Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 30

The brain being thus left temporarily and partially uncontrolled, a disembodied spirit sometimes, but not always, succeeds in occupying it; and occupies it with varying degrees of control. In some cases (Mrs.

Piper) two or more spirits may simultaneously control different portions of the same organism.

The controlling spirit proves his ident.i.ty mainly by reproducing, in speech or writing, facts which belong to his memory and not to the automatist's memory. He may also give evidence of supernormal perception of other kinds.

His manifestations may differ very considerably from the automatist's normal personality. Yet in one sense it is a process of selection rather than of addition; the spirit selects what parts of the brain-machinery he will use, but he cannot get out of that machinery more than it is constructed to perform. The spirit can indeed produce facts and names unknown to the automatist; but they must be, as a rule, such facts and names as the automatist could easily have repeated, had they been known to him:--not, for instance, mathematical formulae or Chinese sentences, if the automatist is ignorant of mathematics or of Chinese.

After a time the control gives way, and the automatist's spirit returns.

The automatist, awaking, may or may not remember his experiences in the spiritual world during the trance. In some cases (Swedenborg) there is this memory of the spiritual world, but no possession of the organism by an external spirit. In others (Cahagnet's subject) there is utterance during the trance as to what is being discerned by the automatist, yet no memory thereof on waking. In others (Mrs. Piper) there is neither utterance as a rule, or at least no prolonged utterance, by the automatist's own spirit, nor subsequent memory; but there is writing or utterance during the trance by controlling spirits.

Now this seems a strange doctrine to have reached after so much disputation. For it simply brings us back to the creeds of the Stone Age. We have come round again to the primitive practices of the shaman and the medicine-man;--to a doctrine of spiritual intercourse which was once c.u.menical, but has now taken refuge in African swamps and Siberian tundras and the snow-clad wastes of the Red Indian and the Esquimaux. If, as is sometimes advised, we judge of the worth of ideas by tracing their _origins_, no conception could start from a lower level of humanity. It might be put out of court at once as unworthy of civilised men.

Fortunately, however, our previous discussions have supplied us with a somewhat more searching criterion. Instead of asking in what age a doctrine originated--with the implied a.s.sumption that the more recent it is, the better--we can now ask how far it is in accord or in discord with a great ma.s.s of actual recent evidence which comes into contact, in one way or another, with nearly every belief as to an unseen world which has been held at least by western men. Submitted to this test, the theory of possession gives a remarkable result. It cannot be said to be inconsistent with any of our proved facts. We know absolutely nothing which negatives its possibility.

Nay, more than this. The theory of possession actually supplies us with a powerful method of co-ordinating and explaining many earlier groups of phenomena, if only we will consent to explain them in a way which at first sight seemed extreme in its a.s.sumptions--seemed unduly prodigal of the marvellous. Yet as to that difficulty we have learnt by this time that no explanation of psychical phenomena is really simple, and that our best clue is to get hold of some group which seems to admit of one interpretation only, and then to use that group as a _point de repere_ from which to attack more complex problems.

Now I think that the Moses-Piper group of trance-phenomena cannot be intelligently explained on any theory except that of possession. And I therefore think it important to consider in what way earlier phenomena have led up to possession, and in what way the facts of possession, in their turn, affect our view of these earlier phenomena.

If we a.n.a.lyse our observations of possession, we find two main factors--the central operation, which is the control by a spirit of the sensitive's organism; and the indispensable prerequisite, which is the partial and temporary desertion of that organism by the percipient's own spirit.

Let us consider first how far this withdrawal of the living man's spirit from his organism has been rendered conceivable by evidence already obtained.

First of all, the splits, and subst.i.tutions of phases of personality with which our second chapter made us familiar have great significance for _possession_ also.

We have there seen some secondary personality, beginning with slight and isolated sensory and motor manifestations, yet going on gradually to complete predominance,--complete control of all supraliminal manifestation.

The mere collection and description of such phenomena has up till now savoured of a certain boldness. The idea of tracing the possible mechanism involved in these transitions has scarcely arisen.

Yet it is manifest that there must be a complex set of laws concerned with such alternating use of brain-centres;--developments, one may suppose, of those unknown physical laws underlying ordinary memory, of which no one has formed as yet even a first rough conception.

An ordinary case of ecmnesia may present problems as insoluble in their way as those offered by spirit-possession itself. There may be in ecmnesia periods of life absolutely and permanently extruded from memory; and there may be also periods which are only temporarily thus extruded. Thus on Wednesday and Thursday I may be unaware of what I learnt and did on Monday and Tuesday; and then on Friday I may recover Monday's and Tuesday's knowledge, as well as retaining Wednesday's and Thursday's, so that my brain-cells have taken on, so to say, two separate lines of education since Sunday--that which began on Monday, and that which began on Wednesday. These intercurrent educations may have been naturally discordant, and may be fused in all kinds of ways in the ultimate synthesis.

These processes are completely obscure; and all that can be said is that their mechanism probably belongs to the same unknown series of operations which ultimately lead to that completest break in the history of the brain-cells which consists in their intercalary occupation by an external spirit.

Pa.s.sing on to _genius_, which I discussed in my third chapter, it is noticeable that there also there is a certain degree of temporary subst.i.tution of one control for another over important brain-centres. We must here regard the subliminal self as an ent.i.ty partially distinct from the supraliminal, and its occupation of these brain-centres habitually devoted to supraliminal work is a kind of possession, which ill.u.s.trates in yet another way the rapid metastasis of psychical product (so to term it) of which these highest centres are capable. The highest genius would thus be the completest _self-possession_,--the occupation and dominance of the whole organism by those profoundest elements of the self which act from the fullest knowledge, and in the wisest way.

The next main subject which fell under our description was _sleep_. And this state--the normal state which most resembles trance--has long ago suggested the question which first hints at the possibility of ecstasy, namely, What becomes of the soul during sleep? I think that our evidence has shown that sometimes during apparent ordinary sleep the spirit may travel away from the body, and may bring back a memory, more or less confused, of what it has seen in this clairvoyant excursion. This may indeed happen for brief flashes during waking moments also. But ordinary sleep seems to help the process; and deeper states of sleep--spontaneous or induced--seem still further to facilitate it. In the coma preceding death, or during that "suspended animation" which is sometimes taken for death, this travelling faculty has seemed to reach its highest point.

I have spoken of deeper states of sleep, "spontaneous or induced," and here the reader will naturally recall much that has been said of ordinary somnambulism, much that has been said of hypnotic trance.

Hypnotic trance has created for us, with perfect facility, situations externally indistinguishable from what I shall presently claim as true possession. A quasi-personality, arbitrarily created, may occupy the organism, responding to speech or sign in some characteristic fashion, although without producing any fresh verifiable facts as evidence to the alleged ident.i.ty. Nay, sometimes, as in a few of the Pesaro experiments (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 563-565), there may be indications that something of a new personality is there. And on the other hand, the sensitive's own spirit often claims to have been absent elsewhere,--much in the fashion in which it sometimes imagines itself to have been absent during ordinary sleep, but with greater persistence and lucidity.

Our inquiry into the nature of what is thus alleged to be seen in sleep and cognate states has proved instructive. Sometimes known earthly scenes appear to be revisited--with only such alteration as may have taken place since the sleeper last visited them in waking hours. But sometimes also there is an admixture of an apparently _symbolical_ element. The earthly scene includes some element of human action, which is presented in a selected or abbreviated fashion, as though some mind had been concerned to bring out a special significance from the complex story. Sometimes this element becomes quite dominant; phantasmal figures are seen; or there may be a prolonged symbolical representation of an entry into the spiritual world.

Cases like these do of course apparently support that primitive doctrine of the spirit's actual wandering in s.p.a.ce. On the other hand, this notion has become unwelcome to modern thought, which is less unwilling to believe in some telepathic intercourse between mind and mind in which s.p.a.ce is not involved. For my own part, I have already explained that I think that the evidence to an at least apparent movement of some kind in s.p.a.ce must outweigh any mere speculative presumption against it. And I hold that these new experiences of possession fall on this controversy with decisive force. It is so strongly claimed, in every instance of possession, that the sensitive's own spirit must in some sense _vacate_ the organism, in order to allow another spirit to enter,--and the evidence for the reality of possession is at the same time so strong,--that I think that we must argue back from this spatial change as a relatively certain fact, and must place a corresponding interpretation on earlier phenomena. Such an interpretation, if once admitted, does certainly meet the phenomena in the way most accordant with the subjective impressions of the various percipients.

As we have already repeatedly found, it is the bold evolutionary hypothesis which best fixes and colligates the scattered facts. We encounter in these studies phenomena of degeneration and phenomena of evolution. The degenerative phenomena are explicable singly and in detail as declensions in divergent directions from an existing level.

The evolutive phenomena point, on the other hand, to new generalisations;--to powers previously unrecognised towards which our evidence _converges_ along constantly multiplying lines.

This matter of psychical excursion from the organism ultimately involves the extremest claim to novel faculty which has ever been advanced for men. For it involves, as we shall see, the claim to _ecstasy_:--to a wandering vision which is not confined to this earth or this material world alone, but introduces the seer into the spiritual world and among communities higher than any which this planet knows. The discussion of this transportation, however, will be better deferred until after the evidence for possession has been laid before the reader at some length.

Continuing, then, for the present our a.n.a.lysis of the idea of possession, we come now to its specific feature,--the occupation by a spiritual agency of the entranced and partially vacated organism. Here it is that our previous studies will do most to clear our conceptions.

Instead of at once leaping to the question of what spirits in their essence are,--of what they can do and cannot do,--of the antecedent possibility of their re-entry into matter, and the like,--we must begin by simply carrying the idea of telepathy to its furthest point. We must imagine telepathy becoming as central and as intense as possible;--and we shall find that of two diverging types of telepathic intercourse which will thus present themselves, the one will gradually correspond to possession, and the other to ecstasy.

But here let us pause, and consider what is the truest conception which we are by this time able to form of telepathy. The _word_ has been a convenient one; the _central notion_--of communication beyond this range of sense--can at any rate thus be expressed in simple terms. But nevertheless there has been nothing to a.s.sure us that our real comprehension of telepathic processes has got much deeper than that verbal definition. Our conception of telepathy, indeed, to say nothing of telaesthesia, has needed to be broadened with each fresh stage of our evidence. That evidence at first revealed to us certain transmissions of thoughts and images which suggested the pa.s.sage of actual etherial vibrations from brain to brain. Nor indeed can any one say at any point of our evidence that etherial vibrations are demonstrably _not_ concerned in the phenomena. We cannot tell how far from the material world (to use a crude phrase) some etherial agency may possibly extend.

But telepathic phenomena are in fact soon seen to overpa.s.s any development which imaginative a.n.a.logy can give to the conception of etherial radiation from one material point to another.

For from the mere transmission of isolated ideas or pictures there is, as my readers know, a continuous progression to impressions and apparitions far more persistent and complex. We encounter an influence which suggests no mere impact of etherial waves, but an intelligent and responsive _presence_, resembling nothing so much as the ordinary human intercourse of persons in bodily nearness. Such visions or auditions, inward or externalised, are indeed sometimes felt to involve an even closer contact of spirits than the common intercourse of earth allows.

One could hardly a.s.sign etherial undulations as their cause without a.s.signing that same mechanism to all our emotions felt towards each other, or even to our control over our own organisms.

Nay, more. There is--as I have striven to show--a further progression from these telepathic intercommunications between living men to intercommunications between living men and discarnate spirits. And this new thesis,--in every way of vital importance,--while practically solving one problem on which I have already dwelt, opens also a possibility of the determination of another problem, nowise accessible until now. In the first place, we may now rest a.s.sured that telepathic communication is not necessarily propagated by vibrations proceeding from an ordinary material _brain_. For the discarnate spirit at any rate has no such brain from which to start them.

So much, in the first place, for the _agent's_ end of the communication.

And in the second place, we now discern a possibility of getting at the _percipient's_ end; of determining whether the telepathic impact is received by the _brain_ or by the _spirit_ of the living man, or by both inseparably, or sometimes by one and sometimes by the other.

On this problem, I say, the phenomena of automatic script, of trance-utterance, of spirit-possession, throw more of light than we could have ventured to hope.

Stated broadly, our trance-phenomena show us to begin with that several currents of communication can pa.s.s at once from discarnate spirits to a living man;--and can pa.s.s in very varying ways. For clearness' sake I will put aside for the present all cases where the telepathic impact takes an externalised or sensory form, and will speak only of intellectual impressions and motor automatisms.

Now these may pa.s.s through all grades of apparent _centrality_. If a man, awake and in other respects fully self-controlled, feels his hand impelled to scrawl words on a piece of paper, without consciousness of motor effort of _his own_, the impulse does not seem to him a _central_ one, although some part of his brain is presumably involved. On the other hand, a much less conspicuous invasion of his personality may feel much more central;--as, for instance, a premonition of evil,--an inward heaviness which he can scarcely define. And so the motor automatism goes on until it reaches the point of _possession_;--that is to say, until the man's own consciousness is absolutely in abeyance, and every part of his body is utilised by the invading spirit or spirits. What happens in such conditions to the man's ruling principle--to his own spirit--we must consider presently. But so far as his organism is concerned, the invasion seems complete: and it indicates a power which is indeed telepathic in a true sense;--yet not quite in the sense which we originally attached to the word. We first thought of telepathy as of a communication between two minds, whereas what we have here looks more like a communication between a mind and a body,--an external mind, in place of the mind which is accustomed to rule that particular body.

There is in such a case no apparent communication between the discarnate mind and the _mind_ of the automatist. Rather there is a kind of contact between the discarnate mind and the _brain_ of the automatist, in so far that the discarnate mind, pursuing its own ends, is helped up to a certain point by the acc.u.mulated capacities of the automatist's brain;--and similarly is hindered by its incapacities.

Yet here the most characteristic element of telepathy, I repeat, seems to have dropped out altogether. There is no perceptible communion between the mind of the entranced person and any other mind whatever. He is _possessed_, but is kept in unconsciousness, and never regains memory of what his lips have uttered during his trance.

But let us see whether we have thus grasped all the trance-phenomena;--whether something else may not be going on, which is more truly, more centrally telepathic.

To go back to the earliest stage of telepathic experience, we can see well enough that the experimental process might quite possibly involve two different factors. The percipient's mind must somehow receive the telepathic impression;--and to this reception we can a.s.sign no definite physical correlative;--and also the percipient's motor or sensory centres must receive an excitation;--which excitation may be communicated, for aught we know, either by his own mind in the ordinary way, or by the agent's mind in some direct way,--which I may call _telergic_, thus giving a more precise sense to a word which I long ago suggested as a kind of correlative to _telepathic_. That is to say, there may even in these apparently simple cases be first a transmission from agent to percipient in the spiritual world, and then an action on the percipient's physical brain, of the same type as spirit-possession.

This action on the physical brain may be due either to the percipient's own spirit, or subliminal self, or else directly to the agent's spirit.

For I must repeat that the phenomena of possession seem to indicate that the extraneous spirit acts on a man's organism in very much the same way as the man's own spirit habitually acts on it. One must thus practically regard the body as an instrument upon which a spirit plays;--an ancient metaphor which now seems actually our nearest approximation to truth.

Proceeding to the case of telepathic or veridical apparitions, we see the same hints of a double nature in the process;--traces of two elements mingling in various degrees. At the spiritual end there may be what we have called "clairvoyant visions,"--pictures manifestly symbolical, and not located by the observer in ordinary three-dimensional s.p.a.ce. These seem a.n.a.logous to the views of the spiritual world which the sensitive enjoys during entrancement. Then comes that larger cla.s.s of veridical apparitions where the figure seems to be externalised from the percipient's mind, some stimulus having actually been applied,--whether by agent's or percipient's spirit,--to the appropriate brain-centre. These cases of "sensory automatism"

resemble those experimental transferences of pictures of cards, etc. And beyond these again, on the physical or rather the ultra-physical side, come those _collective_ apparitions which in my view involve some unknown kind of modification of a certain portion of s.p.a.ce not occupied by any organism,--as opposed to a modification of centres in one special brain. Here comes in, as I hold, the gradual transition from subjective to objective, as the portion of s.p.a.ce in question is modified in a manner to affect a larger and larger number of percipient minds.

Now when we proceed from these apparitions of the living to apparitions of the departed, we find very much the same types persisting still. We find symbolical _visions_ of departed persons, and of scenes among which they seem to dwell. We find externalised _apparitions_ or phantasms of departed persons,--indicating that some point in the percipient's brain has been stimulated by his own or by some other spirit. And finally, as has already been said, we find that in certain cases of possession these two kinds of influence are simultaneously carried to an extreme. The percipient automatist of earlier stages becomes no longer a percipient but an automatist pure and simple,--so far as his body is concerned,--for his whole brain--not one point alone--seems now to be stimulated and controlled by an extraneous spirit, and he is not himself aware of what his body writes or utters. And meantime his spirit, partially set free from the body, may be purely percipient;--may be enjoying that other spiritual form of communication more completely than in any type of vision which our description had hitherto reached.

This point attained, another a.n.a.logy, already mentioned, will be at once recalled. There is another cla.s.s of phenomena, besides telepathy, of which this definition of possession at once reminds us. We have dealt much with _secondary personalities_,--with severances and alternations affecting a man's own spirit, in varying relation with his organism.

Felida X.'s developed secondary personality, for instance (Appendix II.

C), might be defined as another fragment--or another synthesis--of Felida's spirit acting upon her organism in much the same way as the original fragment--or the primary synthesis--of her spirit was wont to act upon it.

Plainly, this a.n.a.logy is close enough to be likely to lead to practical confusion. On what grounds can we base our distinctions? What justifies us in saying that Felida X.'s organism was controlled only by another modification of her own personality, but that Mrs. Piper's is controlled by George Pelham (see page 330 _et seq._)? May there not be any amount of self-suggestion, colouring with the fict.i.tious hue of all kinds of ident.i.ties what is in reality no more than an allotropic form of the entranced person himself? Is even the possession by the new personality of some fragments of fresh knowledge any proof of spirit-control? May not that knowledge be gained clairvoyantly or telepathically, with no intervention of any spirit other than of living men?

Yes, indeed, we must reply, there _is_ here a danger of confusion, there _is_ a lack of any well-defined dividing line. While we must decide on general rules, we must also keep our minds open to possible exceptions.

On the negative side, indeed, general rules will carry us a good way. We must _not_ allow ourselves to ascribe to spirit-control cases where no new knowledge is shown in the trance state. And this rule has at once an important consequence,--a consequence which profoundly modifies the antique idea of possession. I know of no evidence,--reaching in any way our habitual standard,--either for angelic, for diabolical, or for hostile possession.

And here comes the question: What att.i.tude are we to a.s.sume to savage cases of possession? Are we to accept as genuine the possession of the Esquimaux, the Chinaman,--nay, of the Hebrew of old days?

Chinese possession is a good example, as described in Dr. Nevius' book (on _Demon Possession and Allied Themes_, an account of which by Professor Newbold is given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. p. 602 [912 A]). I agree with Professor Newbold in holding that no proof has been shown that there is more in the Chinese cases than that hysterical duplication of personality with which we are so familiar in France and elsewhere.