Strange Powers (11 page)

Now if that was all there was to it, I would have no difficulty about placing Mrs Beattie. I would say that she was one of my 'outsiders', driven by deeper urges than most people, and therefore feeling rather out of place in our ordinary, working society. That in spite of this, in spite of a lack of formal education, she had gradually taught herself to think for herself, and achieved some degree of insight into the problem of the evolution of spiritual consciousness.'

But her writing made it clear that it was more complicated than that. After some study, it seemed to me there were three distinct aspects to Mrs Beattie. To begin with, there was the straight religious aspect: the preoccupation with what most religious people would call salvation, and which she is inclined to call evolution. Next, there was the occultist strain, which might be reminiscent of the work of Emanuel Swedenborg:

'I went out of my body one night, in the usual way, but instead of determining my destination. I was called instead; I found that I was on a high plateau, up in a mountainous country; it was very beautiful. There were a group of people, all dressed in white. One of these was my teacher, and he came to me, and said that this night, they were going to show me some scenes from the history of the world. I sat down among them, and then picture after picture came before me, and I sat and watched as I saw the world as it used to be. They told me I was looking at scenes in the race memory.'

And this was closely connected to another aspect: pre-vision or prophecy. Some of these sound more like Nostradamus than Swedenborg: 'The coast of France will change overnight. Paris will fall to rocket bombardment.' 'One man shall govern the world, centuries ahead; far, too far ahead for us to see.' 'A rain of meteors on the earth; I think it is a periodic cycle.' She also predicts that Rome will become a heap of ashes (this may be connected to another prophecy to the effect that the Roman Catholic Church—and all others—will fail), and that the last Pope will be called Peter. She says that there is now a child in Asia, about ten years old, who will govern all the east. 'A more evil man has never been born.' New York will be shaken by a great earthquake. 'This will be caused by the rising of the east coast out of the water; this will cause a tidal wave, and Ireland will be covered by water.' (Edgar Cayce, the American healer and prophet, made similar predictions about the east coast of America.) The Chinese will conquer Europe as far as Scandinavia and most of the populations of Italy and Austria will be wiped out by aerial weapons. Another entry reads: 'May 1969: A new planet will be discovered at the end of 1970—there may be another one later on. Nov. 197x: This was verified on TV last week.' A later entry clarifies this: '3 Jan. 73: Outer planet, Poseidon, confirmed as belonging to our system. Theory of explosion within our system confirmed, as theory of our scientists to explain odd orbit of Poseidon and last two planets.'

From my point of view, the 'religious' parts of her writing were the least interesting. 'Each man must follow his own path to God, and there is no one way. Only his own personal way—and this Christ will teach him when he opens his mind and heart to him.' True, no doubt, but it could have been written by anybody.

Altogether more interesting was the description of direct experience scattered among the pages. This, for example:

'I, too, was once the same; I did not believe anything but the evidence of my own senses. Yet something pulled at my heart, and I was not happy. I longed to believe in something or someone; I also wanted to know why the universe was, why men were, and what for, and why we were born, and died, and where did we go when we died? ... There was a reason, I knew there must be. No one would go to the trouble of creating a universe for no reason. So I tried to reach this Person by talking to Him. I spoke in my own way, being essentially a simple and direct person ... I told this Person what was troubling me, I said I wanted to know, and was willing to learn, and I would work hard to understand, if He would tell me. He said: "First, you must be tried... "He told me to meet Him every day at the same hour. This I did most faithfully, and little by little, he taught me and trained me, until I reached the point where I cannot learn more until I pass over into the soul world.' She adds that
'He'
speaks into the mind, like a silent whisper, which has the effect of filling her with joy.

In another place, she describes how she was taught astral projection. 'I was to rest flat upon either a bed, divan or floor, supported by a pillow—if necessary covered by a quilt. Then to begin recollection—this was in the early days. Later I relaxed through habit and began meditation immediately: first step: concentration upon mind, relax the body; it becomes still and heavy. Second step: the mind slowly begins to become quiet, the breathing slows. Concentration into the direct center of conscious mind—it stills and smoothes out. Concentration has forgotten body, and is entirely closed into the center of mind. The mind stills, and becomes smooth as a still pond, then stops. This is the point where one looks into a silence, or darkness... yet it is not darkness, but a light so intense as to blind one, and one sees darkness. There one is poised and utterly still, intense concentration, and listening intensely. And one waits and waits and waits. Sometimes there is nothing but an answering warmth. Sometimes a voice speaks and one
sees
exactly what is said. If one is needed for a lesson, or some other reason, this is the point where I leave the body. First there is a short blank, and then I am fully conscious beside my body. At first the second body was nude, but I was taught to will it clothed. Occasionally, I would pass other souls who were unconscious, and at times beginners who were not clothed, but answering a summons—one can always tell.'

Well, all this was fairly plain, and what I now needed was to talk further with Mrs Beattie to clarify and enlarge. I met her off the train at St Austell on a Friday evening. On the journey home, she talked about her son John, his wife and children, and various other practical matters; she seemed to have no inclination to talk about her writing. But she confirmed that much of it was 'automatic': that she felt a sudden impulse to sit down and begin to write; her hand twitched, and as soon as she seized a pen, it began writing.

Back home, she met Joy and my three children. The youngest, then less than a year old, wasn't much interested in strangers, but the other two—aged six and eleven—took to her immediately. My six-year-old son Damon seemed to accept her as a kind of extra grandmother, and lost no time in climbing on her and demanding stories. Obviously, as far as the children were concerned, her 'vibrations' were good. Sally, who had overheard me telling Joy about Mrs Beattie's feats of astral projection, immediately began asking her questions about it. Mrs Beattie answered factually, without evasion or embarrassment. I got the feeling that Sally thought it was all a bit weird, but not 'scary'. As the daughter of a writer, she gets used to meeting all kinds of people.

There is not much to tell about that weekend. I didn't want to ask lots of questions unless she obviously wanted to talk; and as she seemed quite contented to play with the children and talk to Joy, I didn't press it. It was just a matter of getting to know her, and letting things happen. She didn't seem to have any faddist preferences. She ate meat, and when we took her to the local pub on Saturday evening, she drank Moselle wine with me. There was only one odd event. As she was sitting opposite me, on the settee, her right hand began to jump about, rather in the way your leg twitches if a doctor strikes the knee to test your reflexes. Pointing to it with her other hand, she said: 'Look, someone's trying to get through.' 'Who?' 'I don't know. That's how it usually happens.' She went on talking, and the hand continued to twitch. At this point, Sally, who was watching it with interest, got a pencil and notepad, and asked her to see what 'they' wanted. She took the pencil, and began to scribble, in an odd, jerky way. After thirty seconds or so, she read it, wrinkled her nose, and handed it to me. It certainly didn't seem to make sense. 'Hearken unto me,' repeated three times, and then some such message as 'I am that which is eternal.' (Unfortunately, although we kept the paper, it has got mislaid.) The 'Hearken unto me' made it sound like some religious crank with a desire to be heard, but nothing much to say. I asked her: 'Do you often get messages like that?' She shrugged. 'Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't make sense.' Over the next few minutes, as she talked,her hand twitched periodically, but she ignored it, as if it was a telephone she didn't want to answer... Which led me to reflect that the 'spirit world' obviously has its nuts and cranks too, its persistent talkers who are convinced they have something of world-shattering significance to communicate, when all they really want is attention. An interesting thought—that perhaps even disembodied spirits may be unfulfilled neurotics... Or is it possible that some of these voices are from Mrs Beattie's subconscious? I suspect she would say no, for the subconscious mind plays a definite part in her system of ideas... I have always been fascinated by the way the subconscious can throw up ideas and images that seem totally independent of the conscious personality. For example, on the edge of sleep, the images and thoughts that wash through the mind seem to be as objective as the sea, coming from
somewhere else
, not from your own memory banks...

When I drove Mrs Beattie to the station on the following Monday morning, I still hadn't made up my mind about her. It would have been all very straightforward if she had been one of Yeats's simple, illiterate peasant women; then there would be no doubt that everything she wrote came from somewhere outside her own conscious mind. But she struck me as a fairly acute and astute person, and in much of her writing, she speaks with a direct personal voice—as in the passages quoted above. If
these
are not 'automatic writing', then where does the personal writing end and the 'dictated writing' begin?

At which point, it is necessary to make some general comments on 'automatic writing'. And the first thing that must be said flatly is that
no
spirit message, whether received via a medium, automatic script, or even on recorded tape (as in Constantin Raudive's experiments) has ever said anything of profound importance. As far as I know, there is no automatic script on record that says anything that the actual writer (i.e. the person holding the pencil) would not have been capable of saying. The London housewife, Mrs Rosemary Brown, has produced many piano works which she believes are dictated by dead composers such as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and it seems to me highly unlikely that she is a fraud.[1] On the other hand, she has not produced a single piece that can be seriously compared with the best of these composers. If she could produce a piece of Chopin or Liszt as popular as the
Minute Waltz
or
Liebestraum
she would convert thousands of skeptics. She is now apparently engaged in taking down Beethoven's Tenth symphony from the composer's dictation; an exciting prospect—but experience tells me that it will be a noisy, pretentious piece with a few echoes of the Fifth and Ninth symphonies.

In
Modern Spiritualism
(1902), Frank Podmore (one of the founders of the SPR) has several chapters on automatic writing, trance utterance, and so on. Mrs Cora Tappan of America could produce an incredible flow of words, both in prose and verse, and it usually 'made sense'; but the extracts Podmore quotes never rise above the inspiration, say, of
Hymns Ancient and Modern.
A spirit who professed to be Francis Bacon asked whether 'in the whole history of written thought there is anything that can approach [his trance utterances] in ' the magnitude of the ideas or the profundity of the thoughts', and a believer, named Tallmadge admitted that 'their equal never proceeded from mortal man'. A glance at some examples of 'Bacon's' eloquence and profundity is a letdown:

'How glorious that man's destiny! He leaves behind the errors of time, and boldly pushing forward through the untried future, he plants his standard on the very outward wall of eternity, and here he makes his stand... '

And so on and so on, with the cliches clashing like cymbals. The spirits give no evidence whatever of the kind
of sharpness
of mind that we associate with genius. It is all woolly and bombastic. One single cutting verse by the spirit of Heine would carry more conviction than reams of pseudo-Bacon. In my own opinion, it requires a certain degree of self-deception to see anything very remarkable in most 'spirit teachings' or messages from the dead. I can think of only one occasion when the results were well above the usual standard: in that curious automatic script that W. B. Yeats published under the title of
A Vision.
With its complicated explanation of how different types of human character correspond to different phases of the moon, this is a work of considerable fascination. Yeats' biographers generally accept his story that his wife George wrote down most of the book at the dictation of 'spirits'; the fact remains that it
is
the kind of thing Yeats might have written as an exercise in cosmological speculation, and there is not a word in it that Yeats could not have written.

Am I suggesting that all automatic writing is fraud? Not for a moment. It
is
possible that only the subconscious mind is involved—or perhaps the 'superconscious' that Robert Leftwich speaks of. But in that case, it would be reasonable to suppose that all so-called 'spirit phenomena' are purely subjective—springing from unseen depths of the human mind—and the evidence is against that. On the whole, the weight of evidence suggests that communication with the dead explains various spirit messages at least as well as the hypothesis of fraud or telepathy. (I have discussed this at length in
The Occult.}
So automatic writing finds itself in an embarrassing kind of limbo: never totally convincing, but much too convincing to be dismissed as fraud or self-deception. In
most
spirit writing (or painting, or, in the case of Rosemary Brown, music) the evidence is on the side of subconscious mental activity. For example, a great deal of 'spirit painting' has more merit—and talent—than the painter is able to call upon when painting normally and consciously; but in view of our tendency to under-utilize our powers (discussed earlier), this is what we might expect.