The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (75 page)

Here we may assume either that Art himself was suffering from delusions – a reasonable enough hypothesis, under the circumstances – or that, in some odd way, his mother
was
somehow “possessing” him from a distance, in spite of the fact that she was still alive. This, admittedly, sounds farfetched – until we take into account the mother’s transformation after her operation. And if Art’s mother
was
somehow “in two places at once”, the implications are very strange indeed.

Can
one person “possess” another? In Frederic Myers’s classic
Phantasms of the Living
, there is an interesting account of a girl who was convinced that a man she scarcely knew was taking control of her dreams and trying to force her into sexual slavery (see chapter 60). If this is possible, and if disembodied “spirits” exist, then it would seem to follow that, under certain circumstances, “possession” by a spirit is a possibility.

Although Crabtree claims to treat the notion of “possession” merely as a working hypothesis, it can be seen that his work lends support to the views expressed by Wickland. This is even more so in the case of the
California psychiatrist Ralph Allison, whose
Minds in Many Pieces
(1980) is a major work in the field of multiple personality disorder (usually shortened to MPD). Allison had been practicing for almost a decade when he encountered his first case of MPD – a woman named Janette who had tried to kill her husband and children. A colleague advised Allison that he thought Janette was a case of MPD, and when Allison induced her to relax deeply and asked if he could speak to the “other person”, a woman with a harsh, grating voice emerged and identified herself as Lydia. At one point, Janette had been raped in the hospital by several orderlies; now, as Lydia mentioned her interest in “drinking, dancing, fucking”, and placed herself in a provocative position, Allison began to suspect that the orderlies may not have been entirely to blame. Eventually, a third personality named Karen emerged – a balanced, sensible woman – and with her help, Allison was able to cure Janette. (He came to call such personalities “the inner self-helper”.)

In this case, the basic hypothesis of multiple personality covered the facts; that a traumatic childhood had caused the “prime personality” to withdraw from the problems of life, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. But Allison’s next patient, a girl named Carrie, forced him to take the “possession” hypothesis seriously. Carrie was another “multiple” with a history of childhood traumas, including a gang rape. Even without hypnosis, an alter ego named Wanda emerged and talked to Allison. But it seemed clear that Wanda was not responsible for the suicidal impulses Carrie was experiencing. When told that a “psychic” claimed that Carrie was possessed by the spirit of a drug addict who had died of an overdose in New York in 1968, Allison decided to “give the concept of spirit possession a try”. Under deep hypnosis, Carrie agreed that the drug addict was influencing her life, and Allison’s makeshift “exorcism” – performed with a swinging crystal ball on a chain – apparently succeeded. Unfortunately, it failed to dislodge two other personalities, and Carrie eventually committed suicide.

Yet Allison continued to reject the notion of “spirit possession” until he encountered a girl named Elise, who revealed several personalities under hypnosis. Most of these were able to describe their history – what traumas had caused them to be “born”. But one of them claimed to be a man named Dennis, who explained that he had entered Elise’s body when she was experimenting with black magic as a teenager and that he enjoyed remaining there because he enjoyed having sex with another of Elise’s personalities, a girl named Shannon. The sex was not, as might be supposed, a bodiless intercourse between two “spirits”; when
Shannon took over Elise’s body and had sex with a man, Dennis would enter the man’s body. And although Elise and Shannon shared the same body, Dennis was not interested in having sex with Elise, only with Shannon. Eventually, with the help of another “inner self-helper”, Elise was cured. It was this case that finally convinced Allison that multiple personality may sometimes be a case of spirit possession.

Another case confirmed this. In curing a girl named Sophia (by “integrating” her various personalities), Allison discovered that two personalities remained “left over”. Under hypnosis, Sophia was regressed to birth and described how the doctor who had been her mother’s lover had suffocated two triplets at birth but had been interrupted before he could dispose of the third – Sophia. The other two children had then moved into Sophia’s body. Armed with this knowledge, Allison was able to rid Sophia of her two sisters and cure her.

Allison concluded that there were many possible causes of multiple personality, such as compulsive neurosis and violent traumas. But he also listed “possession” by another living person – as in the case of “Art” and his mother – possession by a dead person – as in Dr Bull’s case of the painter Gifford – and possession by a “nonhuman spirit”. By this he was referring to what would once have been called “demoniacal possession”. In a paper on multiple personality, the parapsychologist Stanley Krippner reveals that an increasing number of psychiatrists accept the “spirit hypothesis”.

What, then, is to be made of this bewildering mass of evidence about “possession”, which most doctors would dismiss as childish fantasy? Belief in possession depends, clearly, on the prior assumption that “spirits” actually exist and that what happens at séances, for example, is genuine “possession” by the dead. This is doubted by many eminent parapsychologists and even by some mediums themselves; they prefer to believe that all that is involved in such cases is telepathy and some form of extrasensory perception (ESP). But, as we have seen, William James himself was finally convinced by Mrs Piper. So was Richard Hodgson, who had her shadowed by private detectives to see how she acquired her information – and who learned nothing whatever. But he was staggered when Mrs Piper told him about a girl named Jessie, to whom he had been engaged in Australia and who had subsequently died; Mrs Piper’s “control”, Phinuit, was able to report to Hodgson a conversation with Jessie about which no one else knew.

Hyslop himself was inclined to believe that that mediumship was a matter of “super ESP” until he was finally convinced by William James – many years after James’s death. Hyslop received a letter from an Irish
medium, telling him that a spirit who called himself William James (and of whom the medium had never heard) had asked him to contact Hyslop and remind him of the “red pajamas”. James had once agreed with Hyslop that whichever of them died first should try to communicate with the other. At first, the message about red pajamas meant nothing to Hyslop. Then he suddenly remembered. When he and James had visited Paris as young men, their luggage had failed to arrive, and Hyslop had been forced to go out and buy some pajamas. All he had been able to find at short notice was a bright red pair, and James had teased him for days about his poor taste in pajamas. It was this message that finally convinced Hyslop of the survival of the dead.

If, like Hyslop, we can accept the notion of “survival”, and if, like Kardec, we can accept that spirits can, under certain conditions, share the human brain, then it is hard to see why we should not also accept that they can influence people’s actions – that is, “possess” them. It is important to note that “spiritualists” are in general agreement that such “possession” is rare, since it is impossible for a spirit actually to dislodge the incumbent, or even to share the body, unless there is a close affinity between “possessor” and “possessed”.

The Loudun case seems to provide support for this view. Kardec states that poltergeists can only manifest themselves by stealing human energy, particularly sexual energy. Sister Jeanne’s autobiography makes it clear that her own sexual frustrations alone could have provided a host of “entities” with the necessary energy. And by the time a dozen or so nuns were writhing on the floor and making suggestions that caused even hardened roués to blush, the convent must have been awash with sexual energy. Most cases of possession in nunneries seem to involve the same feverish sexuality. Two decades before the Loudun case, fourteen-year-old Madeleine de Demandolx de la Palud was seduced by Brother Louis Gaufridi, twenty years her senior; the liaison was broken up and she was sent to a nunnery at Aix-en-Provence. Two years later Madeleine began to see devils and smashed a crucifix. Her hysteria soon spread to the other nuns; Madeleine accused Gaufridi not only of seducing her but of introducing her to various diabolic practices. Gaufridi was asked to try and exorcise the demons, and when he failed, was put in prison.

At his trial, Madeleine declared that her allegations were all imaginings, after which she began to move her hips back and forth in a lascivious manner. The judge chose to disbelieve her; Gaufridi was tortured until he “confessed”, then was burned at the stake.

It is important to realize that fornication among the clergy was a
commonplace occurrence in the seventeenth century and that seduction of nuns by their confessors was far from rare. In 1625 a French orphan named Madeleine Bavent was seduced by a Franciscan priest, appropriately named Bonnetemps. In the following year she entered a convent run by Brother Pierre David, who secretly belonged to the Illuminati – a sect that believed that the Holy Spirit could do no harm and that therefore, sex was perfectly acceptable among priests. David apparently insisted that Madeleine should strip to the waist as he administered communion; other nuns, she later claimed, strolled around naked. She claimed that she and David never engaged in actual intercourse – only mutual masturbation – and that when David died in 1628, his successor, Brother Mathurin Picard, continued to caress her genitals during confession.

It was after Picard’s death in 1642 (when Madeleine was thirty-five) that the nuns began to manifest the usual signs of possession: writhing on the ground, contorting their bodies, and making howling noises like animals, as they alleged they were being ravished by demons. Fourteen of the fifty-two nuns exhibited these symptoms, and all put the blame on Madeleine.

Madeleine then told the full story of David, Picard, and the latter’s assistant, Brother Boulle. She claimed that Picard and Boulle had indulged in various “magical” acts involving communion wafers and menstrual blood and eventually in “sabbats”, in which a Black Mass was recited. The priests had draped their erections with consecrated wafers with a hole cut in the middle and “thus arrayed gave themselves to the women present” – Madeleine being favoured five or six times.

Madeleine was accused of being a witch and was discharged from the order; Picard’s corpse was dug up, excommunicated, and tossed onto a refuse heap. This led the priest’s brother to create a scandal, and the result was a trial that ended with Boulle being tortured and burned alive, together with another priest named Duval. Madeleine, confined in a convent and brutally treated, made several suicide attempts and finally died at the age of forty. The nuns were all dispersed to other convents.

Madeleine’s descriptions of sabbats and Black Masses sound like pure invention. But half a century later the notorious
chambre ardente
(“lighted chamber”) affair revealed that many priests did, in fact, take part in such practices. When Louis XIV was informed by his chief of police that many women were asking for absolution for murdering their husbands, he ordered an investigation. It revealed that an international poisoning ring, organized by men of influence, existed. A number of fortune-tellers provided their clients with poisons and love philters,
while priests performed Black Masses involving the sacrifice of babies and magical ceremonies in which they copulated with women on altars. These facts duly emerged in secret sessions of the “lighted chamber”, and were recorded in detail. (The king later ordered all records to be destroyed, but the official transcript was overlooked.) One hundred and four of the accused were sentenced, thirty-six of them to death, while two of the fortune-tellers were burned alive. It is difficult for us to understand why the Church was involved in this wave of demonology – the likeliest explanation is that seventeenth-century rationalism was undermining its authority and that the protest against this authority took the form of licentiousness and black magic. Whatever the explanation, the
chambre ardente
transcripts leave no doubt that it really happened.

One interesting question remains: whether, as Ralph Allison believes, there is such a thing as possession by “nonhuman” entities – i.e., whether some form of “demoniacal possession” is a reality. Of all these cases involving “possession”, the Loudun affair remains the most puzzling. Even if we can accept Wickland’s belief that human beings can be influenced by “earthbound spirits”, it is difficult to understand how five of the exorcists became victims of the demonic possession and four actually died of it. None of the patients described by Wickland, Crabtree, or Allison was driven to this extreme.

One possible clue is provided by a curious little book that appeared in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1972. It is entitled
Who Are the Dead
?, and the author is listed as Helen Quartermaine – which is not, apparently, her real name.

The author’s view, briefly, is that in addition to the physical body, all human beings possess a “personality body” – also known as the psyche – which is made of a finer matter than the physical body. This personality body permeates the physical body – the author uses the image of a ball of wool soaked in water to illustrate how the personality body “imbues” the physical body. The points of contact between the two bodies, she says, are the seven endocrine glands, also known as the seven chakras of Hinduism.

So far, Helen Quartermaine is simply echoing the “occult tradition”, in which the personality body is sometimes called the astral body. (Occult tradition also recognizes the human “aura”, or etheric body, which might be regarded as its “life field” – the equivalent of a magnet’s magnetic field.) But she goes on to make some far more startling assertions. Our problem, she says, is to keep these three “bodies” in alignment. In most people the two “higher bodies” tend to jut out of the right side. This lopsidedness means that the left side is unprotected and
can easily be “invaded” by other disembodied personalities. When people get angry or upset, she explains, the personality receives a shock and is displaced sideways. And it may remain this way for a long time. Life force drains away into the physical body, and the result is serious depletion. She goes on to say: “Considering the endless list of trifling incidences which can cause a person to be malpositioned within his three bodies . . . it follows that
all
of us play host to our dead, by leaving the door of our physical bodies open to admit them. Worse follows, however, for we must also leave ourselves open to their mental, physical and emotional sicknesses”.