Supernatural (76 page)

Benoit Mandelbrot cast this discovery in mathematical form (to which he gave the name of ‘fractals’.) He began by considering the question of how long is a coastline.
It sounds simple enough—you merely have to trace the outline of a map with a small measuring device involving a wheel.
But a map is a simplification of reality.
A larger, more accurate map would give a larger figure, since it would trace all kinds of small details not included in the smaller map.
In fact, every small part of the coastline would have its own extra details, and these details in turn would have
their
own details and so on until you had reduced the coastline to the atomic scale, and it would be impossible to get more detailed,

But if a rough coastline is generated by a computer, this ‘atomic’ limit is never reached.
Imagine a giant magnifying glass, capable of infinite magnification, getting closer and closer to a coastline generated by a computer programme.
The coastline would go on getting more detailed
forever.
And the million-millionth magnification would still look oddly similar to the first.
It is, in effect, like a decimal that can go on forever without repeating itself.

Mandelbrot’s fractals also apply to the weather; its possibilities for variation are infinite.
And so, scientifically speaking, chaos theory disproves the notion that everything that happens is predetermined.
The picture of the universe I suggested in
Beyond the Occult
is something like a giant clock, proceeding inevitably along its predestined course.
Human beings can introduce small variations, but on such a minute scale that they are as important as tiny floating grains of dust in Big Ben.
According to chaos theory, these grains of dust, like the butterfly’s wings, can cause virtually infinite changes.
If chaos theory is correct, the future is infinitely
un
determined.

And yet, just as the whole idea of precognition contradicts our commonsense view of reality—that what has not yet happened cannot be known—so the actuality of precognition contradicts chaos theory.
Ten days before the
Titanic
was due to sail, in April 1912, a man named J.
Connon Middleton dreamed twice of a sinking ocean liner.
Since he was due to sail on the
Titanic,
he was understandably worried, and greatly relieved when the conference he was due to attend was cancelled.
A marine engineer named Colin MacDonald also had premonitions of disaster and declined to sign on the
Titanic
; the man who accepted the job was drowned when the
Titanic
sank on April 14, 1912.

Chaos theory states that it would be impossible to predict the weather ten days in advance.
So even if we suppose some ‘super-ESP’ that could gain access to the relevant information—about icebergs in the Atlantic, the strength of the
Titanic
’s hull, etc—it would still be impossible to have an accurate premonition of the disaster.

In fact, a novel called
The Wreck of the Titan,
published in 1898, fourteen years before the disaster, predicts the catastrophe with uncanny accuracy: the
Titan,
like the
Titanic,
was on her maiden voyage from Southampton.
It was 70,000 tons; the
Titanic
was 66,000.
Both were triple-screw vessels capable of 25 knots.
The
Titan
had 24 lifeboats, the
Titanic
20.
Its author, Morgan Robertson, was a ‘semi-automatic’ writer, who felt that some other writer took over when he wrote.
If
The Wreck of the Titan
was not a genuine piece of precognition, then it was a highly convincing example of synchronicity.

In short, it seems that we are as far as ever from some ‘scientific’ explanation of the time mystery.
All that seems obvious is that there is some sense in which our perceptions are independent of time, and that human beings therefore possess more freedom than they realise.

14

Vampires, Werewolves and Elementals

I
N A BOOK CALLED
The Paranormal,
the psychologist Stan Gooch has described how, at the age of 26, he attended a seance in Coventry with a friend, and spontaneously fell into a trance condition.
‘And then suddenly it seemed to me that a great wind was rushing through the room.
In my ears was the deafening sound of roaring waters .
.
.
As I felt myself swept away I became unconscious.’
When he woke up, he learned that several ‘spirits’ had spoken through him.
Gooch had discovered that he was a ‘medium’.

It was during this period—Gooch reveals in a later book called
Creatures from Inner Space
—that he had his first experience of a ‘psychic invasion’.
He was lying in bed one Saturday morning with his eyes closed when he felt a movement on the pillow beside his head, as if someone had gently pressed a hand against it.
The movement continued for some time; but when he opened his eyes, he was alone.

Twenty years later, lying half awake in the early morning, he became aware that someone else was in bed with him.
He felt that it was a composite of various girls he had known.
‘On this first occasion my conscious interest in the situation got the better
of me, and the succubus gradually faded away.
On subsequent occasions, however, the presence of the entity was maintained, until finally we actually made love.’
He notes that, ‘From some points of view the sex is actually more satisfying than that with a real woman, because in the paranormal encounter archetypal elements are both involved and invoked.’

Oddly enough, Gooch does not believe that his succubus (or female demon) was real; he thinks such entities are creations of the human mind.
He cites cases of hypnotised subjects who have been able to see and touch hallucinations suggested by the hypnotist, and a book called
The Story of Ruth,
by Dr Morton Schatzman, describing how a girl whose father had tried to rape her as a child began to have hallucinations of her father and believe that he was in the room with her.
He seems to believe that his succubus was a similar hallucination.
Yet this view seems to be contradicted by other cases he cites in the book.

The first of these concerns a policeman, Martin Pryer, who had always been ‘psychic’.
At one point he decided to try practising the control of hypnagogic imagery—the imagery we experience on the verge of sleep—and soon began to have alarming experiences.
On one occasion, some strange entity began to cling to his back like a limpet, and held on until he staggered across the room and switched on the light.
On another occasion, he thought that a former girlfriend was outside the window, and when he asked what she was doing, she replied: ‘You sent for me.’
Then some female entity seemed to seize him from behind, clinging on to his back; he sensed that it wanted him to make love to her ‘in a crude and violent manner.’
After some minutes it faded away.

Gooch goes on to describe the experiences of an actress friend called Sandy, who was also ‘psychic’.
One night, she woke up and felt that the spotlight in the corner of her ceiling had changed into an eye that was watching her.
Then she felt an entity—she felt it was male—lying on top of her and trying to make love to her.
‘One part of her was quite willing for the lovemaking to proceed, but another part of her knew that she wanted it to stop.’
The entity became heavier and another force seemed to be dragging her down through the mattress.
She made an effort to imagine that she was pulling herself up through the mattress, and the pressure suddenly vanished.
But when she went into the bathroom, she discovered that her mouth was rimmed with dark streaks, and when she opened it, proved to be full of dried blood.
There was no sign of a nosebleed or any other injury that could account for the blood.

We have already encountered Guy Playfair’s case of ‘Marcia’, the Brazilian schoolteacher who had experiences with an ‘incubus’ after picking up a statue of the sea goddess Yemanjá on the beach (
Chapter 9
,
page 265
).
Such cases make it difficult to accept Gooch’s view that these entities are some kind of hypnotic hallucination.
He seems to have arrived at that conclusion because his ‘succubus’ was a blend of previous girlfriends.
But on the ‘earthbound spirit’ hypothesis put forward by Carl Wickland (
Chapter 11
), it seems more likely that the entity put these ideas into his mind—that is, into his imagination.
He says: ‘In short, this entity, though possessing physical and even psychological attributes familiar to me, was none the less essentially its own independent self.’
And he agrees that the ‘archetypal elements’ were, to some extent, ‘invoked’—that is, that he himself was conjuring them up.
Sandy was able to free herself from the ‘psychic invasion’ by
imagining
that she was pulling herself back up through the mattress, indicating that the entity was controlling her imagination, not her body,

We also note that these ‘psychic invasions’ occurred when all three subjects—Gooch, Martin Pryer and Sandy—were either asleep or hovering between sleep and waking, and therefore in a trance condition akin to mediumship.

The ‘succubus’ (or incubus) was, as the Rev.
Montague Summers states in his book
The Vampire,
an early version of that mythical creature the vampire or blood-drinker.
And the various accounts of possession we have considered seem to lead naturally to the question: was the vampire real, or is it—as most sensible people assume—just a myth?

The vampire as depicted in stories like Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
(1897) is a kind of walking corpse that drinks blood.
Stoker based his character on a real historical personage: Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), King of Wallachia (1456–77) was, as his nickname implies, a man of sadistic temperament whose greatest pleasure was to impale his ‘enemies’ (which meant anyone against whom he had a grudge) on pointed stakes; the stake—driven into the ground—was inserted into the anus (or, in the case of women, the vagina), and the victim was allowed to slowly impale himself under his own weight—Vlad often had the point blunted to make the agony last longer.
In his own time he was known as Dracula, which means son of a dragon (or of the devil).
It is estimated that Dracula had about 100,000 people impaled during the course of his lifetime.
When he conquered Brasov, in Transylvania, he had all its inhabitants impaled on poles, then gave a feast among the corpses.
When one nobleman held his nose at the stench, Vlad sent for a specially long pole and had him impaled.
When he was a prisoner in Hungary, Vlad was kept supplied with birds, rats and toads, which he impaled on small stakes.
A brave and fearless warrior, he was finally killed in battle—or possibly assassinated by his own soldiers—and his head sent to Constantinople.
Four hundred and twenty years later, in 1897, he was immortalised by Bram Stoker as the sinister Count Dracula, no longer a sadistic maniac, but a drinker of blood .
.
.
¹

But how did the legend of the blood-drinking vampire begin?
The story first reached Europe soon after 1718, when Charles VI, Emperor of Austria, drove the Turks out of Eastern Europe, which they had dominated for the past four centuries, marching in and out of Transylvania, Wallachia and Hungary and even conquering Constantinople (1453).
Don John of Austria defeated them at the great sea battle of Lepanto (1571), but it was their failure to capture Vienna after a siege in 1683 that caused the break-up of the Ottoman empire.
During the earlier stages of this war between Europe and Turkey, Vlad the Impaler struck blow after blow against the Turks, until they killed and beheaded him in 1477.
When the Turks were finally defeated, two hundred and forty-one years later, their conquerors were intrigued to hear strange stories about dead people who could cause death to the living.
Such stories had been known to travellers in Greece down the centuries.
There the vampire was known as the
vrykolakas,
and on January 1, 1701, a French botanist named Pitton de Tornefort had visited the island of Mykonos and been present at a gruesome scene of dissection.
An unnamed peasant, of sullen and quarrelsome disposition, was murdered in the fields by persons unknown.
Two days after burial, his ghost was reported to be wandering around at night, overturning furniture and ‘playing a thousand roguish tricks’.
Ten days after his burial, a mass was said to ‘drive out the demon’ that was believed to be in the corpse, after which the body was disinterred, and the local butcher given the task of tearing out the heart.
His knowledge of anatomy seemed to be defective, and he tore open the stomach and rummaged around in the intestines, causing such a vile stench that incense had to be burned.
In the smoke-filled church, people began shouting ‘Vrykolakas’ and alleging that some of the smoke poured out of the corpse itself.

Even after the heart had been burned on the seashore, the ghost continued to cause havoc, until the villagers finally burnt the corpse on a pyre.

De Tornefort takes a highly superior attitude about all this, convinced that it is simply mass hysteria.
‘I have never viewed anything so pitiable as the state of this island.
Everyone’s head was turned; the wisest people were stricken like the others.’
Although the year is only 1701, de Tornefort’s attitude is that of a typical French rationalist of the 18th century.

Attitudes began to change after 1718, as the highly circumstantial accounts of vampires began to reach western Europe—just how precise and circumstantial is illustrated by the following report, known as
Visum et Repertum
(Seen and Discovered), which dates from 1732, and was witnessed by no less than five Austrian officers:

‘After it had been reported in the village of Medvegia (near Belgrade) that so-called vampires had killed some people by sucking their blood, I was, by high decree of a local Honorable Supreme Command, sent there to investigate the matter thoroughly, along with officers detailed for that purpose and two subordinate medical officers, and therefore carried out and heard the present enquiry in the company of the Captain of the Stallath company of haiduks, Hadnack Gorschiz, the standard-bearer and the oldest haiduk of the village.
(They reported), unanimously, as follows.
About five years ago, a local haiduk called Arnod Paole broke his neck in a fall from a hay wagon.
This man had, during his lifetime, often described how, near Gossova in Turkish Serbia, he had been troubled by a vampire, wherefore he had eaten from the earth of the vampire’s grave and had smeared himself with the vampire’s blood, in order to be free of the vexation he had suffered.
In twenty or thirty days after his death, some people complained that they were being bothered by this same Arnod Paole; and in fact, four people were killed by him.
In order to end this evil, they dug up Arnod Paole forty days after his death—this on the advice of their Hadnack, who had been present at such events before; and they found that he was quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears; that the shirt, the covering and the coffin were completely blood; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown.
And since they saw from this that he was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart—according to their custom—whereupon he gave an audible groan and bled copiously.
Thereupon they burned the body to ashes the same day and threw these into the grave.
These same people also say that all those who have been tormented and killed by vampires must themselves become vampires.
Therefore they disinterred the above-mentioned four people in the same way.
Then they also add that this same Arnod Paole attacked not only people but cattle, and sucked out their blood.
And since some people ate the flesh of such cattle, it would appear that (this is the reason that) some vampires are again present here, inasmuch as in a period of three months, seventeen young and old people died, among them some who, with no previous illness, died in two or at most three days.
In addition, the haiduk Jovitsa reports that his stepdaughter, by name Stanacka, lay down to sleep fifteen days ago, fresh and healthy, but that at midnight she started up out of her sleep with a terrible cry, fearful and trembling, and complained that she had been throttled by the son of a haiduk by the name of Milloe (who had died nine weeks earlier), whereupon she had experienced a great pain in the chest, and become worse hour by hour, until finally she died on the third day.