Possession

 

Recent Philippine history has been aptly described as “four hundred years in a convent, followed by fifty in Hollywood”. But there is obviously more to it than that. Long before either Spanish or American colonisation, the islands of the archipelago were a patchwork of well over a hundred distinct linguistic, cultural and racial groups – many of which still survive.

Cagayan Valley in north-eastern Luzon is home to one such community – an Igorot or mountain people who are marked by Christianity and post-war developments, but nevertheless leave all the most important decisions of their lives to solemn rituals that involve animal sacrifice and lead to consultation with the spirits. Communion is accomplished by aniteras or female shamans who are now rare, but carry on like gently beating hearts in dying tribal life. It was to meet one such woman that I made the long journey from Bayombong up into the forests of the Cordillera. I spent several bewitching weeks living in the old lady’s compound, watching the daily work of weaving and basket making, taking part in the evening rituals of healing and spirit worship. It was an altogether magical time, but one I remember best for my involvement in what I can only think of as a kind of exorcism.

A child was brought to the aniteras suffering from a complaint like none I have ever seen. He was said to be ten years old, and from the right side he looked about that age; but from the left, he had the appearance of an aged and diseased dwarf. From the front, you could see a line running down the centre of his body, as though the Hollywood part of his heritage had spent long hours in makeup that morning, doing their best to make one half of his body look like something designed to be exhumed by Vincent Price.

I can joke about it now, but the effect was truly horrible. The hair on the right side of his head was dark and glossy, while that on the left was dank and lifeless. One eye was clear and bright, the other squint and rheumy. Half his teeth were widely spaced and drawn out into fangs by the retreat of bloody gums, and the skin on that side of his face and down his left arm was covered in running sores. He walked slowly and with obvious pain, hunched with every other step over a left leg shortened several inches by a clawed foot. And when he spoke, which he did rarely, it was out of the twisted left side of his mouth in a snarl and in a language which nobody there understood. Nobody except me. I was astounded to hear, in amongst the deep-throated growl, a few phrases in clear and ringing Zulu – the one African language that I was able to speak when I was his age. The words were odd ones and inappropriate to that situation, but they left me feeling very vulnerable, as though I had just had my pocket picked.

The aniteras decided that the child was possessed by busao, an evil spirit – which, in the circumstances, seemed like the only reasonable diagnosis. And for three days she worked her wiles on the child, plying him with herbal potions, saturating him with ceremony and invocation. All to no avail. On the fourth night, however, she was otherwise occupied and the boy/dwarf was sitting on the ground next to a fire encircled by a group of elders, frightening me from time to time with occasional obscene twitches. The people and I were talking in reluctant Tagalog, which is no more their language than it is mine, just passing the time. Nobody was concentrating on the figure at the fire, he was not the subject of conversation and he was looking away from me into the flames. Then slowly, one by one, our gazes focused on him, the talk stopped, the air became almost heavy with condensed attention; and suddenly, as if by prearrangement, the old lady was there with us, standing tall on the edge of the circle. She hurled something into the fire, which flared up in a green blaze and she shouted very loud, very angry, a long quick string of words hurled directly at the afflicted boy.

There was a moment of silence, complete silence, then a terrible scream as the child threw himself down on the ground and began to thrash around violently. Again she shouted, and once more he screamed – a searing combination of pain and anger. It was a duel in sound, a pitched battle that raged and grew into a frenzy, and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun as the child hurled himself face down to the earth and lay still with one arm and shoulder in the glowing coals. For a long, awful moment nobody moved, and then the old woman stepped forward, gently lifted the body up and carried it away to her hut. And it was as though she took with it a great weight from our shoulders – a burden that we were not conscious of carrying, but that had been with us ever since the weird child had arrived.

The next morning, the boy was up early with the rest of the women, helping carry water. He looked straight at me for the first time and his eyes, both eyes, were clear. By that evening he was talking normally, in his own tongue, and walking with only the suggestion of a limp. And by the end of the week, his skin and teeth and hair, his whole appearance, were those of any other healthy, unmarked, active and attractive Filipino child.

I make no apologies for telling this story in such detail and without corroboration. I am not offering it in evidence, but as a starting point for a line of argument. Three things about it are of interest to me. The first is the laterality of the affliction – which, however it was caused, suggests at least a biological vector, involving just half of the brain. The second is the nature of the cure – which was both rapid and dramatic, suggesting the sort of catharsis that has mental rather than physical origins. And the third is the use of an unfamiliar language – in the presence of perhaps the only person out of fifty million in the Philippines who could have understood.

I am not claiming that the child was possessed. I discovered later that his problems had begun three years before when his mother was run over by a truck, killed and hideously disfigured as he was walking down the road with her – holding her right hand. There are, however, strong resemblances between this incident and several other accounts in the literature of what has been identified as demonic possession – most notably the case of fourteen-year-old Karen Kingston, who was cured of a similar affliction in North Carolina in 1974 by a group including three clergymen, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a general practitioner.276Karen’s problem also began with a murder. She watched her mother stab her alcoholic father to death with a butcher’s knife and retreated into a state of helpless shock, which turned gradually from withdrawal into ugly and violent deformity. She was sent to a home for retarded children and when orthodox medicine seemed incapable of preventing the transformation of this adolescent girl into a malevolent crone, an evangelical Baptist suggested exorcism. The ceremony began, in the presence of several clinical witnesses and nursing staff, with a minister addressing the child directly as though she were possessed by a devil. “In the name of Jesus, demon come forth! Leave! Leave!” And the girl responded in kind, in a deep voice. “This child is mine! Go away! Go away! Leave us alone!”

The rest of the treatment will be as familiar to those in our culture who know anything of the rites of exorcism, or have even seen the film of The Exorcist, as the tactics of the aniteras were to her Igorot audience. Events moved from blasphemy and poltergeist phenomena to a violent crisis precipitated by forcing the alleged demon to reveal its name. The moment that the symptoms could be gathered together into a separate identity, which chose the surprisingly undemonic name of “Williams”, Karen was free of it. And over the next three days, she regained her health and intelligence and control.

I gloss over these events in a paragraph, as though conversation and conflict with a demon were part of everyday experience, For most of us, of course, they are not. None of those present in North Carolina will ever forget what happened, any more than I can ignore the dramas I experienced in the Philippines. But to me the crucial aspect of both cases, is that events were clearly culturally determined. They followed the scenario appropriate to the circumstances, drawing on beliefs and expectations relevant to those involved. The cures remain mysterious, amenable one day perhaps to the liberal tenets of the fledgling science of psychosomatic medicine, but the process was essentially traditional and social. Which is why I believe it succeeded. I suggest that the clergyman who acted as Karen’s exorcist, also played the devil’s role – just as I somehow contributed a few words of Zulu to the Philippine performance. Neither of us was conscious of doing so, but I am convinced that at some saman level we were involved. We added social weight to an individual dilemma and helped move it to communal resolution.

Which brings me back to Adam Crabtree, the Canadian psychotherapist who is impressed with the way some of his patients behave during “theradrama” sessions. “I have often seen them,” he says, “operating from very little information, ‘become’ the person that they were portraying to such perfection that they even used that person’s characteristic gestures and peculiar phraseology.” He goes on to consider the way an actor experiences the enactment – “Often he has the sensation of being taken over and losing himself during the dramatization” – and suggests that this talent is more than just skill or telepathy. It involves the presence of the person being portrayed.67

I think he may be right.

Let me return, however, for the next step in the argument, to those Zulu phrases. Parapsychology has a name for the ability to use a language of which a person has no ordinary knowledge. It is called xenoglossy or “foreign tongue” and comes in two forms. “Recitative” xenoglossy is the utterance of fragments of a strange language, as one might parrot Latin phrases without having any idea of their syntax or actual meaning. And “responsive” xenoglossy, which is something far more intelligent, involving an ability to converse in the unknown language. The distinction is vital.124

It is possible to pick up a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and learn some words by rote. It is possible even to study the section in the front that deals with the rules of pronunciation and grammar, and acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these. But this will not immediately transform you into a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croat, able to talk your way around Yugoslavia. There is a gap between the theory and practice of any foreign language which requires just that – practice. You can read all the books in the world about cycling, but you still have to learn to ride by trial and error, by wrapping your muscles and your mind around the problem until the technique falls into place. Then it is yours for life.

The Filipino child was not speaking Zulu, he was practising recitative xenoglossy. There are many similar examples in the literature on spiritism – of mediums reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Greek or throwing in the odd word that turns out on later analysis to be Egyptian or even Hawaiian. Some of these borrowings can be traced to a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia or “hidden memory”, in which we dredge up information from unconscious areas without being aware of doing so. Early this century, for example, a spirit who called herself Blanche Poynings created some excitement in mediumistic circles. She appeared through a hypnotised woman and provided impressively detailed information about life during the time of Richard II and Henry IV. The case seemed to be one that provided evidence for survival, until it was discovered that there was a novel called Countess Maud which included the character of Blanche and all the historical detail; and the book had been read to the sitter as a child.81Latent memory of this kind clearly surfaces on some occasions, but it is far from being the whole answer. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances which could have brought a ten-year-old boy in the Cagayan Valley into contact with Zulu at any stage of his life. Nor am I disposed to assume that he was possessed by the discarnate spirit of a Zulu witchdoctor. It seems altogether more reasonable to assume that somehow, the mechanism is still far from clear, he was able to recite phrases that were familiar to me, borrowing them from my mind as I might purloin a word here or there from Serbo-Croat.

An outrageous conclusion? Perhaps, but there is some evidence for social leakage of this kind.

Alister Hardy once said: “I have myself become convinced of the reality of telepathy from two experiences I had many years ago, but they are anecdotal and of no scientific value; yet to me they are as important and as real as any observation I have ever made in natural history.” Both experiences involved a Mrs. Wedgwood in Lincolnshire, who entertained officers from Hardy’s regiment during World War I and claimed to be able to “see” things. On one occasion she suddenly said, “Oh, I can see your brother quite clearly. I can see him sitting at a table drawing what I think must be some engineering plan; on a large sheet of white paper I see him painting what seem to be squares and oblongs of red and blue.” What she described was exactly what Hardy himself had been doing all that afternoon, entirely on his own, preparing diagrams to illustrate a talk on military history. A year later, Hardy was working as a camouflage officer and spent hours painting a large sheet of white card with a vivid pink distemper and sitting, watching, waiting for it to dry before going out to dinner with Mrs. Wedgwood. Her first words to him were “Oh, what have you been doing? I see a large pink square on the table in front of you.”147These accounts, as Hardy said, are anecdotal. Many people have such experiences. I include his here partly because they are his, and partly because he was not only a great naturalist but an accomplished artist, someone with a good visual memory, on whom shape and colour made a strong impression. Strong enough, perhaps, to overflow.

Some of the best results in controlled tests on the transfer of information by apparently extrasensory means, come from the Ganzfeld or “whole field” technique, which tries as far as possible to reduce patterned sensory input. Subjects are put into a relaxed position, with halved ping-pong balls over their eyes, in diffuse light, to a background of unstructured “white noise”. This withdrawal of attention from the immediate environment seems to help in picking up weak signals.324 Someone in a dream state is presumably isolated in much the same way and there is a certain amount of evidence to show that sleepers are subject to telepathic impressions.380 But if I am right about broadcasts having particular biological relevance in crisis situations, then the leakage between organisms ought to be most marked when the transmission is strong – when the need is greatest. As it was for that Igorot child in the midst of his grotesque dilemma.

The nearest laboratory equivalent to the real life situation is perhaps the technique of “sensory bombardment”, in which subjects are given a comprehensive audio-visual experience inside a wrap-around cinema screen equipped with quadrophonic speakers. The effect of this combined assault is so overwhelming that most subjects put up their own private censors and slip into an altered state of consciousness. And in the process, some of them seem to gain access to information not normally available to them. They make saman contact.

The English philosopher H. H. Price came, I think, closest to a description of what happens in his analysis of shared awareness as a “field of interaction”. Sama is not a thing or an entity and contact through it does not have an all or nothing character. It is not a kind of knowing, so much as a mixture of fact, feeling and expectation – a shared experience. “Telepathy,” said Price, “is more like infection than knowledge.” And once infection has taken place, once information has been transferred, its nature and future is governed by the recipient, who controls the course of the disease.

If the child in the Philippines had been able not only to use a Zulu phrase or two, but to make appropriate reply in Zulu to my questions, he would have been showing responsive xenoglossy. Which would have been even more dramatic, and a sound basis for arguing that actual possession was indeed involved. As it was, he made no response at all, but there are those who have apparently done so. In addition to the unexpected Arabic and Serbo-Croatian talents of Billy Milligan, which remain unresolved, there are several other examples.

In 1974, a thirty-year-old lecturer in public administration at the Nagpur University in India suddenly underwent a profound change in character. One day, Uttara Huddar was a quiet, single woman with modern tastes, whose home language was Marathi. The next, she dressed and acted like a married woman, spent much of her time in religious exercises, called herself Sharada – and spoke fluent Bengali. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, examined her in the company of Bengali experts, who not only declared her competent in the language, but doubted that anyone from Nagpur could speak it in the way she did, without any trace of Marathi accent. Uttara’s family insist that she never learned, nor had the chance to learn, Bengali. Yet she undoubtedly does speak it – at least during those periods, which may last from one day to several weeks at a time, when she appears to become Sharada and has to give up teaching.353A skill of this order, apparently acquired without the usual training and practice, deserves to be regarded as truly paranormal. I can see no way that it can be explained by telepathy, saman contact, social facilitation or access to a collective unconscious. Knowledge of, and active use of, a language are very different things. One brain might have access to the information in another, but it is very difficult to conceive of any way that a muscular skill could be transmitted. Speaking a strange language requires long and arduous training of the muscles of the tongue and lips and it is hard to see how such control could be achieved – even by a brain transplant. And yet … I could be underestimating our ability to adapt. There are at least two other well-documented records of people who appear to have suddenly acquired manual skills that require an equivalent degree of practice and control.

In 1961, following the death of her husband, a British housewife called Rosemary Brown began to play the piano well enough to give accomplished performances of difficult compositions. These were unknown to the world of music, but their style was familiar. So they should be, says Mrs. Brown, because the composers are Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven and Monteverdi, who “take over my hands like a pair of gloves”.34In 1968, following an outbreak of poltergeist activity in his family home, Matthew Manning realised that he was somehow responsible and began to exploit and direct the phenomenon. He produced “automatic writing” in a variety of scripts, including Arabic, and even more impressively – a portfolio of “automatic drawings” in the style of Dürer, Picasso, da Vinci, Beardsley and Klee. Although Manning has no appreciable artistic talent in his own right, the drawings are highly accomplished, done very quickly, always in the distinctive style of a particular well-known artist, but are not always reproductions of any known work. “It’s not me,” says Manning, “I simply switch on the energy.”234

The sudden acquisition of linguistic, musical and artistic skills presents a real problem for any explanation of the paranormal. They seem to rule out any possibility of telepathy or extrasensory perception – even of the more naturalistic saman kind I have been suggesting. Which would appear to leave us with just two other possibilities: true possession – the actual invasion of an alien entity; or reincarnation – which in the final analysis amounts to the same thing, except that the entity involved is dead.

I have philosophic and biological problems with both suggestions, and intend to deal with these later, but want first to take a closer look at the actual limits of the senses. They can be surprisingly elastic.

BEYOND SUPERNATURE.

 by Lyall Watson