became more like Harriet, conforming only be already so wide and deep that a normal lifetime would hardly have cause she had to. Unlike Little Harry, at least Delia did so as healed it. Instead, it would probably have become worse as the though this was, still, her heart’s desire. Nearly thirty years later, girl grew up to be a more effective rebel. Only a complete change by the time I was bom in 1910,1 think Delia must already have of circumstances—death—could have stopped them from chaining turned into the fifteen-year-old I came to know as Beryl, ‘Queen of spells’; rather a dumb blonde, at least to begin with (which was !l themselves together with the iron links of aversion. Such links when I first went to school), but right for the part. I endure almost as long as do the gold links of affection. So it was not only real or imagined gossip about Little Harry’s premature departure that brought on her mother’s suicidal de So it was in my eighth year, about halfway through the first pression. The night she took the overdose she kept on thinking terrible term, that I began to realize something of what happens she heard the child’s insistent voice, ‘You won’t wake up in time to people out of this world. One night I was left on guard while 4 5