Strange Powers (15 page)

All this is necessary to understand Arthur Guirdham's book—and Arthur Guirdham. For he reached the conclusion that his obsessive interest in Catharism, and in the Montsegur area, was due to the fact that he had been a Cathar 'priest' named Roger de Grisolles during this final period of persecution.

He reached this conclusion in a rather odd way. Throughout his life, he had had nightmares in which he was asleep in a room when a tall man approached him; sometimes he would wake up screaming. In March 1962, he saw a patient who had been suffering from a very similar nightmare: Mrs Smith. Her shrieks were so loud that her husband was afraid she would wake up the street. The doctor who had referred her to Arthur Guirdham had at one time wondered if she was epileptic. In fact, Mrs Smith's nightmares ceased when she met Guirdham. (His nightmares ceased at roughly the same time.) She didn't tell him this, for she wanted to continue as his patent—for a rather odd reason. She had recognized him as a man she knew well from her dreams.

Mrs Smith hesitated for some time before she finally told Guirdham her full story. What emerged, finally, was this. As a child she had possessed a remarkable memory; during an exam she was able to write out page after page of Wordsworth, so that she was accused of cheating. At the age of eleven she became unconscious with a severe headache; when she woke up, she had a degree of second sight; she knew when her father would die; she knew that a friend's marriage would not take place; she knew what was in letters before opening them. During her teens, she had three more attacks of unconsciousness—which were diagnosed as epileptic fits; then she began to have the curious, detailed dreams of her previous life in the thirteenth century. She was a girl of humble background who lived with her family in a single-room house near Toulouse.

One night, a man had arrived at the house, and asked for shelter. This was the Cathar 'priest', Roger de Grisolles (or Roger-Isarn). The young girl—Mrs Smith—fell in love with him. (Oddly enough, the dreams did not include her real name—Guirdham calls her Puerilia) She crept over to him in the night and kissed his hand. The two became friendly. One day, her father beat her, and she left home and went to Roger's house, where she became his mistress. (Roger was not a fully fledged priest, or a 'parfait'—Cathars who had foresworn sex.)

Then, in Mrs Smith's dreams, there was a murder. A man came back from the murder, boasting about it; his name was Pierre de Mazerolles. Later, Roger was arrested, and died in prison. Mrs Smith—or rather Puerilia—was burned at the stake. She also dreamed of this burning—in gruesome detail, with her blood dripping into the flames, and her eyelids burnt off.

All kinds of names occurred in Mrs Smith's dreams. Now there
are
still records extant of the period—of the trials of Cathars, and so on. So Arthur Guirdham's task was to study the records, and see if Mrs Smith's dreams made sense. He quickly discovered that Pierre de Mazerolles
was
one of the men involved in the murder of the two Inquisitors. He was able to identify Roger, and his parents and other members of the family. Mrs Smith's story definitely held together. Not only that, but her notes, written so many years earlier, contained material about the Cathars that was not known to scholars at the time, and has only since then been confirmed.

Altogether, I found
The Cathars and Reincarnation
a puzzling, difficult book. Not long after buying it, I realized that I had a couple more books by Arthur Guirdham on my shelves:
A Theory of Disease
and
The Nature of Healing.
I had bought them at the time I had been writing my study of Rasputin and the fall of the Romanovs—I had asked Professor Wilson Knight's advice on books about thaumaturgic healing, and he had recommended these and a couple by Harry Edwards. At the time, they had failed to strike a chord, and I had forgotten I had them. Now I opened
A Theory of Disease
(1957) again, I recalled what had dissatisfied me at the time I read it. It holds the rather unusual thesis that disease is often due to the degree to which a person is preoccupied with his own personality. Shaw's Saint Joan remarks, 'Thinking about yourself is like thinking about your stomach—it's the quickest way to make yourself sick.' So I could understand his basic thesis—the relation of disease to self-awareness. At the same time, according to this thesis, 'outsiders' ought to be far more subject to disease than most people. And while it is true that a large number of artists and poets of the nineteenth century died of tuberculosis, I couldn't see otherwise that outsiders are more disease prone than the average; on the contrary, they're often less so. I thought of the occasion when Strindberg determined to commit suicide by getting pneumonia, so he flung himself into icy water, then climbed a tall tree, and crouched in the cold wind all night. In the morning, he staggered off and found a bed, expecting to wake up dying; instead he woke up feeling in the best of health.

But now I re-read the book, I realized that this argument doesn't affect its thesis. The whole point about 'outsiders' is that, in spite of feeling isolated from society, and perhaps from life itself, they often possess remarkable depths of toughness. Having got over that misunderstanding, I found
A Theory of Disease
a remarkable book. (I still think it is in many ways his best.) When it came out in 1957, it must have been regarded as extremely unorthodox, even though many psychologists recognized the mental origin of many physical diseases. But there was a tendency to blame disease on sexual repressions. Now Guirdham makes the controversial statement that apart from the 'personality', with itsself-obsession, there is a layer of our being that could be called 'the You that is Not You'. (I had once expressed this by saying that man possesses a personality, which is oriented towards self-satisfaction, and an impersonality, which can get a pure and impersonal delight out of mathematics or a sunset.) Health may depend on contact with this layer. The mentally ill patient often says: 'I cannot get away from myself. I think only of myself 'It would be better... if the doctor were able to instruct the patient in some meditative and spiritual technique whereby he could limit the operations of his personality by merging himself with the absolute... Modern medicine had its beginnings in the Greek temples. It may have to return to the temple for its salvation... ' But what makes the book so fascinating is the author's analysis of 'various types of diseases', and of the way these relate to various levels of the personality. Most books that relate healing to the 'spiritual' are rather airy-fairy and unrealistic; Guirdham's book has a strong flavor of reality.

The Nature of Healing
, published seven years after
A Theory of Disease
, goes a great deal further—which is obviously why Wilson Knight had recommended it to me. He is concerned with the gift of healing, such as was possessed by Rasputin; you might say that he is in the field of Christian Science. He has obviously reached a watershed, and I could easily trace the route by which he arrived at it. Everybody must have noticed the way that certain people are totally preoccupied with themselves, in a feverish, unhealthy way, and that such people seem unable to draw upon their full powers; they seem to be cut off from their inner resources; whereas people who exude calm and serenity—and health—are often curiously un-egoistic. In fact, they often possess the power to heal. (Think of Matthew Arnold's line about Wordsworth's healing power—connected with his awareness of 'unknown modes of being', of things
outside
himself.) In
A Theory of Disease
, Guirdham is preoccupied with working out the implications of these observations. In
The Nature of Healing
, he goes on to consider the way that negro 'medicine men' can cause death by laying a curse on someone, and how aborigines may wilt away and die because someone has 'pointed the bone' at them. Any psychologist would accept this, and would say that it is purely psychological. But if this is so, then how far is all disease purely psychological? And if we accept that purely psychological forces are involved in disease, can we discount the possibility of such forces being 'projected' by a medicine man in order to cause disease? Is it not possible that such forces are as real, if as invisible, as germs?

In
The Nature of Healing
, Guirdham also touches on reincarnation; describing a nurse with unusual healing powers, he comments that she knew the layout of Hampton Court long before she went there, so that visiting it was like going home; she was convinced that she had had some intense experience of happiness in the garden at Hampton Court in 1660. 'She knew the London of Charles the Second better than that of today,' and as a child, she made drawings of Norman architecture, with the same odd sense of familiarity. Guirdham ads: 'I am convinced that the power of healing which she undoubtedly possessed involves the capacity to disperse oneself through time.'

These two books made it clear to me that Guirdham was not a crank—or perhaps just given to wishful thinking. There is a feeling of clarity, balance, fair-mindedness, about them. He had obviously come a long way, and come very slowly; he mentions that in the past he had been completely skeptical about the possibility of 'healing' except by purely physical (or natural) forces.At about the time I was reading these books, an old friend, Tom Greenwell, came to stay with us; he works on the
Yorkshire Post
, and he brought with him a pamphlet called
Catharism: The Mediaeval Resurgence of Primitive Christianity
, by Arthur Guirdham. This, I felt, was beginning to look more like synchronicity than coincidence.
The Cathars and Reincarnation
begins by describing how Guirdham kept stumbling upon references to Catharism all over the place. One day, he was discussing a village, and tried to recall the name of its pub; later the same day, he took a book on the Pyrenees out of the public library—and came across the name of the village and its pub in it. I felt that the pamphlet on the Cathars—and the fact that Tom Greenwell had met Guirdham at the time when he was contributing medical articles to the
Yorkshire Post—
dearly indicated that I ought to write to him. I did so, saying how much I had enjoyed the book, but that I felt he had deliberately thrown away the possibility of a best-seller. A few days later, I got a friendly letter back, in which he said that he had deliberately played down the sensational elements—which is what I had suspected.

I wrote a section about him in
The Occult
, as well as an article for the back page of
Man, Myth and Magic.
By that time, we had finally met. In the spring of 1971, he drove down to the west country to visit relatives, and came to stay overnight. The final paragraph of my article on him read: 'Earlier this year, he came down to stay with us. My mental picture of him had varied between the image of a keen-eyed psychiatrist, and of an absent-minded mystic. He was neither of these things: a gentle, intelligent man with the natural kindness that all good doctors have. Throughout the first evening, while we talked mostly about psychology, I felt that there was an element about him that I could not place. Later on, it came to me: there was something priestly about him, something akin to Father Brown, or one of those mediaeval priors described by Rabelais.'

This, I think, is a fairly good description. He is white haired, rather squarely built—he points out in the healing book that many healers are—with a calm, rather soothing voice. He reminded me of another old medical friend, Kenneth Walker, who had been a pupil of Gurdjieff s. He had his wife Mary with him, and she struck me as an ideal sort of person for a doctor's wife: calm, good tempered, practical and thoroughly efficient. She and Joy seemed to have a certain amount in common; writers, like doctors, tend to become objects of fixation for people who imagine they hold the solution to all their problems. Their wives have to learn to put up with this, and to adopt a philosophical attitude, particularly to female admirers; you can read in their eyes a kind of mild, patient irony. In a way, Mary Guirdham convinced me more than her husband that Arthur Guirdham wasn't over-credulous or over-inventive. She struck me as so balanced and intelligent that I couldn't believe she would aid and abet any kind of self-deception.

We talked, as I have said, mainly about psychology. I was writing
New Pathways in Psychology
, and I was struck by the similarity of Maslow's views and Arthur Guirdham's. Translated into Maslow's language, you could say that Arthur Guirdham believed that disease was due to blockage of creative energies—that is, blockage of self-actualization. But then, in a way, Guirdham went further than Maslow. When Maslow died, he was looking into this question of the varieties of self-actualization—what Robert Leftwich might call the structure of the superconscious. Maslow was concerned only with learning to express creative energy: i.e. to evolve. Arthur Guirdham seemed to be implying that evolution of consciousness may involve us in the realm of 'strange powers'. All the same, it was not the 'strange powers' we talked about that evening, but the psychotherapy of men like Maslow and Viktor Frankl. I was particularly fascinated by a story told by Robert Ardrey about two scientists, Rubinstein and Best, who had discovered that planarion worms are subject to boredom and 'life failure' if made to repeat a task over and over again. But by making the task so difficult that the worms have to make an enormous effort to learn it, they were able to make the worms repeat it hundreds of times without boredom. Somehow, the worms came to attach
meaning
to the task when they had to really summon their vitality to learn it, and this meaning stayed permanently, un-eroded by repetition. Clearly, the question of disease and health is closely connected with the question of meaning and boredom. Disease is basically the outcome of life-failure.

Arthur disclaimed any healing powers of his own, and any 'psychic' ability. He was, he said, just a catalyst, the sort of person who seems to bring out 'strange powers' in other people. But he certainly possesses a degree of natural, if not supernatural, healing power. I had developed a rather odd pain at the back of my skull. There was a slight ache in the muscles of the right rear-side of my neck, and a sharp pain at the back of the head in moments of excitement, such as sexual orgasm. Arthur stood behind my chair, and gently massaged the muscles of the neck and shoulders for a few minutes; after this, the stiffness vanished, and stayed away for about a week. There was a definitely soothing feeling as he pressed the muscles.