Afterlife (22 page)

Where sceptics are concerned, he certainly has a point.
Sir John Bland Sutton, a well-known surgeon, remarked: ‘Death is the end of all.
My experience is that all of those who have studied the subject scientifically and deeply have come to the same conclusion.’ Such a statement simply lacks the ring of truth.
There have been many basically sceptical investigators — Hyslop himself was notoriously ‘tough-minded’, and much disliked by fellow members of the SPR because he seemed an incorrigible ‘doubting Thomas’ — but in every single case where a sceptic has persisted in studying the facts, he has ended up more-or-less convinced of the reality of life after death.
I say ‘more or less’ because a few investigators, such as Dr Gardner Murphy and Mrs Louisa Rhine, feel that most of the ‘facts’ can also be explained by what might be called ‘super ESP’ — mind-reading clairvoyance, and so on.
Hyslop himself finally abandoned the ‘super ESP’ hypothesis through an experience that has become known as the ‘red pyjamas case’.
He received a communication from a medium in Ireland to the effect that a ‘spirit’ calling itself William James had asked him to pass on a message asking him if he remembered some red pyjamas.
Now William James, who had died in 1910, had agreed with Hyslop that whichever of them died first should try to communicate with the other.
But the message about red pyjamas meant nothing to Hyslop.
Then suddenly he remembered.
When he and James were young men, they went to Paris together, and discovered that their luggage had not yet arrived.
Hyslop went out to buy some pyjamas, but could only find a bright red pair.
For days James teased Hyslop about his poor taste in pyjamas.
But Hyslop had long forgotten the incident.
As far as he could see, there was no way of explaining the red pyjamas message except on the hypothesis that it was really William James who had passed it on.

Twenty-six years after Hyslop’s death, he was quoted by the psychologist Carl Jung in a letter.
Jung was discussing the question of the identity of ‘spirits’ who communicate through mediums:

Yet it is significant that Jung never made this admission in any of his published work, where he continued to insist that the facts about the paranormal could be explained in terms of the powers of the unconscious mind.
^**

As far as the present investigation is concerned, we shall proceed on Jung’s assumption that the ‘spirit hypothesis’ fits the facts better than any other.
The question of whether it is ultimately true must, for the time being, be left open.

In the autumn of 1863, a woman named Sarah Hall had the interesting experience of seeing her own ghost.
She was sitting at the dining table, with her husband and another couple, when all four of them saw another Mrs Hall standing at the end of the sideboard.
The figure was wearing a spotted dress, quite unlike the one Mrs Hall had on.
Her husband said: ‘Why, it’s Sarah!’, and as they all stared at it, it disappeared.

The case is irritating because it has no sequel.
Mrs Hall was still in good health when she wrote and told Gurney about the case twenty years later, so it was not some ominous portent.
A few years later, Mrs Hall apparently owned a spotted dress like the one her ‘ghost’ was wearing, but that also seems to be neither here nor there.
The only clue that makes any sense is Mrs Hall’s comment that the house they were living in used to be a church.
We have seen that Christian churches were often built on pagan sites, as if the ground itself had some inherent ‘power’ or force that the ancients regarded as sacred.
But that still takes us no nearer the explanation of how four people saw Mrs Hall’s ‘double’.

If the case were unique, we might dismiss it as a prevarication.
But there are hundreds of reports of ‘doubles’ in the literature of psychical research.
No less a person than the poet Goethe recorded seeing his own ‘double’ (or ‘doppelgänger’) riding towards him along a road in Alsace as he was taking leave of his sweetheart.
The figure was wearing a grey and gold suit.
Eight years later, on his way to visit the same girl, he passed the spot and suddenly realised that he was now wearing the grey and gold suit.
And Robert Dale Owen recorded in detail the case of a schoolteacher named Emilie Sagée whose ‘double’ frequently appeared standing beside her in the classroom.
One of her pupils noticed that the ‘real’ Emilie looked pale and ill when her ‘double’ appeared, as if the material for the ‘double’ came from Emilie’s own body.

Cases like this make it very clear that, while we have a few plausible theories about ghosts, apparitions and such things, we lack any
comprehensive
theory that would explain them all.
Even a belief in ‘spirits’ gets us no closer to an explanation of Mrs Hall’s peculiar experience.

Frederick Myers, the man who was most responsible for creating the Society for Psychical Research, was keenly aware of this deficiency.
From the age of twenty-six, when he took the famous ‘starlit walk’ with Henry Sidgwick, until his death thirty-two years later, he never ceased trying to fit all paranormal phenomena into a single pattern.
The result of these efforts appeared two years after his death, in a work called
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
.
The book is a masterpiece, probably the most comprehensive work ever written on the subject of the paranormal.
Unfortunately, it is almost unknown to the general reader, largely on account of its off-putting title, which makes it sound as if it is full of accounts of seance rooms and messages from the dead.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It is an ambitious attempt to review the strange powers of the human mind; the question of ‘life after death’ is raised only towards the end.

Because the book is so little known, and because its conclusions are so important, let us consider it in some detail.
Myers begins by discussing clinical cases of what we would now call ‘multiple personality’.
On 7 September 1824, a German epileptic named Sörgel murdered an old woodcutter in the forest, and chopped off his head and feet with his own axe.
After this, he drank the man’s blood.
Back in town, he talked quite openly about what he had done, explaining that drinking blood is a cure for epilepsy.
Sörgel was already known as a ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ personality who developed criminal tendencies after his fits.
A week later, by the time he appeared in front of the magistrate, he had reverted back to the Jekyll personality, quiet and polite, and without the slightest memory of the murder.
He was found not guilty and sent to a lunatic asylum.

Another case cited by Myers offers at least one interesting clue to this mystery of multiple personality.
Louis Vivé was ten years old when he was sent to a children’s home in 1873, and was of a quiet, obedient disposition.
Four years later, he had a terrifying encounter with a viper, which produced a state of shock.
After this, he began having epileptic fits, and developed hysterical paralysis of the legs.
He was sent to an asylum at Bonneval for observation, and for the next two months worked quietly at tailoring.
Then he had a fit that lasted for two days, with violent convulsions and moods of ecstasy.
When he woke up, the paralysis had vanished, and he was a changed person.
He had no memory of anything that had happened since the viper attack.
And he was violent, dishonest and badly behaved.
The former Louis had been a teetotaller; the new one not only drank, but stole the wine of the other patients.

After serving in the marines, and spending some time in jail for theft, Vivé was sent to the Rochefort asylum, where three doctors became fascinated by his case.
Vivé now suffered from paralysis of the right side of his body, and from a speech defect that made him stutter badly.
In spite of the speech defect he was a non-stop talker, and was inclined to preach atheism and violent revolution.

The 1880s saw a revival of interest in the doctrines of Mesmer, including his belief that the ‘vital powers’ can be moved around the human body by means of magnets.
Vivé’s doctors were interested in a variation of this doctrine — that various metals could get rid of paralysis.
And when they tried stroking Vivé’s upper right arm with steel, it had the astonishing effect of promptly transferring the paralysis to the left side of his body.
Immediately, the old, gentle Louis Vivé came back.
He had no memory of the person he had become after the long epileptic attack.

We have a clue that was unknown to Vivé’s doctors — that the left brain controls the right half of the body, and vice versa.
So when the ‘criminal’ Vivé’s right side was paralysed, his left brain was affected, and the personality that expressed itself was the ‘right-brain Vivé’.
The left brain is the speech hemisphere — hence the stuttering.
A rough outline of Vivé’s problem becomes discernible.
His early childhood had been difficult, with a drunken and violent mother; he became a timid and repressed personality.
The ‘social I’, as we have seen, lives in the left brain.
His right-brain self — the ‘intuitive’ Vivé — had no chance to express its aggressions or frustrations.
The shock of the encounter with the viper caused the total withdrawal of the timid, left-brain self, and left the ‘other Vivé’ free to express itself.
From then on, Vivé turned into a classic case of ‘multiple personality’.

Myer’s account of the case (which gives the impression that he personally interviewed Louis Vivé) ends with an interesting footnote; he mentions that when a magnet was placed on Vivé’s head, he instantly became ‘normal’ again, except that his memory stopped short of the day before the encounter with the viper.
It seems quite clear that ‘magnetism’
did
work, and that modern science may be neglecting an interesting line of research.

Myers goes on to discuss other examples of multiple personality.
There was the celebrated case of a man called Ansel Bourne, who was standing on a street corner in Providence, Rhode Island, when he lost his memory.
The next thing he knew was waking up in a strange room in a strange bed.
It was two months later, and he was in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
During that time, Bourne had gone to Norristown, rented a confectionery shop, and carried on business under the name of A.
J.
Brown.
No one even suspected that he was a case of amnesia.

Even stranger is the case of Clara Fowler, described by the psychiatrist Morton Prince, who called her Christine Beauchamp.
When trying to cure Clara of severe depression, Prince placed her under hypnosis, and a completely new personality emerged, a bright, mischievous child who called herself Sally.
And ‘Sally’ could ‘take over’ Clara when she felt inclined.
She used to enjoy playing tricks, like going for a long walk in the country — ‘Sally’ was as strong as a mule — and then ‘abandoning’ the body and leaving the exhausted Clara to walk home.
On one occasion, ‘Sally’ ‘borrowed’ Clara’s body for weeks, went off to another town and got a job as a waitress, then finally abandoned it and left Clara to make her own way back to Boston.
Like Louis Vivé’s alter-ego, ‘Sally Beauchamp’ stuttered badly.

But the case of Clara Fowler was more complicated than this.
Under hypnosis, a third personality emerged, who was more adult and balanced than either Clara or ‘Sally’.
So the ‘double brain’ explanation that seems to fit the case of Louis Vivé or Ansel Bourne no longer applies here.
In his chapter on hypnosis, Myers seeks a new explanation.
He describes a series of experiments carried out by Edmund Gurney, and later by Mrs Sidgwick, which revealed that most people could be hypnotised to two different ‘depths’ or levels, and that one subject could even be hypnotised through nine different depths.
The subject would be placed under hypnosis and told some ‘fact’ — for example, that a local hotel had just been burnt down.
Then he would be hypnotised more deeply, and told another ‘fact’ — that there had been a railway accident.
Then down to a third ‘depth’, and yet another ‘fact’ — that the Emperor of Germany had been forced to cut short a state visit to Queen Victoria because a relative had died … When subsequently re-hypnotised, the subject would remember each ‘fact’ as he reached the correct level, but would have no memory of any of the others.
Myers inferred that this could be an explanation of
multiple personality — that we all have many layers or levels, and that a shock — like Louis Vivé’s viper — can produce an effect like hypnosis and plunge the patient to another level of personality.
This explanation may or may not be correct, but it shows Myers’ determination to try to find a key to the mysteries of the unconscious mind.

This emerges most clearly in his chapter on genius.
He says: ‘Genius … should be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range … of faculties
in some degree innate in all.’
(My italics.) This is what fascinates Myers; that such powers are not some kind of freak, but probably exist in all of us.
He goes on to cite many stories of extraordinary mental feats.
A five-year-old boy, Benjamin Blyth, was out walking with his father, and asked him what time it was; his father said it was half past seven.
A few minutes later the child said: ‘In that case, I have been alive …’, and named the exact number of seconds since his birth.
When they got home, his father took a sheet of paper and worked it out.
‘You made a mistake — you were wrong by 172,800 seconds.’ ‘No I wasn’t,’ said the child, ‘you forgot the two leap years, 1820 and 1824.’ And Myers also speaks of Professor Truman Henry Safford who, at the age of ten, could perform multiplications in his head when the answer came to thirty-six figures, and the peasant boy Vito Mangiamele, who took half a minute to extract the cube root of 3,796,416.

A modern case can illustrate more clearly what is at issue: the ‘calendar calculating twins’ John and Michael, ‘idiot savants’ who have spent most of their lives in a state mental hospital in America.
They have been described by the psychiatrist Oliver Sacks.
^*
Although the twins are mentally subnormal, with an IQ of only sixty, they can name the day of the week of any date in the past or future forty thousand years.
Asked, let us say, about 6 March 1877, they shout almost instantly: ‘Tuesday.’ And they have no more difficulty about a date long before the Great Pyramid was built.
Yet, oddly enough, the twins have the utmost difficulty with ordinary addition and subtraction, and do not appear to even understand multiplication and division.
The opinion of most scientists who have studied them is that they have some simple formula.
But Dr Sacks reached a quite different conclusion.
He was present one day when a box of matches fell on the floor, and both twins said immediately: ‘A hundred and eleven.’ When Sacks counted the matches, there
were, indeed, a hundred and eleven.
The twins also murmured Thirty-seven’, and when Sacks asked them why, they explained that three thirty-sevens make a hundred and eleven.
He asked them how they knew there were a hundred and eleven.
‘We
saw
it.’ So they had instantaneously counted the matches as they were falling.
And they gave the same answer when Sacks asked how they had worked out that thirty-seven is a third of one hundred and eleven.
It was as if they had seen one hundred and eleven ‘splitting’ into three parts.