The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (68 page)

Unfortunately, this information about the Mahatma letters was revealed in a report on Theosophy published by the Society for Psychical Research towards the end of 1885, and the rest of the report was damning. It was the result of an investigation by a young man named Richard Hodgson, who had talked to Madame Blavatsky’s housekeepers and learned that most of the “miracles” were fraudulent; their most convincing demonstration was to cause a letter – addressed to Hodgson and referring to the conversation they had only just had – to fall out of the air above his head. Hodgson’s report had the effect of totally destroying Madame Blavatsky’s credibility, and demolishing the myth of the “hidden Masters” in Tibet.

Having said all this, it is necessary to admit that there are still a number of things to be said in Madame Blavatsky’s favour. The evidence of many observers shows that she was undoubtedly a genuine “spirit medium”. Constance Wachtmeister, a countess who became Madame Blavatsky’s factotum in 1884, found it at first a little unnerving. She was sharing a room (divided by a screen) with Madame Blavatsky, and as soon as Madame was asleep the raps would begin, continuing at intervals of ten minutes until about 6 a.m. A lamp was burning by Madame Blavatsky’s bed; on one of the first nights the countess was kept awake and slipped behind the screen to extinguish it. She had only just got back into bed when the lamp was relit. Madame Blavatsky was obviously asleep, and in any case the countess would have heard the scrape of a match or tinder box. Three times she extinguished it; three times it promptly relit itself. The raps also continued. The third time she put it out, she saw a disembodied brown hand turning up the wick. She woke Madame Blavatsky, who looked pale and shaken, and explained that she had been “with the Masters” and that it was dangerous to awaken her suddenly.

Charles Johnston describes how he sat watching HPB (as her admirers
called her), tapping her fingers idly on a table-top. Then she raised her hand a foot or so above the table and continued the tapping movement; the sounds continued to come from the table. Then she turned towards Johnston, and began to send the “astral taps” on to the back of his hand. “I could both feel and hear them. It was something like taking sparks from the prime conductor of an electric machine; or, better still, perhaps, it was like spurting quicksilver through your fingers”.

It is of course possible that all this was fraudulent; but it seems unlikely. If we can accept the hypothesis that there
are
genuine mediums that is, mediums who either possess, or are possessed by, certain “magical” powers then it seems fairly certain that Madame Blavatsky was such a person. And if we can accept that there are genuine mediums, then the next question is whether their powers are the result of some mysterious activity of the unconscious mind, or whether they involve some external force – some emanation of the “collective unconscious”, or even “spirits”. Most students of the paranormal end up by conceding (however reluctantly) that there
does
seem to be some external force, although understandably many of them find it impossible to concede the existence of spirits.

The psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen, who studied hundreds of patients suffering from hallucinations in the Mendocino State Hospital, reached the remarkable conclusion that the nature of the hallucinations had been accurately described by the eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. They seemed to fall into two types, which he calls “higher order” and “lower order”. Lower-order hallucinations seemed to be stupid and repetitive; they “are similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it”. But higher-order hallucinations seemed “more likely to be symbolic, religious, supportive, genuinely instructive”. A gas-fitter experienced a higher-order hallucination of a beautiful woman who showed him thousands of symbols. Van Dusen was able to hold a dialogue with this “woman”, with the help of the patient, and after the conversation the patient asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.

If we can accept this much, then we can also see that Madame Blavatsky’s “secret masters” may not have been her own invention. She told Constance Wachtmeister that the raps that resounded from above her bed were a “psychic telegraph” that linked her to the Masters, who watched over her body while she slept. If we are willing to concede that the Masters may have been what Swedenborg calls “angels”, or what Van Dusen calls higher-order hallucinations, then it suddenly
ceases to be self-evident that HPB was an old fraud. We have at least to consider the hypothesis that
something
was going on which is slightly more complicated.

Madame Blavatsky was not the inventor of the idea of secret masters; the notion is part of an ancient “occult” tradition. The composer Cyril Scott, who was also an “occultist”, writes in his
Outline of Modern Occultism
(1935) of the basic tenets of “Occult science”:

Now, many modern thinkers would agree that man is involved in an evolutionary process that involves his mind as well as his body, and many would insist that the process is not entirely a matter of Darwinian mechanisms (see, for example, the contributors to Arthur Koestler’s
Beyond Reductionism
). But it is clearly a very long step from this kind of evolutionism to the belief that the evolutionary process is being directed by “higher intelligences”.

Such a step was, in fact, taken (on purely scientific grounds) by the cybernetician David Foster, in his book
The Intelligent Universe.
Foster’s basic assertion is simply that, to the eye of the cyberneticist, evolution seems to suggest some intelligent intervention. Cybernetics is basically the science of making machines behave as if they are intelligent – as does, for example, a modern washing machine, which performs a number of complex processes, heating water up to a certain temperature, washing the clothes for a certain period, rinsing them, spin-drying, etc. But these processes are “programmed” into the machine, and can be selected by merely turning a dial, or inserting a kind of plastic biscuit – each of whose edges contains a different programme – into a slot. An acorn could be regarded as a device containing the programme for an oak-tree. But to the eye of a cybernetician the acorn, like the plastic biscuit, suggests some form of programming. Could an acorn be programmed solely by Darwinian natural selection? Foster points out that one basic rule about computer-programming is that the intelligence that does the programming must be of a higher, more complex, order than the programme itself. Similarly, in order to drive a car or use an electric typewriter my mind must work faster than the machine; if the machine goes faster than my mind, the
result will be disaster or confusion. In cybernetics, blue light could be a programme for red light, but not vice versa on the same principle that Dickens can create Mr Pickwick, but a Mr Pickwick could not create a Dickens. And Foster argues that the energies involved in programming DNA would need to be higher than any form of energy found on earth. He argues that the process would require energies of the same order as cosmic rays. Such an argument obviously implies that the complexity of life on earth can only be accounted for by some intelligence “out there”.

We may reject this argument, pointing out that “instinct” may create a complexity that looks like superintelligence. Mathematical prodigies, who can work out problems of bewildering complexity within seconds, are often of otherwise low intelligence. There is no evolutionary necessity for the human brain to work out such problems; so why
has
the brain developed such a power? The physiologist would reply: as a kind of by-product, just as a simple calculating device like an abacus could be used to multiply numbers far beyond the grasp of the human imagination. But those who believe that evolution is basically purposive use such examples as mathematical prodigies to argue that the evolution of man’s higher faculties cannot be explained in purely Darwinian terms.

Since Madame Blavatsky (who died in 1891) there have been many “occultists” (I use the word in its broadest sense, as meaning those who are interested in the paranormal) who have believed that they were in contact with higher intelligences. Alice Bailey became an active member of the Theosophical Society after the death of Madame Blavatsky, and was convinced she was in touch with Sinnett’s “Mahatma” (it means “great soul”) Koot Hoomi. In 1919, disgusted by the power struggles within the society, she founded her own group, and produced a large number of books dictated by an entity called “the Tibetan”.

The Rev. Stainton Moses, an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, used “automatic writing” to produce large quantities of a script that was published after his death under the title
Spirit Teachings.
Although Moses published extracts from these in
Light
, he was too embarrassed to admit that some of the “spirits” who dictated them claimed to be Plato, Aristotle and half a dozen Old Testament prophets. Yet there was strong evidence that these scripts were not simply the product of his own unconscious mind. On one occasion Moses asked the “spirit” if it would go to the bookcase, select the last book but one on the second shelf, and read out the last paragraph on page 94. The spirit did this correctly. Moses was still not convinced, so the spirit selected its own book. It dictated a passage about Pope, then
told Moses precisely where to find it; when Moses took the book off the shelf, it opened at the right page. The spirit dictated these passages while the books remained closed on the shelf.

In 1963 two Americans, Jane Roberts and her husband Rob, began experimenting with an ouija board, inspired to some extent by “Patience Worth” (see chapter 62). Various personalities identified themselves and gave messages; then after a while a character who identified himself as “Seth” began to come through:

“Seth” went on to dictate a number of books, with titles like
The Seth Material
and
Seth Speaks
, which achieved tremendous popularity. They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Roberts’s unconscious mind or a genuine “spirit”, was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James’s works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Roberts’s “communicator” writes like an undergraduate:

There is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James’s swift-moving, colloquial prose. “And to leash these as well . . .” is simply not William James; he would simply have said “And to harness these . . .”

Yet Seth himself often says things of immense and profound importance – for example, his emphasis (in
The Nature of Personal Reality
) on the importance of the conscious mind and conscious decision.

Comments like these are so opposed to our familiar dogmas about the unconscious and the “solar plexus” that they make an impact of startling freshness. This is not the usual diffuse verbiage of “inspirational” writing, but the communication of a vision into the powers of the mind. If Seth is an aspect of Jane Roberts, then she is a philosopher of considerable insight.

The experience of the Londoner Tony Neate is typical of the “psychic” who finds himself “in communication” with Van Dusen’s “higher order hallucinations”. In 1950, at the age of twenty, he began as a skeptic playing with a primitive form of ouija board, a glass on a polished table-top; the glass flew off the table with such violence that it knocked a man over backward. He began to practise psychometry – receiving “pictures” from objects that are held in the hand – and found that his visions of the history of such objects were often accurate. One day when he was practising psychometry he went into a trance, and “spirits” spoke through him. A “spirit” who claimed to be Freud quoted a German book giving the exact page; Tony Neate was able to track down the book in the London Library and found the quotation accurate. A spirit who claimed to be the singer Melba told of a concert she had given in Brussels; again, the statement was found to be accurate.