Supernatural (79 page)

He also cites the modern American expert on ‘out of the body’ journeys, Robert Monroe: ‘Monroe tells of encountering a zone next to the Earth plane populated by the ‘dead’ who couldn’t or wouldn’t realise they were no longer physical beings .
.
.
The beings he perceived kept trying to be physical, to do and be what they had been, to continue physical one way or another.
Bewildered, some spent all of their activity in attempting to communicate with friends and loved ones still in bodies or with anyone else who might come along.’

The conclusion would seem to be that the vampire cannot be dismissed as a myth.
But the reality of vampirism has very little in common with the Dracula legend.
There is no fundamental difference betwaeen vampires and poltergeists—except that, fortunately, vampire phenomena seem to be far more infrequent.

And what of the vampire’s equally celebrated cousin, the werewolf?
Here, as in the case of the vampire, we have many highly circumstantial reports: in the one hundred and ten years between 1520 and 1630, there are thirty thousand in central France alone.
(Here they were called
loup-garous.
) But there are also reports from Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Iceland, Lapland and Finland.
So it is difficult to dismiss them, as Rossell Hope Robbins does in his
Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology,
as a sign of superstition or madness.
A typical report is as follows.
In 1598 a 16-year-old boy named Benoit Bidel, who lived at Naizan in the Jura region of France, was found dying from a stab wound.
He claimed that he had climbed a tree and was picking fruit when his sister, who was down below, was attacked by a wolf.
The boy tried to fight off the wolf with a knife, but he claimed that the wolf had snatched the knife from him—it had human hands—and stabbed him.
The boy died, and a search of the area was made; a semi-imbecile girl named Perrennette Gandillon was found.
Deciding that she might be the werewolf, the townspeople killed her.
Then someone remembered that her brother Pierre was scarred with scratches; he was arrested, together with his sister Antoinette and his son George.
All three confessed to being werewolves.
Judge Henri Boguet, author of
Discourse on Sorcerers,
visited the Gandillons in jail and said that they ran around on all fours.
They confessed that they had turned themselves into wolves with the aid of a witch’s salve, and that they had attended ‘Sabbats’.
All three were sentenced to death and burned.
Rossell Hope Robbins takes the commonsense view that all three were insane.
Another interesting possibility is suggested by Neville Drury and Stephen Skinner in
The Search for Abraxas
(1971).
Discussing Carlos Castaneda and his Don Juan books, they note that Castaneda described how the ‘witch doctor’ Don Juan had taught him to make a paste of the root of the datura plant, also called Devil’s Weed, and how, when he rubbed it on his body, he felt he was flying at great speed through the air.
Is it possible, ask the authors, that the witches’ salves of past centuries were made of some similar substance that produced the hallucination that they were flying?
(In fact, Lord Lytton had already made such a suggestion in his occult novel
A Strange Story.
) Of course, much of Castaneda’s work has been discredited since astute critics noticed that his books were full of factual contradictions, especially regarding dates; yet this particular suggestion remains highly plausible.

In studying the reports of werewolves one thing becomes clear: the werewolf was very closely bound up with witchcraft.
The Gandillon family, whether they were insane or not, believed that they had attended witches’ Sabbats and that they were able to turn themselves into wolves by means of a salve.
They believed that their powers came ultimately from the Devil.
It is interesting to note that Pierre Gandillon fell into a trance on Maundy Thursday and, when he had recovered, claimed to have attended a Sabbat of werewolves.
He believed, then, that he attended these Sabbats ‘in the spirit’ rather than in the flesh, a belief which ties in with theories of ‘astral bodies’.
Indeed according to the 19th-century French ‘magician’ Eliphas Lévi, a werewolf is simply the astral body of the sorcerer projected into the shape of a wolf.

It is undoubtedly true that many ‘werewolves’ were people who suffered from delusions.
In 1603 a mentally defective youth named Jean Grenier claimed to some girls that he was a werewolf; when he was arrested, he implicated his father and a neighbour.
In fact, children had been attacked in the area.
But the Parlement of Bordeaux took a surprisingly reasonable view for that period and accepted the father’s explanation that his son was an imbecile; Jean was placed in custody in a monastery, where he died a few years later.

In other cases, the explanation may be less simple.
In the late 16th century the case of a ‘werewolf named Peter Stubbe caused a great stir all over Europe.
There had been many wolf attacks in the Cologne area; after a wolf had attacked a group of children, nearly tearing the throat out of one of them, a hunt was organized; the wolf vanished, but the hunters found a man—Peter Stubbe—walking towards Cologne in the area where the wolf had apparently vanished.
Under torture Stubbe confessed to being a werewolf, claiming that he was a witch and that the Devil had given him a magic belt (which was never found) which enabled him to transform himself.
He admitted to incest with his sister and daughter, with whom he had had a child.
He claimed that he had killed many children, as well as large numbers of sheep, lambs, and goats, over a period of twenty-five years.
He was broken on the wheel, his flesh pulled off with red hot pincers, and then decapitated; his daughter and sister were sentenced to be burned.

In mediaeval Europe, wolves were the commonest and most dangerous beasts of prey, and the sexual obsessions that drove Isobel Gowdie caused sexually frustrated peasants to identify with wolves.
But the most curious question is how far their obsession caused actual physical changes.
William Seabrook has a remarkable description of how a Russian emigrée woman meditated on hexagram 49 from the
I Ching,
whose meaning is associated with an animal’s fur, and with moulting.
She imagined herself to be a wolf in the snow, then began to make baying noises, and slaver at the mouth.
When one of the witnesses attempted to wake her up, she leapt at his throat and tried to bite it.
In the case of Gilles Garnier, executed as a werewolf in 1574, he seems to have carried out the attacks on children either in the shape of a man or a wolf.
The charge, drawn up at Dôle, alleged that he had seized a 12-year-old girl and killed her in a vineyard with his hands and teeth, then dragged her along the ground—with his teeth—into the wood at La Serre, where he ate most of her.
He so enjoyed it that he took some home for his wife.
(This does not indicate that she was also a
loup-garou
; three hundred years later, in the same area, a peasant named Martin Dumollard made a habit of murdering girls that he lured into lonely places, and taking their clothes to his wife.
He would say, ‘I’ve murdered another girl,’ and then go off with a spade.
She seems to have regarded these activities as a sign of mild eccentricity.) Garnier killed a 12-year-old boy in a wood, and was about to eat the flesh (‘although it was a Friday’) when he was interrupted by some men.
They testified that he was in human form, and Gamier agreed.
But he insisted that he was in the shape of a wolf when he strangled a 10-year-old boy and tore off the leg with his fangs; he does not explain how a wolf could strangle anybody.
He also attacked another 10-year-old girl—again wearing his wolf-shape—but was forced to flee when interrupted; she died of her wounds.
On this occasion, the peasants who interrupted Garnier saw him as a wolf, but nevertheless thought they recognised Garnier’s face.
He was sentenced to be burned alive.

The rational explanation is that Stubbe and Garnier confessed to a great deal of nonsense under torture, and this is possible.
But it is surely more significant that the great majority of werewolf reports date from the same period as the witchcraft trials in Europe, and that many ‘werewolves’, like the Gandillons, confessed to being witches.
Our study of witchcraft has left no doubt that the majority of cases were miscarriages of justice, but that ‘real witchcraft’ undoubtedly existed in Europe, and that many witches had ‘intercourse’ with spirits they believed to be demons.
We have also considered many cases of African witchcraft in which the sorcery undoubtedly worked, and even one in which a Catholic priest vouched that a man changed himself into a cassowary.

In cases of vampirism, it seems a reasonable assumption that the vampire is a ‘hungry ghost’ or earthbound spirit; in cases of lycanthropy, it seems clear that individuals with a taste for sorcery or witchcraft have attempted to invoke spirits in order to change into a wolf.
In effect, such individuals were inviting the spirits to possess them.

And, as in the case of vampirism, there seem to be powerful sexual undertones.
In discussing werewolves in
The Occult,
I have pointed out that many modern sex killers—for example, the child-murderer Albert Fish and the necrophile Ed Gein—have behaved very much like the traditional idea of the werewolf.
If Fish and Gein had been ‘witches’, it is easy to imagine them performing rituals to invoke spirits until they genuinely felt they had been transformed into beasts of prey.
But how far would this cause actual physical changes?
In the Gandillon case, we note that the 16-year-old victim, Benoit Bidel, said that the ‘wolf had human hands, while in the Gamier case, Gamier confessed to
strangling
a young boy.
And peasants who interupted Gamier as he was attacking a 10-year-old girl said they thought they recognised his face.
It certainly sounds as if the ‘wolf remained in many respects human—rather like the upright beast into which Lon Chaney is transformed in the film of
The Wolf Man.

In his classic work
Man into Wolf,
the Jungian psychologist Robert Eisler suggests that early man had to transform himself from a herbivorous ape into a carnivore struggling for supremacy with other carnivores, and that in the course of this battle, he deliberately acquired something of the ferocity of the wild animal.
In his novel
Steppenwolf,
Hermann Hesse writes of a quiet, scholarly man who likes to imagine himself transformed into a wolf of the steppes, and who writes in a poem about attacking a girl:

The lovely creature I would so treasure,
And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
I would drink of her red blood full measure,
Then howl till the night went by.

We should also bear in mind Allen Kardec’s remark that spirits are able to ‘possess’ those whose affinities they share, and that many sex killers—from the 19th century American mass murderer H.
H.
Holmes to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper—have believed themselves possessed by the Devil.
Is it not conceivable that lychanthropy, like vampirism, should be understood as a special case of ‘demoniacal possession’?

As we have seen in the chapter on witchcraft, the occult tradition recognises another type of spirit, the nature spirit or ‘elemental’—the psychic Geoffrey Hodson described the ‘huge, crimson, bat-like thing’ that he saw in the Lake District.

Like the vampire and the werewolf, the elemental can be found in all mythologies of the world.
The name obviously implies that such entities are connected with the ‘four elements’ of the ancient philosophers—earth, air, fire and water—(respectively gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and undines).
And since we now know that there are ninety-two natural elements, it would seem that we can at least dismiss this notion without fear of being accused of scientific materialism.

On the other hand, the Cambridge don Tom Lethbridge (whom we met in an earlier chapter; see Pp.
210
ff) was convinced that there was some scientific foundation for the belief in elementals.
When Lethbridge was eighteen, he and his mother had gone for a walk in the Great Wood near Wokingham, and, at a certain spot, had both experienced a sense of deep depression.
A few days later they heard that the body of a suicide had been discovered a short distance from where they were standing.

Forty two years later, after he had retired to an old house in Devon, Lethbridge and his wife Mina went out one Sunday afternoon to collect seaweed for the garden from nearby Ladram Bay.
It was a grey, damp day in January, and almost as soon as they walked on to the beach, both felt as if they had ‘stepped into a kind of blanket, or fog, of depression and .
.
.
fear.’
Mina came hurrying back from the other end of the beach, saying: ‘I can’t stand this place any longer.
There’s something frightful here.’

The following Sunday they returned to Ladram beach.
Again they encountered the same ‘fog of depression’ at the same place.
He noted that it was close to a spot where a tiny stream ran down from the cliff.
When they went to the spot where Mina had experienced the depression the previous week, it was overwhelming, ‘so strong as to make me feel almost giddy’.
He likened it to being in bed with a high temperature when one is full of drugs.
They went to the cliff top and Tom began to make a sketch while Mina wandered off.
As she stood on the edge of the cliff, she experienced a sensation as if someone was urging her to jump.

Back at home, Tom thought he saw a clue.
Lethbridge was an excellent dowser, so good that he often used it in his archaeological work.
On one occasion, as an experiment, he had allowed a friend to blindfold him then lead him over ground that contained volcanic dykes; his dowsing-rod had located every one of them.
Dowsing, he was convinced, was some kind of response to the electrical field of water.
(If he had known about split-brain physiology, he might have carried his speculations further and suggested that it is the right hemisphere that responds.) But suppose this ‘field’ could
record
emotions?
Lethbridge was not, apparently, aware of Sir Oliver Lodge’s ‘tape recording’ theory of ghosts (see
page 211
), but the theory he came to formulate was in many ways similar: that when strong emotions occur in certain places, they are somehow recorded, and can be ‘picked up’ later by someone who is sensitive to such things.
This, he thought, explained the feeling of depression in the Great Wood; the emotions of the man who had committed suicide lingered like a bad smell.