Supernatural (74 page)

This certainly sounds like some form of ESP, some unconscious knowledge of where the passage was located.
But what about the chance that caused the librarian to be standing in front of the book at the right moment?
We have here such a complex situation that it is difficult to think of an answer in terms of some ‘passive’ faculty like ESP.

Another story concerning Rebecca West underlines this point.
Again in the London Library, she was waiting for a copy of Gounod’s Memoirs to arrive.
She was approached by an American who recognised her, and who asked if it was true that she possessed some lithographs by the artist Delpeche.
They were still talking about Delpeche when the Memoirs arrived; she opened it casually, and found herself looking at the name Delpeche—a passage in which Gounod described how Delpeche had been kind to his mother.
The assistant was already on his way to collect the Memoirs when the artist approached her, so again we have a complex situation that cannot be explained in terms of ESP.
We are forced to fall back on ‘coincidence’.

But some synchronicities seem so preposterous that this explanation seems increasingly hollow.
The best example I can give is a personal one.
When writing an article about synchronicity (for
An Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
), I began to experience a series of absurd synchronicities, the oddest of which was as follows.
I was describing an experience of the ‘Ufologist’ Jacques Vallee, who became interested in a Los Angeles religious cult known as the Order of Melchizedec—Melchizedek being one of the obscurer Biblical prophets.
(We have already encountered him in connection with Dion Fortune.) Vallee had searched for information about the prophet, but without much success.
In the midst of this search, he took a taxi to Los Angeles airport, and asked his lady taxi driver for a receipt.
She gave him a receipt signed ‘M.
Melchizedec’.
He thought this an amusing coincidence, which suggested that there were more Melchizedecs around than he had assumed.
But when he checked the Los Angeles telephone directory—a vast compilation in several volumes—he found only one Melchizedec—his taxi driver.

Vallee said it was as if he had stuck a notice on some universal notice board: ‘Wanted—Melchizedecs’, and some earnest guardian angel had asked: ‘How about this?’
‘No, no, that’s no good—that’s a taxi driver .
.
.’

Vallee points out that there are two ways in which a librarian can store information.
One is in alphabetical order.
But a simpler system would be to place each book on the nearest shelf as it arrived, and have some straightforward method of retrieving it—like a ‘beeper’ on the spine of every book, which would respond to a radio signal by making a noise to signal its position.
Vallee is suggesting that this may be how the universe is constructed—on a system known as a ‘random data base’—and that it could explain apparent ‘synchronicities’.

After I had finished writing this passage, I broke off my day’s work to take my dogs for a walk.
As I was leaving my work room, I noticed on the camp-bed a book that had obviously fallen off the shelf, and which I did not recognise.
It was called
You Are Sentenced to Life,
by a Dr W.
D.
Chesney, and I had obviously bought it many years before in California and sent it for binding.
But I had never actually read it.
When I came back from my walk, I glanced through the book—and discovered, at the very end, a page headed ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEC.
It was a letter to the author from the founder of the Order, Grace Hooper Pettipher.

I had cited Vallee’s story about Melchizedec as one of the most proposterous synchronicities I know.
Finding yet another reference to the Order within an hour or so of writing about it—I have about 30,000 books in my house—obviously involved a coincidence that would be beyond numerical calculation.
It was as if the ‘guardian angel’ had said: ‘You think that’s preposterous?—well how about this?’

It was shortly after this that, reading some text about Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of magic, and his famous formula ‘As above, so below’ (which is supposed to express the essence of magic), I felt for the first time that I understood the inner meaning of the saying.
It is generally taken to refer to the magical system of ‘correspondences’, the idea that earthly things have a heavenly connection.
(For example, the days of the weeks are named after gods, and a magician who wished to perform a ceremony to ensure wealth would choose Sunday as the best day, since the sun is associated with gold .
.
.) What suddenly struck me is that we are all accustomed to the fact that the environment can act upon the mind—so that a dull day can make us depressed, and so on.
But the fundamental tenet of ‘occultism’ (and the basic assertion of this book) is that the mind possesses
hidden powers
that can influence the external world.
This seems to happen by a process of ‘induction’, not unlike that involved in a simple electrical transformer.
If, for example, I wish to use my British electric razor when I am in America, I have to buy a transformer which will ‘step-up’ American voltage (120) to British voltage (240.) If I want to use an American razor in England, I have to reverse the same transformer (which merely involves connecting it up back-to-front) to step-down 240 volts to 120.

Like most people, I have often observed that when I am in an optimistic and purposeful state, things tend to ‘go right’.
When I am tired and depressed, they go wrong—as if I have wired up my ‘mind transformer’ the wrong way round, so it causes ‘lower’ vibrations in the external world.
Optimism, on the other hand, seems to induce more powerful vibrations in the external world, and these in turn induce ‘serendipity’—a term coined by Horace Walpole, meaning ‘the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by chance’.

Religion has always taught that the gods have power over matter, but man is its slave: if this interpretation is correct, ‘As above, so below’ means that man has the same potential power to control matter as the gods.

This
is obviously the essence of Richard Church’s insight when the sound of the hatchet and its impact on the tree became ‘desynchronised’ (see
page 9
): ‘I had found that time and space are not absolute.
Their power was
not
law .
.
.’
This is obviously the beginning of a
totally different
attitude towards reality, an attitude that contradicts our ‘normal’ basic assumptions.

Let me attempt to express this more clearly.
Life on earth has always had a difficult struggle to maintain itself.
And man, one of the youngest of life forms, has had to fight against every kind of obstacle.
What is so remarkable is that, unlike his fellow animals, he has learned to use his
mind
as his most important tool in the struggle for existence.
This has carried him into an extraordinary realm of imagination and ideas.
Our domestic animals live in the physical world; but our children already inhabit a strange electronic world of video-recorders and computers that would be beyond the grasp of any dog or cat.
Man has become a creature of two worlds, with one foot on the solid earth and one foot in the world of the mind.

But because he is one of the youngest of all earth’s creatures (only a few viruses are younger), he is extremely unsure of himself.
With very few exceptions, each individual feels himself to be surrounded by a vast, hostile world that makes him feel like a pygmy.
Above all, this huge and complex world makes him feel
passive,
a ‘creature of circumstance’.
Some primitive creature from another planet might well assume man sees himself as a god, but he would be mistaken.
We feel that we have very little influence over our complicated lives.
Moreover, as soon as we feel tired or worried, we feel even more ‘trapped’, and our estimate of ourselves sinks almost to zero.

This is absurd.
If we can make the imaginative effort of placing ourselves behind the eyes of one of our cave-man ancestors of the late Pleistocene era, we can imagine his amazement if he could catch a glimpse of the ziggurats of the Sumerians, the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Greece, the aqueducts of the Romans; and if he could see our modern skyscrapers and space probes, he would regard us as a race of supermen.
And in a sense he would be right.
It is we who fail to grasp the magnitude of our own achievement.
We remain subject to a crippling kind of modesty, a neurosis of self-belittlement.
Because of our inability to achieve a certain detachment from our own lives—to see them as it were, from a bird’s eye view rather than a worm’s eye view—we remain gloomily self-critical, convinced that all our technical and intellectual achievements are a kind of vanity or a prelude to catastrophe.

Yet in the past century or so, we have, in fact, begun to develop a kind of ‘bird’s eye view’, a certain capacity to soar above the trivia of our everyday lives into the realm of imagination and intellectual detachment.
It is this capacity that promises that man will finally begin to grasp the magnitude of his own achievement, and to live on a far higher level of zest and vitality.

One thing seems clear: that the various ‘hidden powers’ we have spoken of in the course of this book are called into operation when we are in moods of optimism and relaxation.
And, what is more, they
induce
a feeling of optimism and relaxation, as we can see in the case of Richard Church; in other words, there is a ‘feedback’ effect.
All this suggests that there is a close connection between optimism, the ‘bird’s eye view’, and the development of these ‘hidden powers’.
It also suggests that the most important step in this direction is the ability to grasp what is at issue in the puzzling phenomenon of synchronicity.

Alan Vaughan’s vision of the future reminds us that there have always been men and women who possessed this curious ability; they are known as ‘prophets’.
One of the chief problems about the great prophets of the past—Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Mother Shipton, the Brahan Seer—is that their prophecies are so frequently ambiguous.
The ‘magician’ Paracelsus published in 1530 (eleven years before his death) a number of obscure prophecies, including one of wars, riots, slaughters and conflagrations in the North countries, warning the inhabitants of Brabant, Flanders and Zealand to beware.
At the time Paracelsus wrote, the Low Countries were peaceful and prosperous; fourteen years after his death, they passed from the Emperor Charles V to his son Philip of Spain, who attempted to impose Catholicism with the aid of the Inquisition, bringing about one of the most appalling reigns of terror in history.
As a prophecy, then, it is impressive, but it could be no more than a fortunate guess—after all, in a world full of warlike princes, nothing is more likely than slaughters, riots and conflagrations.

Michel Nostradamus, who died a quarter of a century after Paracelsus, is the most controversial of all ‘prophets’.
In 1555, he published the first edition of his ‘quatrains’, four-line stanzas arranged in centuries (lots of 100—a dozen in all, although several are incomplete.) Most of these are incredibly obscure, and, since they are all mixed up together, it is difficult to guess what period they are supposed to apply to.
What, for example, can one make of this:

Milan, Ferrare, Turin et Aquilleye,

Capne, Brundis, vexez par gent Celtique,

Par le Lyon et phalange aquilee,

Quand Rome aura le chef vieux Britannique.

(5:99)

Literally translated, this seems to mean: ‘Milan, Ferrara, Turin and Aquila, Capua, Brindisi vexed by a Celtic (i.e.
French) gentleman, by the lion and eagle phalanx, when Rome has the old British chief.’

It seems to be utter nonsense.
But one of its interpreters, Stewart Robb, finds hidden meaning there.
The French army used the eagle as an emblem for the first time under Napoleon, so presumably he is the ‘French gent’ referred to.
Napoleon also taught his army to form into Macedonian ‘phalanxes’.
Napoleon liked to think of himself as ‘the lion’, and even thought of adopting it as his emblem.
So it would seem that the stanza refers to Napoleon’s Italian campaigns (1796–7).
But who is the ‘old British chief’ whom Rome will have?
Well, apparently the Brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie was living in Rome at the time, and the Jacobites liked to refer to him as Henry IX of Great Britain, since his brother was now dead .
.
.

An interesting interpretation which is by no means unconvincing.
But is the Brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie really so important that he deserves a mention in the same breath as Napoleon’s Italian campaigns?
If Napoleon had met him, or if he had played some part in the campaign, it would be very convincing; as it is, we must feel that the case for Napoleon is unproven.

Having said which, it must be admitted that there are some very convincing quatrains.
There is one which runs:

Du nuit viendra par le foret de Reines

Deux pars, valtorte, Herne la pierre blanche,

Le moin noir en gris dedans Varenne,

Eleu Cap. cause tempeste, feu, sang, tranche.

By night will come through the forest of Reines

Two partners, by a tortuous valley, Herne the white stone,

The black monk in grey into Varenne:

Elected capet, cause tempest, fire, blood and slicing.

Varennes only appears once in French history, and this was when king Louis XVI fled there with Marie Antoinette from the French Revolution.
They went via the forest of Reins, and lost their way, having chosen a bad route (’tortuous valley’).
The king wore a grey suit, and he was, in fact, an elected king (capet), the first France had had.
And his flight and subsequent arrest at Varennes led to the Terror, which ended with them losing their heads (the word ‘tranche’ almost sounds like the fall of the guillotine).