Afterlife (34 page)

Among Hindus and Buddhists, reincarnation is an article of religious faith.
The ancient Celts believed in it; so did the Greeks.
Various fathers of the Church — like St Jerome and Origen — regarded the doctrine with sympathy.
But it was condemned outright by the Second Council of Constantinople — convened by the Emperor Justinian — and from then on became a Christian heresy.
In a pamphlet on reincarnation published by the Catholic Truth Society, Father J.
H.
Crehan, SJ, sums up: ‘… for a Catholic, it should be clear that our faith has no room for theories of reincarnation’.
(It may or may not be significant that Ian Wilson is a Catholic convert.)

But it would probably be fair to say that the main reason reincarnation has made so little headway in the West in our own time is that most people feel it to be a licence for fantasy.
The force of the objection can be seen in a case I have discussed at length elsewhere: that of Dr Arthur Guirdham.
^*
Dr Guirdham, who was senior consultant in psychiatry for the Bath medical area, had always been fascinated by the thirteenth-century heretical sect called the Cathars — ‘pure ones’.
They believed that God is not all-powerful, that evil is an independent force, perhaps as strong as good, and that the realm of matter belongs to the devil.
The Church persecuted them, and in 1244 most of them were massacred at Montségur, near Toulouse.
In Toulouse and other places in the area, Guirdham had powerful feelings of déjà vu.
He had also suffered most of his adult life from a nightmare in which he was lying down when he was approached by a tall man; he often woke up screaming.

In 1962, Guirdham saw a patient whom he calls Mrs Smith, who had often had a similar nightmare.
Both their nightmares ceased after she became his patient.
What she did not tell him immediately was that she had recognised him as a person who had recurred in her dreams for many years.
These dreams — about her existence as a girl in thirteenth-century France — had started after a series of peculiar attacks of unconsciousness.
And in her dreams, she saw a young Cathar priest called Roger de Grisolles, who had come to her parents’ cottage one night during a snowstorm, and with whom she had a love affair.
When her parents threw her out, she went to live with Roger in his house.
Her dream-memories of this house became increasingly detailed.
The idyll came to an end with a murder.
She was not sure who was murdered, but she knew that someone called Pierre de Mazerolles was involved.
Roger died in prison, and she herself was later burned alive at Montségur.
She recognised Guirdham as ‘Roger’.

It took ‘Mrs Smith’ a year to work up the courage to tell Guirdham about her dreams.
He was thunderstruck.
‘Mrs Smith’ knew absolutely nothing about Catharism.
But he knew that the persecution and massacre of the Cathars had started after a man called Pierre de Mazerolles had organised the murder of inquisitors sent to Toulouse by the pope.
Guirdham began to investigate the details ‘Mrs Smith’ remembered about the Cathars.
Some of the details sounded unlikely: for example, that Cathar priests wore green or blue.
She made a note of this in 1944; in 1965 the French scholar Jean Duvernoy discovered that some Cathar priests
did
dress in green or blue.
She had dreamed of sugar sawed from a loaf and used as a medicinal remedy; in 1969, the scholar Rene Nelli discovered that sugar
was
imported from the Arab countries in ‘loaves’ and was regarded as a universal remedy.
‘Mrs Smith’ ’s detailed description of Cathar rituals and beliefs were again confirmed by the scholars.

So far, the story sounds plausible enough to anyone who has an open mind about reincarnation.
‘Mrs Smith’ ’s discovery that Dr Guirdham had been her lover in a previous existence sounds like a typical example of Freud’s ‘transference phenomenon’ (when the patient falls in love with the doctor), and the coincidence of the two coming together again in the twentieth century is a little hard to swallow.
But the confirmation of the details about Catharism by scholars seems to clinch the story.
If Hudson’s ‘subjective mind’ was really responsible
for all these phenomena, then its powers must be even wider than Hudson thought.

I wrote about Guirdham in my book
The Occult
, and went to stay with him at his home near Bath.
This certainly dissipated my suspicion that he might have invented Mrs Smith, for although I did not meet her, it was quite plain that Guirdham is a perfectly normal, honest, well-balanced individual, not a crank, and his wife Mary, who confirmed the details of his book, seemed the epitome of commonsense.
He showed me his correspondence with various scholars, and it became clear that he had left an enormous amount of evidence out of his book, simply for fear of confusing the reader.

But what worried me, even at that stage, were the later developments of his Cathar involvement.
He showed me the manuscript of a book called
We Are One Another
, which begins with his meeting with a woman he calls Clare Mills, an attractive, bustling open-air girl, who asked him one day if the words Raymond and Albigensian meant anything to him — they kept ‘repeating in her head’.
Albigenses was another name for Cathars, and Raymond was the name of the counts of Toulouse.
All this was before he had written his book about ‘Mrs Smith’,
The Cathars and Reincarnation
, so she had no way of knowing about his interest in the subject.
‘Clare Mills’ had also had dreams of being burned, and the names involved made it clear that she was also dreaming about the Cathar persecution.
She dreamed of being made to walk half naked towards a huge bonfire, and of being struck on the back by a burning torch — she had a strange birthmark there which looked like a series of hard blisters.
Guirdham concluded that she was another Cathar with whom he had been acquainted in a previous existence.
But this was not all.
The mother of a dead girl showed Guirdham a notebook her daughter had kept at the age of seven; it was full of Cathar names and sketches … Guirdham came to believe that the mother and daughter had both been Cathars.
Other acquaintances became involved in the strange story, so that there was no alternative to the belief that Guirdham was studying a case of ‘group reincarnation’ (a doctrine preached by ‘Myers’ to Geraldine Cummins, we may recall).

More was to come.
In
The Lake and the Castle
, Guirdham explains how he became convinced that this same group of people had been involved together in an earlier epoch, as members of the reincarnationist Celtic church; they had also
suffered martyrdom … And, as if feeling that a reader who can swallow a gnat can swallow a camel, Guirdham goes on to tell how this same group had also been involved together in Roman Britain in the fourth century and in the Napoleonic era.

I have been a friend of Arthur Guirdham ever since those days in the early 1970s, and have often stayed in his home.
He is the godfather of my daughter.
So I believe I know him fairly well.
I have taken ‘Clare Mills’ out to dinner (with the Guirdhams) and she confirmed everything he said.
I have no reason to believe he is a Svengali who can persuade his patients to cooperate in his fantasies about previous lives, or that his books are inventions written to gain notoriety.
Clearly, he believes every word in them.
Moreover, he is far too intelligent to allow his fantasy to run away with him.
Ian Wilson points out that if Guirdham had stopped after recounting the ‘Mrs Smith’ case, and perhaps written a psychiatric study of ‘Mrs Smith’, his claims would probably have met with serious attention.
He knows as well as anyone that this ‘group reincarnation’, and all the previous lives as Celts and Romans (not to mention Guirdham’s own life as an ancient Greek of the thirteenth century BC, described in
The Island
), make his story totally unacceptable to most readers.
Presumably he would protest, like Sir William Crookes: ‘I didn’t say it was possible — I said it was true.’

Father Crehan’s view of the case is that Guirdham, ‘Mrs Smith’, ‘Clare Mills’ and the rest were telepathic, and that they somehow ‘pooled’ their fantasies and the results of their reading.
Guirdham’s account of his relation with ‘Mrs Smith’ makes this quite impossible — she had been making detailed notes about the Cathars eighteen years before she met him.
So we are left with only two possible solutions: either that Guirdham is a self-deceiver on a heroic scale, or that the concept of ‘group reincarnation’ is basically true.

Fortunately, it is of no immediate consequence to this argument whether it is true or not.
The picture that emerges from case histories of reincarnation seems quite clear and consistent, and it fits the general pattern of arguments for ‘survival’ without contradiction.
We have noted, for example, that Mary Roff knew about her parents’ attempt to communicate with her through a medium, and was able to quote the words she had written at the seance.
Mediumship actually seems to be a form
of temporary ‘possession’.
Mary and Lurancy Vennum apparently came to an agreement about the possession of Lurancy Vennum’s body for a few months.
After it was all over, Mary still ‘dropped in’ periodically.

The picture that emerges is of ‘disembodied’ entities who can, under the right circumstances, enter or leave a human body exactly as a driver can enter or leave a car.
In the case of Jasbir Lal Jat, it looks as if Sobha Ram found the abandoned car while the engine was still warm, and slipped into the driving seat.
The idea seems an affront to commonsense, but the evidence is there to support it.

On the whole, the ‘facts’, as they emerge from various cases, seem to support Steiner’s view of reincarnation as an evolutionary experience, as set forth in the eight volumes of
Karmic Relationships
.
There is only one major point of contradiction; Steiner seemed to feel that the process of reincarnation takes anything from a hundred to a thousand years.
But Steiner’s own views evolved over the years; there are some major differences between
Theosophy
(1904) and
An Outline of Occult Science
six years later.
Steiner never claimed to be infallible; like all mystics, he tried to describe his ‘glimpses’ as he received them.

Steiner’s importance lies in the impressive consistency of his teachings, and on his insistence that it is a mistake to try to take ‘spiritualism’ too literally.
‘The Spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ He never ceased to emphasise that ‘the spirit world is woven out of the substance of which human thought consists.’ What he seems to be saying is that man is somehow quite mistaken to assume that he is ‘imprisoned’ in a material world, and in allowing this to induce a certain basic passivity towards his own life.
He loves to emphasise the immense latent creative powers of the human mind.
So although his attitude towards Spiritualism often seems hostile, he is fundamentally reaffirming what Myers says in
Human Personality
— and what Catherine Crowe had said before him: that human beings possess enormous hidden powers they never even suspect.
The point is underlined by a passage that expresses the essence of Steiner’s thought:

In fact, these words are not by Rudolf Steiner; they are from the ‘script’ written by ‘Myers’, and published by Geraldine Cummins as
The Road to Immortality
.
It emphasises Steiner’s repeated assertion that it is a mistake to take the ‘facts’ too literally.
To do so is to leave out of account a ‘fifth dimension’ that confers meaning on them.

The sufferings of the First World War had the effect of making thousands of converts to spiritualism — and, paradoxically, of convincing more people than ever before that it was nonsense.
The man who must bear a large part of the responsibility for these contrary effects was Sir Oliver Lodge.

In November 1916, Lodge’s
Raymond, or Life and Death
was published, and caused an immediate sensation — although not quite of the kind Lodge had hoped for.
Ever since 1909, when Lodge had produced a book called
The Survival of Man —
admitting his belief in life after death — scientists had felt that he had ‘let down the side’.
But at least in that book he had discussed the experimental evidence and maintained a rigorous scientific detachment.
But to devote a four-hundred-page book to arguing that his son had come back from the dead looked like emotional self-indulgence.
Raymond
made an easy target for hostile reviewers — particularly a passage in which Raymond explained that the ‘other side’ is not all that different from our earth.
Most people, he said, wore white robes, although many would have preferred to wear a suit.
They could also eat if they wanted to, or even have a cigar or a whisky and soda.
‘There are laboratories over here and they manufacture all sorts of things in them.’ It sounded too silly for words.
One psychologist called Charles Mercier was quick off the mark with a thoroughly hostile book called
Spiritualism and Sir Oliver Lodge
.
But most scientists felt simply that Lodge had become a little cracked, and that the kindest thing would be to ignore him.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle encountered the same hostility in 1918 when he confessed his conversion to Spiritualism in a book called
The New Revelation
.
During the war, the Doyles had looked after an ailing young woman called Lily Loder-Symonds, who amused herself in her sickbed by practising automatic writing.
The Doyles were convinced that it was simply her subconscious mind speaking.
Then one day there came a message: ‘It is terrible.
Terrible.
And will have a great influence on the war.’ On that day, a German submarine sank the passenger liner
Lusitania
and over a thousand passengers were drowned, many of them American.
The sinking prepared
the way for America’s entry into the war.
From then on, the Doyles took the automatic writing more seriously.
In April 1915, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law Malcolm Leckie died at Mons.
One day, as Doyle was sitting by Lily Loder-Symonds’s bedside, watching her produce automatic writing, he was startled to recognise Malcolm Leckie’s handwriting.
Doyle began to ask questions, and ‘Leckie’ replied.
Doyle asked him a particularly difficult question — about a private conversation they had had before the war.
The reply specified precisely what he and Leckie had discussed.
Yet Doyle had mentioned it to no one else — not even his wife.
From then on, he had no doubt of the reality of life after death.

His conversion caused even more embarrassment than that of Sir Oliver Lodge.
Distinguished friends, such as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and King George V, felt that he was displaying a childish credulity.
Many people asked mockingly: ‘What would Sherlock Holmes have said?’ In fact, when the final volume of Sherlock Holmes stories —
The Case Book —
appeared in 1927, it received an unprecedentedly cold reception; the middle-class public felt that its idol had revealed feet of clay.
The last novel about the great Professor Challenger —
The Land of Mist —
in which Challenger is converted to Spiritualism — was received with widespread derision.
Doyle’s biographer states that Doyle’s support of Spiritualism prevented him from receiving a peerage.
^*

One of the saddest stories of anti-spiritualist prejudice concerns an architect called Frederick Bligh Bond.
In 1907, the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey were bought by the nation, and Bligh Bond was appointed to take charge of the excavations.
Bond was a devotee of Catherine Crowe’s
Night Side of Nature
, and decided that his task would be greatly simplified if he could contact some of the long-dead monks of the abbey and ask them where to dig.
A friend named John Allen Bartlett was able to produce automatic writing.
In November 1907, Bond and Bartlett sat on either side of a table, with Bartlett holding a pencil and Bond’s hand resting very lightly on top of it.
Bond asked questions, and Bartlett’s hand wrote out the answers.
When Bond asked where a missing chapel had been situated, Bartlett’s hand drew a plan of the abbey with the chapel on it.
The ‘communicator’ called himself ‘Gulielmus Monachus’ — William the Monk.
And when Bond’s team dug in the position
indicated, they found the chapel.
His employers — the Church of England — were delighted.
They continued to be delighted as Bond made find after find, including another chapel.
Bond took care to tell no one that most of his information came from William the Monk and various other communicators who called themselves ‘the Watchers’.
Finally, in 1917, he decided that his success had justified itself, and told the whole story in a book called
Gate of Remembrance
.
The Church was horrified, and Bond found himself out of a job.
He was not even allowed within the precincts of the abbey, and the abbey book shop was ordered not to sell his guide book to Glastonbury.

There is an ironical footnote to this story.
In 1936, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, decided that it was time for the Church of England to make up its mind about Spiritualism.
So he appointed a commission to look into it, and to decide whether the doctrines of Spiritualism were consistent with Christianity.
The commission took three years to report.
Their conclusion was that not only was Spiritualism not opposed to Christianity — after all, Christians believe in a life after death — but that the evidence for ‘survival’ was extremely powerful.
The archbishop was apparently so embarrassed by these conclusions that he dropped the report into a drawer, where it lay forgotten for more than thirty years; it was finally published in the mid-1970s.

We have already observed this phenomenon: the feeling that there is something morbid and degenerate about a preoccupation with life after death.
It is a perfectly valid reaction.
Healthy people feel naturally that we should turn our attention to the fascinating problems of life and the physical universe rather than to death.
Yet we can also see that such criticism is totally irrelevant where Lodge and Doyle were concerned.
Doyle would have been an idiot not to be impressed when the automatic writing told him something that was known to no other living person.
Lodge would have been a very poor scientist if he had failed to recognise that the Raymond group photograph
^*
constitued
strong prima facie
evidence that his son had survived death.
It is important to remember that Lodge and Doyle had been members of the Society for Psychical Research for more than two decades before they finally became convinced of ‘survival’; the same applied to James Hyslop and Sir William Barrett.
Crookes himself only came to accept ‘survival’ in 1917,
after a seance at which he became convinced that his dead wife was speaking to him.
These men were convinced by evidence, not by wishful thinking.

This in itself tells us why spiritualism failed to convince the masses.
If it took twenty years to overcome the doubts of men who were interested in the problem, it would obviously take centuries to convince those who weren’t.

It must also be admitted that Raymond Lodge’s remarks about cigars and whisky and soda — not to mention white robes — probably did more harm to spiritualism than the exposure of a dozen fake mediums.
And, in various forms, the problem has continued to be a bugbear ever since.
There is a slight element of absurdity in the whole notion of life after death — a touch of the preposterous that was exploited in H.
G.
Wells’s ‘Inexperienced Ghost’ and Noel Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
.
And most of the books about life after death fail to avoid this touch of absurdity.
In 1928, the Rev.
Charles Drayton Thomas produced his book
Life Beyond Death With Evidence
, an impressive account of his ‘contacts’ with his deceased father and sister through mediums.
But when his father begins to describe the world he lives in, there is an effect of bathos:

After all this, it is difficult to feel the appropriate emotion when the father and sister describe an interview with Jesus, who, predictably, radiates ‘a great majesty, together with great sweetness and humility’.

In the 1930s, a medium named Jane Sherwood began to practise automatic writing, and received lengthy Communications from a certain ‘G.
F.
Scott’ describing the life beyond; these were published as
The Psychic Bridge
and
The Country Beyond
.
‘Scott’ later revealed his true identity — as T.
E.
Lawrence — and dictated another book about his own personal experiences of life after death.
A spirit called Mitchell, who had taken upon himself the role of Lawrence’s mentor, tells Lawrence that he has lived a monk-like existence, and that he ought
to go and experiment with all the experiences he has missed on earth.
For example, women.
‘Go on a proper spree.’ Lawrence is taken on a kind of brothel tour.
‘These girls are not prostitutes … they are women who have missed sexual experiences during their earth life and need to work out this lack before they can progress …’ And Lawrence, who on earth had shown homosexual tendencies and a taste for being flogged, bursts into lyrical prose: ‘We two have wandered happily in an enchanted land exploring the delights of an intimate companionship crowned by the magic of union …’
^*

If it were obvious that Jane Sherwood and Drayton Thomas had been deceived — either by their own unconscious minds or by spirits with a penchant for leg-pulling — these passages would not be such an embarrassment.
But Jane Sherwood’s
The Country Beyond
has been described by Raynor C.
Johnson — a leading authority on mysticism — as ‘one of the best attempts to convey to us valid impressions of the conditions we shall all have to meet some day when we have finished with our physical bodies’.
And Drayton Thomas’s book is one of the most impressive arguments for ‘survival’ ever published; his ‘father’ was able to accurately forecast items he would find in the newspapers the following day — items which (as enquiry revealed) had not even been set up in print at the time.

It seems that these awkward paradoxes are inherent in the nature of spiritualism.
Students of the paranormal find them no more off-putting than poetry lovers find Wordsworth’s occasional descents into bathos.
They are simply another aspect of ‘James’s Law’.
But for many potential converts between the wars, they formed an insuperable barrier to belief.
Laboratories and brothels in the sky could simply not be taken seriously.

There were several other causes for the decline of spiritualism in the 1920s and 1930s.
The days of the great mediums — such as Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Leonore Piper — seemed to be at an end.
There were still many remarkable mediums — Mrs Leonard, the Schneider brothers, Helen Duncan — but their achievements were not so spectacular.
In the cynical and disillusioned frame of mind engendered by the Great War, exposures and denunciations received far more publicity than successful experiments with mediums.
The magician Harry Houdini made a career from attacking spiritualism
in the 1920s; his book
A Magician Among the Spirits
denounced mediums as ‘human vultures’.
When investigating the American medium Margery Crandon, there is evidence that Houdini cheated by hiding a ruler in a specially designed cabinet, so she could be accused of using it to ring a bell.
(Houdini’s assistant later admitted that he had hidden the ruler in the cabinet on Houdini’s orders, and added: ‘There’s one thing you’ve got to remember about Mr ‘Oudini — for ‘im the truth was bloody well what he wanted it to be.’) In fact, even the serious investigators often seemed to be on the side of the sceptics.
After a series of experiments with the Austrian medium Rudi Schneider, Harry Price denounced him in a Sunday newspaper instead of simply making an unfavourable report to the Society for Psychical Research.
(It became clear later that his motive was pique because Schneider had agreed to work with some rival investigators.) And when Helen Duncan was charged with cheating and fined ten pounds, Price wrote a book attacking her.
In due course, Price himself would be denounced for trickery in his most famous investigation — the haunting of Borley Rectory …