Life Before Life A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lifes

“Read on, and learn that evidence may answer – sooner than you expected – the most important question we can ask ourselves: What happens after death?”
–IAN STEVENSON, M.D.

FOR THE PAST FORTY YEARS, doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center have conducted research into young children’s reports of past-life memories. Dr. Ian Stevenson, the founder of this work, has always written for a scientific audience. Now, in this provocative and fascinating book, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist who currently directs the research, shares these studies with the general public. Life Before Life is a landmark work, one that has the potential to challenge and ultimately change our understanding about life and death.

Children who report past-life memories typically begin talking spontaneously about a previous life when they are two to three years old. Some talk about the life of a deceased family member, while others describe the life of a stranger. They may recount details about previous family members, events in the previous life, or the way they died in that life. The children tend to show a strong emotional involvement with the apparent memories and often cry to be taken to the previous family. In many cases, parents have taken their children to the places they named, where they found that an individual had died whose life matched the details given by the child. During the visits, some children have recognized family members or friends from that individual’s life. Many children have had birthmarks that matched wounds on the body of the deceased individual.

Researchers have studied more than 2,500 such cases, and their careful investigations have produced an impressive body of work. The Journal of the American Medical Association stated in a review of one of Dr. Stevenson’s scientific books that “in regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases…in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.”

Life Before Life explores the various features of this worldwide phenomenon, describing numerous cases along the way. We meet a boy in Michigan who, after being born with three birthmarks that matched wounds on his deceased brother, begins talking about events from his brother’s life; a boy in Turkey who gives a number of accurate details about a man, including his name, who lived five hundred miles away and died fifty years before the boy was born; and a girl in Sri Lanka who is able to recognize the family members of a deceased stranger as they are presented to her one by one, giving specifics about their lives that she could not have known from their appearance.

Dr. Tucker presents this material in a straightforward way, relating extraordinary stories that have been amassed with a scientific approach.

He then considers how best to interpret the evidence, and he lets readers reach their own conclusions—which, for many, will be profound.

JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., is a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, where he directs research into children’s reports of past-life memories at the Division of Personality Studies and serves as medical director of the Child & Family Psychiatry Clinic.

FOREWORD BY IAN STEVENSON, M.D.

Numerous authors have written about reincarnation, nearly always affirming it, some of them even purporting to describe its processes; a few writers dismiss the idea of reincarnation as absurd. Few of these authors seem interested in the question of evidence for or against reincarnation.

Jim Tucker has written a different kind of book. For him evidence has become central. Does it, he asks, support or even compel a belief in reincarnation?

One can easily think of objections to reincarnation: the paucity of persons who actually claim to remember a past life, the fragility of memories, the population explosion, the mind-body problem, fraud, and others. Jim Tucker discusses these, one by one and thoroughly. His book resembles no other, because it has no predecessor of its type.

I found particularly impressive Jim Tucker’s guidance of his readers.

He asks, almost requires, them to reason along with him as he describes and discusses each objection to the idea of reincarnation. He writes so well that he may beguile a casual reader into thinking he or she has no work to do. Read on, and learn that evidence may answer—sooner than you expected—the most important question we can ask ourselves: “What happens after death?”

INTRODUCTION

Some young children say that they have been here before. They give various details about previous lives, often describing the way in which they died. Of course, young children say a lot of things, and we may simply think that they are fantasizing as children often do. But what if, in a number of instances, people listened to the children and then tried to find out if the events they described had actually happened? And what if, when those people went to the places the children had named, they found that what the children had said about the past events was indeed true? What then?

The Case of Kemal Atasoy Dr. Jürgen Keil, a psychologist from Australia, listened as Kemal Atasoy, a six-year-old boy in Turkey, confidently recounted details of a previous life that he claimed to remember. They were meeting in the boy’s home, a comfortable house in an upper middle class neighborhood, and with them were Dr. Keil’s interpreter and Kemal’s parents, a well-educated couple who seemed amused at times by the enthusiasm that the little boy showed in describing his experiences. He said that he had lived in Istanbul, 500 miles away. He stated that his family’s name had been Karakas and that he had been a rich Armenian Christian who lived in a large three-story house. The house, he said, was next to the house of a woman named Aysegul, a well-known personality in Turkey, who had left the country because of legal problems. Kemal said that his house had been on the water, where boats were tied up, and that a church was behind it. He said that his wife and children had Greek first names. He also said that he often carried a large leather bag and that he only lived in the house for part of the year.

No one knew if Kemal’s story was true when he met Dr. Keil in 1997.

His parents did not know anyone in Istanbul. In fact, Kemal and his mother had never been there, and his father had only visited the city twice on business. In addition, the family knew no Armenians. His parents were Alevi Muslims, a group with a belief in reincarnation, but they did not seem to think that Kemal’s statements, which he had been making from the time he was just a toddler at two years of age, were particularly important.

Dr. Keil set out to determine if the statements that Kemal had given fit with someone who had actually lived. The work that Dr. Keil had to perform to find out if such a person even existed demonstrates that Kemal could not have come across the details of the man’s life by accident.

When Dr. Keil and his interpreter went to Istanbul, they found the house of Aysegul, the woman whom Kemal had named. Next to the house was an empty three-story residence that precisely matched Kemal’s description—it was at the edge of the water, where boats were tied up, with a church behind it. Dr. Keil then had trouble finding any evidence that a person like the one Kemal described had ever lived there. No Armenians were living in that part of Istanbul at the time, and Dr. Keil could not find anyone who remembered any Armenians ever having lived there. When he returned to Istanbul later that year, he talked with Armenian church officials, who told him that they were not aware that an Armenian had ever lived in the house. No church records indicated one had, but a fire had destroyed many of the records. Dr. Keil talked with an elderly man in the neighborhood who said that an Armenian had definitely lived there many years before and that the church officials were simply too young to remember that long ago.

Armed with that report, Dr. Keil decided to continue his search for information. The next year, he made a third trip to the area and interviewed a well-respected local historian. During the interview, Dr. Keil made sure he did not prompt any answers or make any suggestions. The historian told a story strikingly similar to the one Kemal had told. The historian said that a rich Armenian Christian had, in fact, lived in that house. He had been the only Armenian in that area, and his family’s name was Karakas. His wife was Greek Orthodox, and her family did not approve of the marriage. The couple had three children, but the historian did not know their names. He said that the Karakas clan lived in another part of Istanbul, that they dealt in leather goods, and that the deceased man in question often carried a large leather bag. He also said that the deceased man lived in the house only during the summer months of the year. He had died in 1940 or 1941.

Though Dr. Keil was not able to verify Kemal’s statement that the wife and children had Greek first names, the wife came from a Greek family.

The first name that Kemal had given for the man turned out to be an Armenian term meaning “nice man.” Dr. Keil could not confirm that people actually called Mr. Karakas that, but he was struck by the fact that, even though no one around him knew the expression, Kemal had given a name that could easily have been used to describe Mr. Karakas.

How did this little boy, living in a town 500 miles away, know so many things about a man who had died in Istanbul fifty years before he was born? He could not have heard about the man Dr. Keil had to work so hard to learn anything about. What possible explanation could there be? Kemal had a very simple answer: he said that he had been the man in a previous life.

Kemal is not alone in his claims. Children all over the world have described memories of previous lives. For more than forty years, researchers have investigated their reports. More than 2,500 cases are registered in the files of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. Some of the children have said they were deceased family members, and others described previous lives as strangers. In a typical case, a very young child begins to describe memories of another life. The child is persistent about this and often demands to be taken to his other family in another location. When the child has given names or enough details about the other location, the family often goes there to find that the child’s statements fit the life of a person who has died in the recent past.

Were Kemal and the other 2,500 children remembering what they thought they were remembering—events from lives they had previously experienced? That question has occupied researchers for years, and this book will attempt to answer it. Previously, we have only written for a scientific audience, but now that we have forty years’ worth of data, the general public deserves the opportunity to evaluate the evidence as well.

I will try to present it in as fair a way as possible so that you can judge for yourself. The phenomenon of young children reporting past-life memories is fascinating in and of itself, and as you learn about it, you can gradually form an opinion about what it means. You can eventually decide whether you think that children like Kemal really have come back after having previous lives—and whether the rest of us may be able to come back, too.
**
John McConnell, a retired New York City policeman working as a security guard, stopped at an electronics store after work one night in 1992. He saw two men robbing the store and pulled out his pistol.

Another thief behind a counter began shooting at him. John tried to shoot back, and even after he fell, he got up and shot again. He was hit six times. One of the bullets entered his back and sliced through his left lung, his heart, and the main pulmonary artery, the blood vessel that takes blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs to receive oxygen. He was rushed to the hospital but did not survive.

John had been close to his family and had frequently told one of his daughters, Doreen, “No matter what, I’m always going to take care of you.” Five years after John died, Doreen gave birth to a son named William. William began passing out soon after he was born. Doctors diagnosed him with a condition called pulmonary valve atresia, in which the valve of the pulmonary artery has not adequately formed, so blood cannot travel through it to the lungs. In addition, one of the chambers of his heart, the right ventricle, had not formed properly as a result of the problem with the valve. He underwent several surgeries. Although he will need to take medication indefinitely, he has done quite well.

William had birth defects that were very similar to the fatal wounds suffered by his grandfather. In addition, when he became old enough to talk, he began talking about his grandfather’s life. One day when he was three years old, his mother was at home trying to work in her study when William kept acting up. Finally, she told him, “Sit down, or I’m going to spank you.” William replied, “Mom, when you were a little girl and I was your daddy, you were bad a lot of times, and I never hit you!”

His mother was initially taken aback by this. As William talked more about the life of his grandfather, she began to feel comforted by the idea that her father had returned. William talked about being his grandfather a number of times and discussed his death. He told his mother that several people were shooting during the incident when he was killed, and he asked a lot of questions about it.

One time, he said to his mother, “When you were a little girl and I was your daddy, what was my cat’s name?” She responded, “You mean Maniac?”
“No, not that one,” William answered. “The white one.”
“Boston?” his mom asked.
“Yeah,” William responded. “I used to call him Boss, right?”

That was correct. The family had two cats, named Maniac and Boston, and only John referred to the white one as Boss.
One day, Doreen asked William if he remembered anything about the time before he was born. He said that he died on Thursday and went to heaven. He said that he saw animals there and also talked to God. He said, “I told God I was ready to come back, and I got born on Tuesday.”

Doreen was amazed that William mentioned days since he did not even know his days of the week without prompting. She tested him by saying, “So, you were born on a Thursday and died on Tuesday?” He quickly responded, “No, I died Thursday at night and was born Tuesday in the morning.” He was correct on both counts—John died on a Thursday, and William was born on a Tuesday five years later.

He talked about the period between lives at other times. He told his mother, “When you die, you don’t go right to heaven. You go to different levels—here, then here, then here” as he moved his hand up each time.

He said that animals are reborn as well as humans and that the animals he saw in heaven did not bite or scratch.
John had been a practicing Roman Catholic, but he believed in reincarnation and said that he would take care of animals in his next life. His grandson, William, says that he will be an animal doctor and will take care of large animals at a zoo.
William reminds Doreen of her father in several ways. He loves books, as his grandfather did. When they visit William’s grandmother, he can spend hours looking at books in John’s study, duplicating his grandfather’s behavior from years before. William, like his grandfather, is good at putting things together and can be a “nonstop talker.”

William especially reminds Doreen of her father when he tells her, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll take care of you.”

The idea that research could actually support the concept of reincarnation is surprising to many people in the West, since reincarnation may seem foreign or even absurd. People sometimes joke about their past lives or about their next one. The media document people dramatically describing lives from ancient times after being hypnotized. Reincarnation conflicts with the view of the majority of scientists that the material world is all that exists, and with many people’s religious beliefs.

Although some people find the idea of reincarnation to be ridiculous or offensive, others accept it on faith. The idea of reincarnation has appealed to many throughout history and into the present day, including Plato and the ancient Greeks, Hindus and Buddhists in Asia, various West Africans, many Native Americans in northwest North America, and even some groups of early Christians. Today, people in the world who believe in reincarnation may outnumber those who do not.

Such beliefs are not restricted to distant places. A surprising number of Americans believe in reincarnation—between 20 and 27 percent, depending on the poll—and a similar percentage of Europeans do as well. They cannot base this belief on the evidence for reincarnation since most people do not know about this research done at the University of Virginia. They often do not base it on formal religious doctrine since many believers attend churches that do not hold such a view. In fact, a Harris poll in 2003 found that 21 percent of Christians in the United States believe in reincarnation. The work described here may give such individuals support for their beliefs, but the researchers have not operated from the perspective of any particular religious doctrine or bias. Our goals have been to determine the best explanation for the statements by the children and to see if science should consider reincarnation as a possibility.

Most people probably hope that the answer is yes. After all, the idea that we cease to exist when we die is unsettling for many of us.[the idea that we don't cease to exist when we die is as much unsettling for some of us.VB] Though many in the United States may not be comfortable with the concept of reincarnation, the idea that part of us continues after we die is certainly appealing. If a deceased individual can survive death in some form and be reborn, then this means that we can continue on. Perhaps we can stay close to loved ones as they continue their lives or perhaps go to heaven or to other dimensions or who knows what. If these children are correct when they report that they lived before, then a part of us can survive the death of our bodies.

More specifically, the concept of reincarnation is compelling because the idea of being able to come back to try again may appeal to a lot of people. We cannot change the mistakes we have made in the past, but being able to try to do better the next time would certainly be a comfort.
If we get to live repeated lives, then perhaps we can make progress across lifetimes and become better people.
As much as we might wish to come back ourselves, we also wish that the people we love could do so. Surely, William’s mother must have been thrilled and comforted by her impression that her adoring father survived death and was reborn as her son. She had to deal with the horror of knowing that her father was murdered, and the idea that he was reborn as her son undoubtedly helped her change her grief into acceptance. We will meet others in this book who have dealt with similar losses: for example, a mother who watched her toddler die from cancer and a man whose father was closed off from his children before he died. In such situations, people would love the possibility of a second chance, of another opportunity to love and to share moments with the person who died. When any of us grieve for loved ones we have lost, we would certainly be comforted to know that those people have continued in some form and that they may come back into our lives.

Believing in that possibility may seem like wishful thinking and nothing more. But could life after death be more than wishful thinking?

Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality. Life Before Life will describe the cases researchers have collected that suggest that some people can survive death and be reborn into another life. This is not work that we have undertaken lightly. Researchers have addressed this issue with the same open-minded analytical approach that we would use with any question.

We have approached the work rationally instead of emotionally, so it is analytical rather than emotional. In addition, we have done this work with clearheaded care, not with religious zeal. Of course, many people believe in life after death based purely on their religious faith. Though I mean to take nothing away from faith, religious belief need not keep us from looking for evidence that supports the idea. Faith should not prevent us from trying to gain a better understanding of the nature of life, and we have made this a scientific endeavor rather than a religious one.

Life Before Life is therefore analytical rather than emotional or religious. I will not try to convince you that these cases prove that reincarnation occurs, to promote a theory. Instead, I will present the cases so that you can assess them and reach your own conclusions about what they mean. I will give my analysis of where I think the evidence leads us, but you should also be forming your own opinions along the way. In doing so, you should not be too quick to make a judgment, either that the cases are nonsense or that they are definitive proof of reincarnation. Instead, I would encourage you to take the same analytical approach that we have used in doing the research.

These cases are not about “proof,” they are about evidence. Since this work has taken place in the messy real world rather than a tightly controlled laboratory, proof is not possible. This is often the case in science and medicine. For example, many medications are judged to be helpful, because evidence indicates that they work even though they have not been absolutely proven to do so. Our work also involves an area, the possibility of life after death, that does not easily lend itself to being researched. Some people even say that researchers should not try to study the subject of life after death scientifically since it is so far removed from usual empirical areas of investigation. Nevertheless, there is no bigger question in the world than whether we can survive death, and researchers have attempted to collect the best evidence possible to answer it, evidence that I will share with you.

Each case of course has its unique aspects, but we can discuss typical features found in many of the cases. In later chapters, we will then examine in depth a number of cases that include each of these features.
**
The story of this research at the University of Virginia begins in 1958. By any standard, Dr. Ian Stevenson had achieved a successful academic career at that point. After graduating at the top of his medical school class at McGill University, he had initially studied biochemistry before becoming interested in psychosomatic medicine, the study of the connections between emotions and health. He had written extensively, almost always in medical journals but several times also in Harper’s Magazine and The New Republic, and by 1958, he had seventy publications to his credit. A year earlier, he had become the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia at the unusually young age of thirty-nine.
Along with these accomplishments, Dr. Stevenson was interested in paranormal phenomena—ones beyond current scientific explanation.

When the American Society for Psychical Research announced a contest in 1958 for the best essay on paranormal mental phenomena and their relationship to life after death, he submitted the winning entry, entitled, “The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations.” In this essay, he reviewed forty-four cases that had previously been published of individuals from various parts of the world who had described memories of previous lives. The reports came from a number of sources—books, magazines, and newspapers. Almost all of the most impressive cases involved children who were under the age of ten when they first reported the memories, and in many of them, the children were three years old or younger. Dr. Stevenson was struck by the pattern of children from very different places making similar statements about past-life memories. As he said later, “These forty-four cases, when you put them together, it just seemed inescapable to me that there must be something there.” He ended the paper by saying that the evidence he presented did not permit any definite conclusion about reincarnation, but he felt that more extensive study was justified.

After the paper was published in 1960, Dr. Stevenson began to hear about new cases. After learning of four or five cases in India and one in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), he took a trip to investigate. Once he got to India, he was surprised by how many cases he found. In four weeks, he investigated twenty-five cases. Likewise, he visited Ceylon for one week and found five or six cases. He concluded that children reported memories of previous lives much more frequently than anyone had previously known.

One person who read Dr. Stevenson’s essay was Chester Carlson, the inventor of the photocopying process that formed the basis for the Xerox Corporation. His wife, Dorris Carlson, had gotten him interested in parapsychology. After reading the essay, he contacted Dr. Stevenson to offer financial support. Dr. Stevenson initially declined the offer, because he was busy with his other work, but as he collected more cases and became increasingly intrigued by what he found, he accepted funding support from Carlson.

In 1966, he published his first book on the topic, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Dr. Stevenson had worked hard to verify independently what the twenty children had said and how well their statements matched the lives of the individuals the children were thought to remember. The book consisted of very detailed reports of cases from India, Ceylon, Brazil, and Lebanon that included lists of every person Dr. Stevenson interviewed about each case, along with lengthy tables in which each of the child’s statements about a previous life was listed along with the informant for that statement and the person or persons who had verified that the statement was correct for the life of the deceased individual. Dr. Stevenson presented the cases in an objective, evenhanded manner, and he discussed their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

A number of journals, including the prestigious American Journal of Psychiatry, gave the book positive reviews, with reviewers often noting Dr. Stevenson’s painstaking work and objectivity, and it has continued to be well regarded over the years because of those features.

With the help of assistants, Dr. Stevenson was soon finding cases in a number of countries, and he made trips to India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Lebanon, Thailand, Burma, Nigeria, Brazil, and Alaska. After publishing Twenty Cases, he also began to learn of occasional cases in this country.

With Carlson’s funding, Dr. Stevenson was able to step down as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry in 1967 to focus full-time on his research. The dean of the medical school, who did not approve of the work, was happy to see Dr. Stevenson step down, and he agreed to allow the formation of a small research division, now known as the Division of Personality Studies, where the work would take place.

The following year, Chester Carlson died suddenly of a heart attack. Since the division was dependent on Mr. Carlson’s funding in order to operate, Dr. Stevenson assumed that he would have to try a return to more routine research. Carlson’s will was then opened, and he had left one million dollars to the University of Virginia for Dr. Stevenson’s work.

At that point, controversy broke out regarding whether the university would accept the money, given the unusual nature of the research. Universities are not in the habit of turning down million-dollar gifts, but the situation clearly made some people uneasy. The university eventually did decide to accept the money since it had been given to support scholarly work, and the work continued.

Dr. Stevenson wrote more books about the cases, and these continued to be well received by at least some in the field. In reviewing one, Lester S. King, the Book Review Editor of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote that “in regard to reincarnation [Stevenson] has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.” He also added, “He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”

In 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Dr. Stevenson’s reincarnation work. It included a paper by Dr. Stevenson and commentaries on it from several others. Dr. Harold Lief, a well-respected figure in the field of psychiatry, wrote one of the commentaries. He described Dr. Stevenson as “a methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side.”

He also wrote, “Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known … as ‘the Galileo of the twentieth century.’ ” Dr. Stevenson gradually got others interested in investigating cases.

Satwant Pasricha, a psychologist in India, began assisting Dr. Stevenson on the cases there, and she continues to research them today. Erlendur Haraldsson, a psychologist at the University of Iceland who had a long history in experimental psychology, became interested in the cases in the 1970s, and he has studied them ever since. Antonia Mills, an anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from Harvard, began assisting Dr. Stevenson on cases in northwest North America, and she has since investigated cases independently there and in India. Jürgen Keil, who investigated Kemal’s case in the Introduction, is a psychologist at the University of Tasmania who was able to establish new contacts in Turkey, Thailand, and Myanmar in order to study cases in those locations. In addition, he and I made two trips to Thailand and Myanmar to study cases together, and I will be describing some of those later in the book. Dr. Stevenson investigated most of the cases from Asia that I will discuss, and the end notes at the back of the book list the references for his detailed reports of the cases.
He became particularly interested in cases in which a child was born with a birthmark that matched a wound on the deceased individual. He believes in strength in numbers, so he held off publishing any of these cases until he could publish a series of them in a book. After several delays, he published Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects in 1997. The work is massive— 2,200 pages long in two volumes—and it includes detailed reports of 225 cases along with pictures of the various birthmarks. Dr. Stevenson published it as he approached his eightieth birthday. Though Reincarnation and Biology in some ways represented the culmination of his decades of work, he was still not done and continued to write and research cases.

I came onto the scene in 1996, and I eventually left my private practice in psychiatry to pursue this research. Recently, I have been focusing on American cases. Though they are harder to find here, American cases occur without the cultural factors that some critics hold responsible for cases in other parts of the world. I will use a number of these American cases to illustrate the various aspects of the experiences.

When I do, I will change the names of the children and other identifying details. I will do so for the international cases as well unless a case report has already been published that used the child’s real name.

As for Dr. Stevenson, he has continued to show enthusiasm for the work. He retired in 2002, perhaps with a reluctance that few people in their eighties would feel toward retirement, partly to focus more on his writings but also to spend more time with his wife, Margaret. He had talked about cutting back on the research trips for years but had failed to do so. Even after he retired, he took one final “final trip” to India.

Margaret once said that she did not mind his taking the trips, but she wished that he would stop referring to each one as the last. He wrote yet another book in 2003—European Cases of the Reincarnation Type—and continued to work on other papers and book projects. His publications now number more than 290.

Jim B. Tucker 

Pulp Fiction - review

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite movies. I didn’t want to like it. I didn’t even want to see it. Everything I’d heard made me think it would be thoroughly nihilistic and quite unpleasant. But then someone at a party described Pulp Fiction as a movie about “greatness of soul at the end of history.” That caught my attention, because at the time I immersed for the nth time in Plato’s Republic, the core of which is an account of the human soul, as well as Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, from which Francis Fukuyama derived his “end of history” trope.

The very idea of mentioning Plato and Hegel in the same breath with Quentin Tarantino may seem absurd, but bear with me. Pulp Fiction is not a decadent film. It is a film about the most fundamental metaphysical and moral choices we can make—that just happens to be set in the midst of the criminal underclass of a decadent society. 

The basic issue to be decided is whether to live according to material or spiritual values—to satisfy one’s individual desires or to subordinate these to serve something higher: the common good, one’s personal sense of honor, or a religious calling. This deep seriousness makes Pulp Fiction more than just clever, dark-comic nihilism. It is a genuinely great movie.

The three main characters of Pulp Fiction are two hit men, one black (Jules Winnfield, brilliantly played by Samuel L. Jackson) and one white (Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta), and a corrupt boxer, Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis).

Each of these men represents a particular spiritual type, defined in terms of which part of his soul rules the others. Jules Winnfield is a spiritual man, meaning that in a conflict between spiritual and material considerations, he follows the spiritual path. Butch Coolidge is an honor-driven man, meaning that in a conflict between honor and the satisfaction of his desires (even to the point of preserving his life), he chooses honor. Vincent Vega is ruled entirely by his desires, meaning that in a conflict between his desires and honor or spiritual motives, he chooses his desires.

These types of individuals correspond to the three fundamental Indo-European social “functions”/castes as explained by Georges Dumézil and reflected in Plato’s Republic. The spiritual man corresponds to the priestly function/caste. The honor-driven man corresponds to the warrior function/caste. The desire-ruled man corresponds to the economic function/caste.

Pulp Fiction tells the overlapping stories of these three men in a complex, non-linear fashion. The meaning of the movie becomes clearer, however, if we discuss the story in chronological order.

The Outline of the Movie

The titles in quotes are Quentin Tarantino’s. The others are mine.

Part 1: The Diner: Two criminals known as “Pumpkin” (Tim Roth) and “Honey Bunny” (Amanda Plummer) decide to rob a diner.

Part 2: The Killing: Hit men Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield kill several people and recover a briefcase containing contents stolen from their employer, gangster Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames).

Part 3: “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”: Vincent Vega takes Marsellus Wallace’s wife Mia out for dinner and dancing.

Part 4: “The Gold Watch”: Boxer Butch Coolidge double-crosses Marsellus Wallace and prepares to flee town when he discovers that he must return to his apartment to recover his father’s gold watch. (The prologue of this scene is a flashback that explains the significance of the watch.)

Part 5: “The Bonnie Situation”: Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield must dispose of the body of one of their associates who is accidentally shot in their car in broad daylight.

Part 6: The Diner Again: After disposing of the body, Vincent and Jules decide to have breakfast at a diner, only to have their meal interrupted by Pumpkin and Honey Bunny’s robbery.

The Chronology of Events

1. The flashback to Butch’s childhood

2. The Killing

3. “The Bonnie Situation”

4. The Diner/The Diner Again

5. “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”

6. “The Gold Watch”

Pulp Fiction is set in Los Angeles and environs in the early 1990s. The movie was filmed in 1993 and released in 1994.

Jules Winnfield, the Spiritual Man

Let’s begin the story with the killing. It is early morning. Jules Winnfield has come to pick up Vincent Vega for a job. When we meet Vincent Vega he has just returned to Los Angeles from three years in Amsterdam.

After three years in one of Europe’s greatest cities, what has rubbed off on him? Vincent’s conversation focuses entirely on fast food, drink, and drugs: what the Dutch eat with their French fries, what the French call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese (Royale with Cheese—on account of the metric system), where you can buy beer, the laws governing marijuana use in Holland, etc. Vincent, as we come to learn, is not stupid. He is intelligent and witty. But he is totally ruled by his desires.

Vincent and his partner Jules Winnfield go to an apartment occupied by four young thieves, three white and one black, who have stolen a briefcase from the black gangster Marsellus Wallace, who is Vega and Winnfield’s employer. The two hit men are let into the apartment by the black thief Marvin, who has betrayed his white friends to the black gangster Wallace and his black enforcer Winnfield. After recovering the briefcase, Winnfield kills two of the white thieves, sadistically toying with their leader, Brett, including shooting him in the leg and quoting the Bible at him before finishing him off. This ends Part 2, “The Killing.”

The storyline resumes in Part 5, “The Bonnie Situation,” when the third white, who has been hiding in the bathroom, bursts out firing a .357 Magnum. All six shots miss. Jules and Vincent then shoot the gunman, collect the briefcase, and depart with Marvin in tow.

Jules interprets the fact that the bullets missed as “divine intervention.” “God came down from heaven and stopped the bullets.” Vincent interprets it as merely “luck,” a “freak occurrence,” “this shit happens.” These fundamentally different interpretations reveal fundamentally different characters. Vincent is ruled by his desires. Thus it makes sense that he would interpret the event in fundamentally materialistic terms as a meaningless freak accident. Jules, by contrast, gives the event a spiritual interpretation, revealing an openness to a higher reality and thus to motives higher than the satisfaction of mere material interests.

In the getaway car, Vincent turns to Marvin for his opinion of the event. Vincent is holding his gun, pointed at Marvin. Marvin, who seems none too bright, says he has no opinion. Then Vincent blows Marvin’s head off, drenching the interior of the car in blood. Vincent claims it is an accident, although he was none too pleased that Marvin had not mentioned that the third white thief was hiding in the bathroom with a “hand cannon.” Still, Vincent is a rather calculating and risk-averse individual. Before the hit, he meticulously questions Jules about the number of people they are facing and keeps insisting that they should have brought shotguns. Thus intentionally killing Marvin in a car in broad daylight seems uncharacteristically reckless.

To avoid being pulled over driving a car bathed in blood, Jules drives to the nearby house of his friend Jimmy (played by Quentin Tarantino himself). Jimmy is not amused. He tells his friends that he is not in the “dead nigger storage” business. His wife Bonnie, a nurse working graveyard at a hospital, will be home in an hour, and the killers, the corpse, and the car will have to be gone. Jules calls Marsellus, who dispatches Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel), who apparently has some experience in these matters. The whole scene is played in a darkly comic way, wallowing in the grossness of the blood and the corpse, as well as the moral sordidness of its casual disposal. Marvin is “nobody who will be missed,” and, truly, there are plenty more where he came from.

After Wolf disposes of the body and departs, “The Bonnie Situation” has been resolved, and the last part of the movie commences: Part 6, The Diner Again.

Jules and Vincent decide to have breakfast at a local diner (it truly has been a long morning). Vincent orders pancakes and bacon, Jules coffee and a muffin. When Vincent offers Jules some bacon, Jules refuses on the ground that pigs are unclean animals, to which Vincent retorts in a childish voice, “Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.” Again Vincent shows that he is fundamentally ruled by his desires, whereas Jules has higher standards, in this case aesthetic. (Jewish dietary laws are explicitly rejected as his motive, but spiritual men routinely codify their moral and aesthetic preferences as religious commandments.)

Then the conversation returns to the bullets that missed. Vincent again dismisses it as a freak accident. Jules again insists that it was divine intervention, a message from God. He has decided to quit “the life”—meaning the life of a killer—and “wander the earth like Kane in Kung Fu,” getting in adventures and meeting people until God tells him he is where he ought to be. Vincent, who is immune to the spiritual and focused entirely on the material, knows exactly what people with no jobs and no money who wander the earth are. They are bums. Jules is proposing to be nothing more than a bum. Vincent, whose entire life seems to be ruled by his digestive tract, then interrupts the conversation “to take a shit.”

When Vincent is in the toilet, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny launch their robbery, and the movie comes full circle. It goes quite well, until Pumpkin tries to take Marsellus’ case from Jules. Jules gets the drop on him, then in an absolutely riveting speech, explains that he will not kill them because he is “in a transitional period” (transitioning out of “the life”). His brush with death has brought on “a moment of clarity.” He now sees through the excuses and self-deceptions he has used to rationalize his life as a criminal. He sees that he has been nothing more than a tool of “the tyranny of evil men.” He keeps the briefcase. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny depart, followed by Jules and Vincent.

At this point, the movie ends, but we are not even half-way into the story. If Tarantino had originally meant to present the movie in chronological order, Samuel L. Jackson’s absolutely riveting delivery makes it easy to understand why he chose to make this the final scene. Everything after it would seem like an anticlimax.

Next in the story is Part 3, “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife.” Vincent and Jules, having departed the diner, arrive at a bar owned by their employer, Marsellus Wallace. The scene begins with Wallace speaking to Butch Coolidge, the boxer, but I will save my discussion of this scene until later, when I discuss “The Gold Watch.” Although we do not see it happen, Jules presumably tenders his resignation and departs on his spiritual quest. We learn nothing more about his fate.

Since Jules Winnfield is now departing from the story, this is the appropriate place to explore another way in which spiritual themes play a role in Pulp Fiction. What is in Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase? When Vincent opens the briefcase in The Killing, a golden light shines out of it. Vincent takes a drag on his cigarette and stares, transfixed. In The Diner Again, when Pumpkin demands that Jules open the briefcase, again we see a golden glow. With a look of awe on his face, Pumpkin asks: “Is that what I think it is?” Jules nods yes, then Pumpkin says, “It’s beautiful.”

An interpretation that I find appealing has been floating around the internet since 1994: The briefcase contains Marsellus Wallace’s soul.10 He has sold it, or it has been stolen, but in any case he wants it back. This interpretation fits in with a number of details in the movie in addition to the strange glow and the looks of awe: The combination of the briefcase is 666, the Number of the Beast. Jules tells Pumpkin that the briefcase contains his boss’s “dirty laundry,” and indeed, Marsellus Wallace has a lot of dirty laundry, a lot of sins upon his soul.

The first thing we see of Marsellus Wallace is the back of his shaved head. At the base of his skull is a large Band-Aid. One wonders if something has been removed. It has been suggested that his soul was removed through the back of his head, although the idea apparently has no basis in myth or tradition. If Jules and Vincent were trying to recover Marsellus Wallace’s soul, it would also explain why God might indeed want to intervene on their behalf. And as for the death of the four thieves: Well, they are the devil’s little helpers anyway.

Vincent Vega: The Desire-Driven Man

Although Jules Winnfield quits “the life,” Vincent Vega stays in Marsellus’s employ, and his next job is to take Mrs. Wallace out for a night on the town while Mr. Wallace is away.

Am I the only one to whom this does not sound like a good idea? During the opening sequence of The Killing, we learn that Marsellus’ white wife Mia (Uma Thurman) is a failed actress. (She was in a pilot.) We also hear that Marsellus had another of his associates, Atwan Rockamora, thrown off a fourth-storey balcony for giving Mia a foot massage. (Those of us who on this basis suspected Tarantino of being a foot fetishist were vindicated by the Kill Bill movies.)For Vincent, the first order of business in taking out his boss’s wife is to buy some heroin. He goes to the house of his dealer Lance (Eric Stolz). As Vincent waits for Lance, he listens to a disquisition on body piercing from Lance’s wife Jody (Rosanna Arquette). Having purchased and injected some spendy gourmet heroin, Vincent departs for the Wallace residence to pick up Mia.

We soon learn that Mia is cut from the same cloth as Vincent: she is witty, playful, and entirely dominated by her desires. Cocaine is her drug of choice, along with alcohol and cigarettes. Everything about this couple is extremely cool, from Vincent’s car to their clothes, their music, their witty repartee, and their wonderful dance scene. But their most disarming traits are their sensitivity and old-fashioned manners. It is impossible to dislike Vincent and Mia. It is hard not to envy them. Their lives would be a fun vacation from our lives. This whole segment of Pulp Fiction does full justice to both the allure and the emptiness of their postmodern hedonism.

Mia has Vincent take her to Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a ’50s nostalgia restaurant in which the booths are classic cars and the waiters and waitresses dress up like ’50s movie and pop stars. (The prices, however, are very much in the ’90s.) Vincent sums the place up brilliantly, in one of the movie’s best lines: “It’s like a wax museum with a pulse.” After Buddy Holly takes their order, Mia slips into the bathroom to snort some coke. After dinner, they doff their shoes then compete in, and win, the Jack Rabbit Slim’s twist contest. There is a great deal of clever dialogue, but the overall impression is that Vincent and Mia have only one use for their intelligence: to accumulate novel experiences and undergo pleasant sensations.

Cut to the end of the evening. Vincent and Mia stagger back to the Wallace residence. Having eaten, drunk, danced, laughed, and shot up, Vincent’s desires are now moving in a sexual direction. But first he has “to take a piss.” He ducks into the bathroom to get a grip on himself. Here we see the roles of reason and morality in a desire-dominated life.

For Plato, reason is a multifaceted faculty embracing everything from induction from sense experience to calculating options and outcomes to mystical insight into transcendent truths. All human beings use reason, but only the spiritual individual accesses its highest powers. Jules Winnfield’s conviction that God was sending him a message is an example of the highest, mystical function of reason, although it seems none too reasonable to the rest of us.

For desire-ruled individuals like Vincent, however, reason is merely a tool to satisfy their desires. It is empirical and calculative. Modern philosophy, no matter how rational it professes to be, tends to define reason merely as a tool for the satisfaction of desire, which makes even professed rationalists hedonists in the end.

Vincent wants to fuck Mia. (There is no point in putting a finer word on it.) This, he claims, is “a test of character,” and he shows that modernity defines character, like reason, in a way that leaves desire firmly in control. Vincent would enjoy fucking Mia. But he would not enjoy the probable consequences if Marsellus finds out. (Mia denies the foot massage story, but who knows . . . ?)

Vincent does not choose against sex with Mia based on his sense of the honorable or the sacred. Rather, he masters one desire by rationally counter-posing other, greater desires: the desires to remain alive and on good terms with his boss. Thus he resolves that he is going to have a drink, say goodnight, be a perfect gentleman, then go home and jerk off.

Vincent, in short, achieves self-mastery though rational self-indulgence. Reason for Vincent means hedonistic calculus. Character means the ability to sacrifice present pleasures for future pleasures. These are the highest virtues to which a hedonist can aspire.

While Vincent is communing in the toilet with the cleverer demons of his nature, Mia is getting bored in the other room. Vincent has gallantly offered Mia his coat, which she is still wearing. In a pocket, she finds his bag of heroin. Thinking it is cocaine, she snorts some of it, sending her into an immediate overdose. When Vincent finds her—glassy-eyed, foaming at the mouth, bleeding from the nose, a grotesque parody of Man Ray’s “Tears”—he panics. He is a no-doubt wanted criminal. So is his boss. So he cannot take Mia to an emergency room. Too many questions. So he drives her to the house of his dealer Lance, where, after a good deal of dark-comic hysteria, he revives Mia by stabbing her in the heart with a huge syringe full of adrenaline, shocking her back to consciousness. (“Pretty trippy” chortles Jody. Then her friend Trudi celebrates life with another bong hit.)

As the bedraggled pair stumble back to the Wallace house, they no longer look so cool and attractive. They look like death warmed over. One knows that all their coolness, cleverness, and wit—not to mention what passes for reason and character in their lives—will not be enough to save them from the consequences of their affluent hedonism: addiction, degradation, and death by misadventure. (As an “anti-drug” film, Pulp Fiction is second only to Requiem for a Dream.)

Postmodernism, Hedonism, & Death

The story of “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife” beautifully illustrates two philosophical theses: (1) there is an inner identity between postmodern culture and hedonism, and (2) hedonism, taken to an extreme, can lead to its self-overcoming by arranging an encounter with death—an encounter which, if survived, can expand one’s awareness of one’s self and the world to embrace non-hedonistic motives and actions.

“Postmodernism” is one of those academically fashionable weasel words like “paradigm” that have now seeped into middlebrow and even lowbrow discourse. Those of us who have fundamental and principled critiques of modernity quickly learned that postmodernism is not postmodern enough. Indeed, in most ways, it is just an intensification of the worst features of modernity.

For my purposes, postmodernity is an attitude toward culture characterized by (1) eclecticism or bricolage, meaning the mixing of different cultures and traditions, i.e., multiculturalism, and (2) irony, detachment, and playfulness toward culture, which is what allows us to mix and manipulate cultures in the first place. The opposite of multiculturalism is cultural integrity and exclusivity. The opposite of irony is earnestness. The opposite of detachment is identification. The opposite of playfulness is seriousness.

The core of a genuine culture is a worldview, an interpretation of existence and our place in it, as well as of our nature and the best form of life for us. These are serious matters. Because of the fundamental seriousness of a living culture, each one is characterized by a unity of style, the other side of which is an exclusion of foreign cultural forms. After all, if one takes one’s own worldview seriously, one cannot take incompatible worldviews with equal seriousness. (Yes, cultures do borrow from one another, but a serious culture only borrows what it can assimilate to its own worldview and use for its greater glory.)

The core of a living culture is not primarily a set of ideas, but of ideals. Ideals are ideas that make normative claims upon us. They don’t just tell us what is, but what ought to be. Like Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” ideals demand that we change our lives. The core of a living culture is a pantheon of ideals that is experienced as numinous and enthralling. 

An individual formed by a living culture has a fundamental sense of identification with and participation in his culture. He cannot separate himself from it, and since it is the source of his ideas of his nature, the good life, the cosmos, and his place in it, his attitude toward culture is fundamentally earnest and serious, even pious. In a very deep sense, he does not own his culture, he is owned by it.

In terms of their relationship to culture, human beings fall into two basic categories: healthy and unhealthy. Healthy human beings experience the ideals that define a culture as a challenge, as a tonic. The gap between the ideal and the real is bridged by a longing of the soul for perfection. This longing is a tension, like the tension of the bowstring or the lyre, that makes human greatness possible. Culture forms human beings not merely by evoking idealistic longings, but also by suppressing, shaping, stylizing, and sublimating our natural desires. Culture has an element of mortification. But healthy organisms embrace this ascetic dimension as a pathway to ennoblement through self-transcendence.

Unhealthy organisms experience culture in a radically different way. Ideals are not experienced as a challenge to quicken and mobilize the life force. Instead, they are experienced as a threat, an insult, an external imposition, a gnawing thorn in the flesh. The unhealthy organism wishes to free itself from the tension created by ideals—which it experiences as nothing more than unreasonable expectations (unreasonable by the standards of an immanentized reason, a mere hedonistic calculus). The unhealthy organism does not wish to suppress and sublimate his natural desires. He wishes to validate them as good enough and then express them. He wants to give them free reign, not pull back on the bit.

Unfortunately, the decadent have will-to-power too. Thus they have been able to free themselves and their desires from the tyranny of normative culture and institute a decadent counter-culture in its place. This is the true meaning of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism replaces participation with detachment, earnestness with irony, seriousness with playfulness, enthrallment with emancipation. Such attitudes demythologize and profane the pantheon of numinous ideals that is the beating heart of a living culture.

Culture henceforth becomes merely a wax museum: a realm of dead, decontextualized artifacts and ideas. When a culture is eviscerated of its defining worldview, all integrity, all unity of style is lost. Cultural integrity gives way to multiculturalism, which is merely a pretentious way of describing a shopping mall where artifacts are bought and sold, mixed and matched to satisfy emancipated consumer desires: a wax museum jumping to the pulse of commerce. This is the world of Pulp Fiction.

Yet, as Pulp Fiction also shows, even when desire becomes emancipated and sovereign, it has a tendency to dialectically overcome itself. As William Blake said, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” As much as hedonists wish to become mere happy animals, they remain botched human beings. The human soul still contains longings for something more than mere satiation of natural desires. These longings, moreover, are closely intertwined with these desires. For instance, merely natural desires are few and easily satisfied. But the human imagination can multiply desires to infinity. Most of these artificial desires, moreover, are for objects that satisfy a need for honor, recognition, status, not mere natural creature comforts. Hedonism is not an animal existence, but merely a perverted and profaned human existence.

If animal life is all about contentment, plenitude, fullness—the fulfillment of our natural desires—then a distinctly human mode of existence emerges when hominids mortify the flesh in the name of something higher. Hegel believed that the perforation of the flesh was the first expression of human spirit in animal existence.

This throws light on the discourse on body piercing delivered by Jody, the wife of Lance the drug dealer. Jody, it is safe to say, is about as complete a hedonist as has ever existed. Yet Jody has had her body pierced sixteen times, including her left nipple, her clitoris, and her tongue. And in each instance, she used a needle rather than a relatively quick and painless piercing gun. As she says, “That gun goes against the whole idea behind piercing.”

Well then, one has to ask: “What is the whole idea behind piercing?” Yes, piercing is fashionable. Yes, it is involved with sexual fetishism. (But fetishism is not mere desire either.) Yes, it is now big business. But the phenomenon cannot merely be reduced to hedonistic self-indulgence. It hurts. And it is irreversible.

Thus, in a world of casual and meaningless self-indulgence, piercing and its first cousin tattooing are deeply significant; they are tests; they are limit experiences; they are encounters with something—something in ourselves and in the world—that transcends the economy of desire. They are re-enactments of the primal anthropogenetic act within the context of a decadent and dehumanizing society.

But to “mortify” the flesh means literally to kill it. Each little hole is a little death, which derives its meaning from a big death, a whole death, death itself. And it is an encounter with death itself that is truly anthropogenetic—at least potentially so.

Jules and Vincent had a brush with death, but the bullets missed. For Jules, this brought on a moment of clarity. His self-deceptions were breached, he saw his life for what it really was, and he changed it. But the experience was wasted on Vincent.

Vincent and Mia Wallace also had a brush with death. (Mia’s death would surely have entailed Vincent’s death.) But again, it was wasted on Vincent. (We never learn how it affected Mia.)

For Hegel, however, the truly anthropogenetic encounter with death is not a mere “near miss,” but rather an intentionally undertaken battle to the death over honor, which is the subject of Part 4, “The Gold Watch,” to which we now turn.

The Gold Watch

We first encounter boxer Butch Coolidge at the beginning of Part 3, “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife.” The setting is a tittie bar owned by Marsellus Wallace. The time is mid-morning, so the bar is empty. Butch is a small timer near the end of his career. If he was going to make it, he would have made it already. So he is looking to scrape up some retirement money by throwing a fight. Marsellus Wallace offers him a large sum of cash to lose in the fifth round. Wallace plans to bet on Butch’s opponent and clean up.

Butch accepts the deal, then Wallace dispenses a bit of advice: “Now, the night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That’s pride fuckin’ wit ya. Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps. Fight through that shit. ’Cause a year from now, when you’re kickin’ it in the Caribbean, you’re gonna say, ‘Marsellus Wallace was right.’” Butch replies, “I’ve got no problem with that, Mr. Wallace.”

Just before Butch leaves, Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield enter, fresh from their encounter with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. As Butch approaches the bar, Vincent, who (as we all know) has had a really bad morning, taunts him as “palooka” and “punchy.” Butch is clearly incensed but lets it drop. Apparently, his pride is well in check.

We meet Butch again in Part 4, “The Gold Watch,” which begins with a flashback. It is 1972. Butch is about eight years old. He is watching TV when his mother introduces him to Captain Koons (Christopher Walken), who was in the same North Vietnamese Prisoner of War camp as Butch’s father, who died there.

Captain Koons has come to keep a promise to Butch’s father. He is delivering a wristwatch that was bought by Butch’s great-grandfather Ryan Coolidge when he went off to fight in World War I. Twenty years later, he gave it to his son Dane Coolidge, who went off to fight in World War II as a Marine. Dane was killed at the battle of Wake Island. Knowing that he had little chance of survival, he entrusted a man named Winocki, a gunner on an Air Force transport plane, with the task of delivering his watch to his infant son whom he had never seen. The gunner kept his promise, and that same watch was on the wrist of Butch’s father when he was shot down over Hanoi. To keep the watch from being confiscated, Butch’s father hid it in his rectum. When he died, he entrusted it to Captain Koons, who hid it in his rectum until he was released. “And now, little man,” says Captain Koons, “I give the watch to you.”

As young Butch reaches out for the watch, the older Butch wakes up with a start. It is the night of the fight. His trainer opens the door: “It’s time, Butch.” We hear the roar of the crowd.

Cut to the aftermath of the fight. A female cabbie, Esmeralda Villa Lobos, is listening to the radio as she waits outside the arena. We hear the announcers say that the other boxer, Floyd Ray Willis (a black man, according to the script) was killed and that Butch Coolidge fled the ring. Then Butch exits the arena from a window and jumps into the cab. He has broken his deal with Marsellus Wallace and is clearly on the run. But the question is: “Why did he fight to win, to the point of killing the other boxer?”

The natural interpretation is that his pride got the best of him. What stirred up his pride? The most plausible answer is his dream/recollection of the story of the gold watch. After all, everything in the story is connected to honor: the three generations of his family (patriotic folk from Tennessee) who fought in America’s wars, two of them giving their lives. The fact that we know that these wars were not in America’s interests, and that American men were sent to their deaths by aliens and traitors, does not alter the fact that the military cultivates an ethos of honor to overcome the fear of death. Furthermore, Winocki and Captain Koons both honored their promises to deliver the gold watch to the next Coolidge heir.

Thus the watch represents honor, the honor of fighting men, a fact that is not stained but enhanced by the detail that both Butch’s father and Captain Koons kept it hidden in their rectums for years. As Butch later says, his father “went through a lot” to give him that watch. What they went through commands respect.

So my initial interpretation was that Butch’s honor was stirred up by the recollection of the watch, thus he went into the ring and fought, not for money, but for honor. And since he had made a deal with Marsellus Wallace to throw the fight, he was risking his life to fight for honor. And he fought all-out, killing the other boxer. So Butch seems to have proved himself to be a man ruled by honor, not by desire.

Hegel on the Beginning of History 

The duel to the death over honor is a remarkable phenomenon. Animals duel over dominance, which ensures their access to mates. But these duels result in death only by accident, because the whole process is governed by their survival instincts, and their “egos” do not prevent them from surrendering when the fight is hopeless. The duel to the death over honor is a distinctly human thing.

Indeed, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel claims that the duel to the death over honor is the beginning of history—and the beginning of a distinctly human form of existence and self-consciousness.

Prehistoric man is dominated by nature: the natural world around him and the natural world within him, namely his desires. History, for Hegel, is something different. It is the process of (1) our discovery of those parts of our nature that transcend mere animal desire, and (2) our creation of a society in accord with our true nature.

When we fully know ourselves as more than merely natural beings and finally live accordingly, then history will be over. (History can end, because as a process of discovery and construction, it is the kind of thing that can end.) Hegel claimed that history ended with the discovery that all men are free and the creation of a society that reflects that truth.

When two men duel to the death over honor, the external struggle between them conceals an internal struggle within each of them as they confront the possibility of being ruled by two different parts of their souls: desire, which includes the desire for self-preservation, and honor, which demands recognition of our worth by others.

When our sense of honor is offended, we become angry and seek to compel the offending party to respect us. If the other party is equally offended and intransigent, the struggle can escalate to the point where life is at stake.

At this point, two kinds of human beings distinguish themselves. Those who are ruled by their honor will sacrifice their lives to preserve it. Their motto is: “Death before dishonor.” Those who are ruled by their desires are more concerned to preserve their lives than their honor. Thus they will sacrifice their honor to preserve their lives. Their motto is: “Dishonor before death.”

Suppose two honorable men fight to the death. One will live, one will die, but both will preserve their honor. But what if the vanquished party begs to be spared at the last moment at the price of his honor? What if his desire to survive is stronger than his sense of honor? In that case, he will become the slave of the victor.

The man who prefers death to dishonor is a natural master. The man who prefers dishonor to death—life at any price—is a natural slave. The natural master defines himself in terms of a distinctly human self-conscious-ness, an awareness of his transcendence over animal desire, the survival “instinct,” the whole realm of biological necessity. The natural slave, by contrast, is ruled by his animal nature and experiences his sense of honor as a danger to survival. The master uses the slave’s fear of death to compel him to work.

History thus begins with the emergence of a warrior aristocracy, a two-tiered society structured in terms of the oppositions between work and leisure, necessity and luxury, nature and culture. Slaves work so that the masters can enjoy leisure. Slaves secure the necessities of life so the masters can enjoy luxuries. Slaves conquer nature so masters can create culture. In a sense, the whole realm of culture is a “luxury,” since none of it is necessitated by our animal desires. But in a higher sense, it is a necessity: a necessity of our distinctly human nature to understand itself and put its stamp upon the world.

The End of History

Hegel had the fanciful notion that there is a necessary “dialectic” between master and slave that will lead eventually lead to universal freedom, that at the end of history, the distinction between master and slave can be abolished, that all men are potential masters.

Now, to his credit, Hegel was a race realist. He was also quite realistic about the tendency of bourgeois capitalism to turn all men into spiritual slaves. Thus his view of the ideal state, which regulates economic life and reinforces the institutions that elevate human character against the corrupting influences of modernity, differs little from fascism. So in the end, Hegel’s high-flown talk about universal freedom seems unworthy of him, rather like Jefferson’s rhetorical gaffe that “all men are created equal.”

The true heirs to Hegel’s universalism are Marx and his followers, who really believed that the dialectic would lead to universal freedom. Alexandre Kojève, Hegel’s greatest twentieth-century Marxist interpreter, came to believe that both Communism and bourgeois capitalism/liberal democracy were paths to Hegel’s vision of universal freedom. After the collapse of communism, Kojève’s interpreter Francis Fukuyama declared that bourgeois capitalism and liberal democracy would create what Kojève called the “universal homogeneous state,” the global political and economic order in which all men would be free.

But both capitalism and communism are essentially materialistic systems. Yes, they made appeals to idealism, but primarily to motivate their subjects to fight for them. But if one system triumphed over the other, that necessity would no longer exist, and desire would be fully sovereign. Materialism would triumph. (And so it would have, were it not for the rise of another global enemy that is spiritual and warlike rather than materialistic: Islam.)

Thus Kojève came to believe that the universal homogeneous state would not be a society in which all men are masters, i.e., a society in which honor rules over desire. Rather, it would be a world in which all men are slaves, a society in which desire rules over honor.

This is the world of Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” the world of C. S. Lewis’s “Men without Chests” (honor is traditionally associated with the chest, just as reason is associated with the head and desire with the belly and points below). This is the postmodern world, where emancipated desire and corrosive individualism and irony have reduced all normative cultures to commodities that can be bought and sold, used and discarded.

This is the end of the path blazed by the first wave of modern philosophers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, etc., all of whom envisioned a liberal order founded on the sovereignty of desire, in which reason is reduced to a technical-instrumental faculty and honor is checked or sublimated into economic competitiveness and the quest for material status symbols.

From this point of view, there is no significant difference between classical liberalism and Left liberalism. Both are based on the sovereignty of desire. Although Left liberalism is more idealistic because it is dedicated to the impossible dream of overcoming natural inequality, whereas classical liberalism, always more vulgar, unimaginative, and morally complacent, is content with mere “bourgeois” legal equality.

The great theorists of liberalism offered mankind the same deal that Marsellus Wallace offered Butch: “Fuck pride. Think of the money.” And our ancestors took the deal. As Marsellus hands Butch the cash, he pauses to ask, “Are you my nigger?” “It certainly appears so,” Butch answers, then takes the money. In modernity, every man is the nigger, the spiritual slave, of any man with more money than him—to the precise extent that any contrary motives, such as pride or religious/intellectual enthusiasm, have been suppressed. (Marsellus, a black man, calls all of his hirelings niggers, but surely it gives him special pleasure to deem the white ones so.)

History Begins Again

But history can never really end as long as it is possible for men to choose to place honor above money. And that is always possible, given that we really do seem to have the ability to choose which part of our soul is sovereign.

It is, moreover, possible as long as the examples of our ancestors, better men than ourselves, can still stir us. When Esmeralda asks Butch what his name means, he replies “I’m an American, honey, our names don’t mean shit.” It is one of the funniest lines of the movie, but also one of the saddest. Americans are such a sorry lot of spiritual slaves because we don’t know who we are. We don’t know who our ancestors are. We don’t know what our names mean. So we don’t have to live up to them. Or if we do know, we allow the Marsellus Wallaces of the world to bribe us into forgetting about it.

Of course “Butch” means something. It is a fighting man’s name. Butch is a fighting man, from a long line of fighting men. Although he fights for money, not honor. But then, when he has reached the rock bottom of spiritual sordidness—when he sells himself as the nigger of a black gangster—he redeems himself. This is what makes Butch Coolidge seem so heroic.

But then we discover that we were completely wrong. Butch stops to make a phone call, and we learn that he has taken Marsellus’s money then leaked the word that the fix was in, which tilted the odds dramatically in favor of his opponent. Then Butch bet all of Marsellus’s money on himself and beat the other boxer—and he had to beat him, so he fought all-out and killed him—in order to win a huge payout. So Butch turns out to be a bigger crook than Marsellus Wallace. And we all know what happens to people who steal from Marsellus Wallace.

Butch meets his French girlfriend Fabienne at a cheap motel. They are cute together, and she obviously wants to have his children, explaining at length about how she wants to have a large, perfectly round potbelly. They plan to leave town the next morning, but Butch discovers that Fabienne forgot to pack his father’s gold watch.

Again, Butch is faced with a conflict between honor and desire, a conflict in which his life is at stake. Honor tells him to retrieve the watch, although he knows that he will have to risk his life to do so, because Wallace will surely stake out his apartment. Desire, most eminently the desire to stay alive, tells him to take the money and run. So now we see, for real, what kind of man Butch is. He chooses honor, risking his life to retrieve the watch.

Butch cautiously returns to his apartment and retrieves the watch. Astonished at the ease, he ducks into his kitchen for a snack (he has had no breakfast). As he waits for the toaster, he is startled to see a submachine gun with a huge silencer lying on the counter. As he hefts the gun, he hears the toilet flush. The bathroom door opens, and there stands Vincent Vega, reading material in hand. The two men freeze, staring at each other. Then the toaster pops, breaking the spell, and Butch pulls the trigger, reducing Vega to a bullet-riddled corpse sprawled in the bathtub.

It could have been Jules Winnfield, but he followed his spiritual enthusiasm and left “the life.” Vincent, ruled by his desires, stayed in. Vincent, ruled by his desires, mocked Butch as “palooka” and “punchy,” daring him to retaliate. Which, eventually, he did. And given Vincent’s character, it is singularly appropriate that Butch got the drop on him while he was “taking a shit.”

Butch flees in Fabienne’s Honda. As he waits at a light, Marsellus Wallace crosses the street in front of him with coffee and donuts for the stake out. When the two men recognize each other, Butch floors it, running Marsellus down. But his car is hit by oncoming traffic. When Marsellus comes to and sees Butch, injured in the wrecked Honda, he pulls out a .45 and starts firing wildly as he staggers across the street. Butch ducks into a pawnshop, and when Marsellus follows, Butch knocks him down and starts punching him furiously: “Feel that sting? That’s pride, fuckin’ wit ya.”

Unfortunately, they have blundered into no ordinary pawnshop. Maynard, the shop-keeper gets the drop on Butch with a shotgun then knocks him out cold. When he comes to, he and Marsellus are tied to chairs in a basement dungeon with red S&M ball gags in their mouths. Maynard explains that nobody kills anyone in his place of business except himself or Zed, who is arriving presently. Zed and Maynard are two homosexual hillbilly sadists who apparently plan to rape, torture, and murder Marsellus and Butch.

When Zed and Maynard take Marsellus in the other room to reenact a scene from Deliverance, Butch manages to free himself. He could just sneak out, saving himself and leaving Marsellus to a well-deserved fate. But Butch can’t do it. He chooses a riskier but more honorable path. He decides to rescue Marsellus. He looks around for a suitable weapon. First he hefts a claw hammer. Then a small chainsaw. Then a baseball bat. Finally, his eyes light on a samurai sword—the perfect symbol of honor.

He returns to the dungeon. Zed is raping Marsellus (who does look just like a hawg—a roasted one, complete with an apple in his mouth) while Maynard watches. Butch dispatches Maynard and taunts Zed. Marsellus, in the meantime, gets up, grabs Maynard’s shotgun, and blasts Zed in the groin. At this point, Marsellus could have killed Butch as well. (Butch was very, very stupid to let Marsellus get the drop on him.)

But Marsellus responds to Butch’s gallant gesture in kind. He agrees to drop his grievance against Butch if he does not tell anyone about what has happened and if he leaves L.A. never to return. I know it is unlikely. But if he got his soul back, maybe it is starting to kick in. (But not soon enough to save Zed from a “medieval” fate.)

Butch accepts the deal and roars off on Zed’s chopper to meet Fabienne. They still have time to catch their train to Tennessee. And on that happy note, the story (as opposed to the movie) of Pulp Fiction ends.

* * *

Even its detractors admit that Pulp Fiction is a stylishly directed, superbly acted, darkly comic movie. I hope I have convinced you that it is a deeply serious movie as well. Yes, Quentin Tarantino is a thoroughly repulsive and nihilistic human being, and everything he directed before and since Pulp Fiction reflects that.11 But repugnant people create great art all the time, in spite of themselves. 

Yes, Pulp Fiction contains interracial couples, villainous bumbling whites, and noble, eloquent blacks. One just has to look beyond the casting to the story itself. But Pulp Fiction is only superficially anti-white. On a deeper level, it can aid us in rejecting modernity and recovering the spiritual foundations of something better.

Pulp Fiction is valuable for our cause as a critique of modernity in its final decadent phase, what Traditionalists call the Kali Yuga, Hegelians call the “end of history,” and idiots celebrate as postmodernity. Philosophically speaking, modernity is the emancipation of desire from reason, honor, culture, and tradition.

Pulp Fiction takes such philosophical abstractions and pairs them with unforgettably dramatic concrete images and events. Modernity is Marsellus Wallace telling us to fuck pride, take his money, and become his nigger. Modernity is coke, smack, and Jack Rabbit Slim’s. Modernity is Vincent Vega sprawled dead in a bathtub, Mia Wallace with a huge syringe stuck in her heart, and Jules Winnfield scooping up bits of brain and skull in the back seat of a blood-soaked car.

But Pulp Fiction does much more than just critique modernity. It also shows us an alternative. Not an alternative vision of society, but rather the spiritual basis of an alternative to modernity. Spiritually, modernity is the rule of desire. Part of the grip of modernity is that even people who intellectually reject it are still modern men who have no idea of how they could become anything else.

Most modern people lack the concepts necessary to think of themselves as anything more than desire-driven producer-consumers. Reason to them is just calculating options. Honor is just the narcissistic display of commodities that we are told symbolize status.

Pulp Fiction brilliantly concretizes and dramatizes the moments of decision when one chooses to be something more than a mere modern man: Jules Winnfield’s choice to follow his desires or his mystical conviction that God is sending him a message; Butch Coolidge’s choice to be a sneaky, bourgeois coward or a man of honor.

The spiritual man is Jules Winnfield, honestly confronting the fact that he has been lying to himself all his life, that he has been the tool of the “tyranny of evil men” (from Hobbes and Locke down to Marsellus Wallace), and instead “trying to be the shepherd.” The warrior is Captain Koons keeping his word and delivering the gold watch; the warrior is Butch Coolidge descending back into hell with a samurai sword to do justice. These are the kinds of men who can start history again and deliver our people from evil.

Plato claims that society is the soul writ large. If democracy is the rule of desire writ large, then the regime that corresponds to Butch Coolidge’s soul is a warrior aristocracy. The regime that corresponds to Jules Winnfield’s soul is a form of theocracy in which social order is based on a transcendent metaphysical order, what Evola called the idea of the Imperium. If Tarantino had tried to show us the political big picture, he would have gotten it all terribly wrong. But what he does show, he gets dead right. Mapping out the political alternative is our job.

Counter-Currents, June 29 & July 6, 2011

Spirit Release Therapy

 A REVISED EPISTEMOLOGY FOR AN UNDERSTANDING OF SPIRIT RELEASE THERAPY DEVELOPED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF F.W.H. MYERS

By  Terence James Palmer

Abstract

In this thesis I argue the case for a revised epistemology that will enable medical practice to understand more fully the relevance and validity of Spirit Release Therapy (SRT), as a clinical approach to releasing alleged discarnate spirits from the living, in its application for the treatment of a wide range of psychological and physiological disorders.

SRT is a modern clinical alternative to religious exorcism for the release of spirit entities from patients that has been emerging in psychiatry and clinical psychology since the early part of the twentieth century, especially in North and South America and in Western Europe. In contrast to positivist scientific assumptions that spirits are created in the minds of the superstitious or the mentally ill, SRT finds earthbound spirits of the deceased that are found to be attached in some way to the living. It treats these spirits with equal compassion to those presenting patients who are unwilling hosts to them. This compassionate approach of SRT contrasts with that of the Roman Catholic tradition which casts out spirits deemed to be ‘evil’ using its Rite of Exorcism. The general reaction from modern medicine to the proposition that spirits exist, is to reject it because there is no scientific framework that can accommodate it. Although there is no consensus within the Christian tradition that affirms the existence of autonomous spirits (with many believing in the reality of spirits and evil as symbolic and not metaphysical truths), the Catholic tradition relies on faith and non-rational beliefs in its justification for the eradication of what it consequently regards as inherently diabolical entities.

There is therefore a dichotomy between modern medicine and religious belief, but I shall argue that the gulf between these opposing positions can be bridged through an epistemological approach that is both grounded in subjective experience and validated by scientific enquiry. In this thesis I examine the relevance of this epistemological approach to the reality of spirit possession (and the practical procedures adopted in SRT for the possible dispossession of spirits) through an analysis of the conceptual framework and scientific methods of Frederic Myers (1843-1901), the 19th century researcher and co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research.

In Part I of this thesis I place spirit possession in a Western social and cultural context where I discuss the contemporary attitudes to spirit possession, which are themselves expressed and reinforced by an epistemology that is grounded in the empiricism of the social sciences, anthropology, psychiatry and the scientific study of beliefs.
Part II explains Myers’ 19th century methods and theories that challenge positivistic empiricism and Part III seeks to update these methods and theories within a 21st century context where they are applied to various enigmatic case studies that challenge modern psychiatry and clinical psychology. I have adopted this structure in order first to highlight some of the deficiencies of current scientific methods in making sense of spirit possession and second to raise important questions that remain unanswered by mainstream psychology, thereby further illuminating the limitations of the epistemological grounding of this discipline.
**
Treatment Approaches to Spirit Possession

Broadly speaking, there are three basic methods that have been traditionally used for treatment of the possessed. The first consists of trying to expel the spirit physically, by such means as bleeding, beating, or whipping the patient (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 13). It is this first method that was adopted by the caregivers in those cases cited by La Fontaine et al (2009).

The second method is to transfer the offending spirit to another body, usually an animal. 6 The third form, and arguably the ‘most frequently applied’ (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 13) is religious exorcism, which is driving the spirit out by conjurations, prayer and ritual. It was this third method that Cuneo sought to examine.

‘Exorcism’ 7 is no less an imprecise term than ‘possession’. It has been used for any prayerful act by a priest with the intention of releasing a demonic entity from a person or place (Baglio, 2009, p. 35). The same word has been used for a procedure lasting minutes and for one lasting weeks in which priests and others are involved in intense interaction with a person or place thought to be possessed or harassed by evil spirits. 8

Modern Christian ministry recognises the problems created by inappropriate beliefs in possession or suspicions that someone is experiencing some kind of paranormal activity and in England there is a national information infrastructure in place that is administered at diocesan level (Perry, 1987). According to Perry, the term ‘deliverance’ is adopted by the Anglican Church in preference to exorcism, and those who are experiencing disturbing psychic or spiritual phenomena are advised by Perry to contact their local parish priest, who will present their case to the specialist spiritual investigation team, which comprises deliverance ministers, psychiatrists and psychic investigators who will be able to advise a course of action depending on whether the disturbance is deemed to be caused by mental illness, paranormal activity or genuine spirit manifestation. 9

In addition to the above mentioned church initiatives, SRT is emerging as a collection of methods and techniques used by an increasing number of practitioners in a variety of professional therapeutic disciplines.

What is Spirit Release Therapy (SRT)? 10

Spirit Release Therapy is a term that is used by some practitioners, but not all, to describe a treatment modality that has evolved from the pioneering clinical experience of medical practitioners, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists who have encountered patients with illnesses that have not responded to traditional psychotherapy or psychiatric methods.

Such pioneers have treated them successfully using their own intuition (described below) and by responding to the expressed needs of the patient and those spirit entities that are encountered in dialogue, rather than treating them according to predetermined theories and the beliefs and assumptions of the therapist. SRT could therefore be described as a person centred, or perhaps a ‘soul’ centred therapy (Zinser, 2010).

Each practitioner of SRT has his or her own definition of their practice, but in order to introduce Spirit Release Therapy here I shall quote the definition offered by William Baldwin who writes:

Spirit Releasement Therapy comes under the broad category of Transpersonal Psychology methods, and is so named because it aims to release from the client / patient / host, any disembodied consciousness of any sort (Baldwin, 1995, p. 207).

Baldwin coined the term ‘releasement’ instead of ‘release’ to differentiate the releasing of spirits from other forms of release, but the term has not generally been adopted by other practitioners because it is seen as an unnecessary complication in the meaning of the term.

Baldwin’s definition is a simple one, but it incorporates a very wide diversity of spirit entities with the term ‘disembodied consciousness of any sort’, and it is part of the SRT practitioner’s art and skill to uncover the type of spirit (or spirits) that are affecting the patient.11 In Baldwin’s definition he uses the word ‘consciousness’ that implies a direct relationship between spirit and consciousness. A spirit can therefore be referred to as a ‘disembodied consciousness’. It is within the conceptual framework of Myers that the relationship between consciousness and spirit is explored in more detail in Parts II and III of this thesis.

Definitions of Autonomous Spirit Entities

SRT practitioners who define spirit entities according to their orientation can be divided loosely into three main groups: those practitioners who release spirit entities from places, such as Archie Lawrie (2003; 2005) of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR), and Linda Williamson (2006), and those who release spirits from people such as Carl Wickland (1924), Hans Naegeli-Osjord (1988) and William Baldwin (1995). Others, represented by the man-and-wife team of T & N O’Sullivan (1999), refer to themselves as ‘soul rescuers’ who have learned to tread the path of the shaman where they ‘communicate with the spirits and understand the rules of co-existence with the other world’ (O'Sullivan and O'Sullivan, 1999, xix). Archie Lawrie could be regarded by many as a ‘ghost’ hunter, but in contrast to other investigators of the ‘paranormal’ he enlists the aid of a medium to locate and communicate with those restless spirits that may be referred to as ghosts. Linda Williamson, in her book Ghosts and Earthbound Spirits (2006) remarks that mediums who are either aware of, or communicate with spirits are not able to arrive at a consensus on how ghosts or spirits are defined. Ghosts are generally deemed to be those spirits that inhabit houses, whilst others prefer to call them ‘earthbound spirits’ (Williamson, 2006, 11), and Spiritualists 12 refer to those they communicate with as ‘spirits’ (ibid). Williamson makes the distinction between spirits that exist in a spiritual domain, or spirit-world such as ‘guides’ and the spirits of the deceased and those who remain ‘earthbound’ for a variety of reasons. Williamson asserts that ‘evil’ spirits do exist, but in her own experience poltergeists are not evil but ‘lost and frustrated’ earthbound souls that are trying to attract attention to themselves (ibid. p.11).

The term ‘disembodied consciousness of any sort’, used by Baldwin, can include the spirits of deceased persons, non-human destructive entities that may commonly be referred to in religious language as ‘demons’ (often referred to as Dark Force Entities or ‘DFE’s), negative thought forms created by the host or other living persons, intergenerational curses, elementals, alien life forms and others less clearly defined (Baldwin 1995). Even the discarnate spirits of foetuses that have been terminated can be encountered, and Winafred Lucas (2000) describes techniques for communicating with the spirit of the unborn child and negotiating its return to the spirit world in preference to being forced out with physical abortion, which is traumatic for the spirit of the foetus and may cause it to remain earthbound and attached to the mother (ibid, pp.257-316).

Whether these disembodied conscious forms actually exist in material or metaphysical form or whether they are created from the imagination is a subject of debate even between SRT practitioners (Hunter 2005, pp.156-157). However, the aim of this thesis is to encourage the academic study SRT and its contribution as a therapeutic modality in the alleviation of psychological or physiological distress and to situate it within transpersonal psychology according to the conceptual framework of Frederic Myers. It is from the scientific methods and framework of Myers that the ontological status of discarnate spirit entities may ultimately be determined. Having gained an idea of some of the different uses and definitions of the word ‘spirit’, it remains for me to determine how the word is applied to clinical interventions.

(...)

Differences between SRT and Exorcism

Spirits, whether they be earthbound or co-existing in another dimension or ‘spirit-realm’ are often referred to as ‘attachments’ if they are interacting in some way with a person rather than referring to them as ‘possessing’ spirits. According to Williamson, earthbound spirits are in a confused mental state and many of them do not even realise that they are dead (Williamson, 2006, xi). Possessing spirits on the other hand tend to be deliberate in their intentions and may enter into the subject’s physical and spiritual space and take control over the thoughts and behaviours of the unwilling host, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

SRT can, depending on the belief system or world-view of the patient, be applied in a purely secular, spiritual or religious therapeutic context. Spirit Release Therapy does not impose any theory, concept, philosophy or belief system onto the patient, or try to shoe-horn the patient into a theoretical model of health or sickness. SRT aims to facilitate the healthy well-being of the patient and the ‘attached’ entities through the patient’s and the ‘attachment’s’ own understanding of their experiences and perceptual world-views. This is achieved by allowing the therapist to enter into the integrated world of the patient and the attached spirits through the gateway that we shall identify as a state of consciousness that is different from what is commonly acknowledged as the normal waking state or ‘normal conscious awareness’. The process of accessing mental phenomena that exist beyond the limitations of normal conscious awareness is fundamental in linking SRT practice with the concepts and methods of Myers who identified the Subliminal Self as the greater part of the total mind, and the Supraliminal as the much limited normal waking state (see Chapter 6). SRT is fundamentally different from religious exorcism where spirits are assumed to be ‘evil’ and cast out. William Baldwin’s approach is sympathetic and therapeutic, and in complete contrast to the popular conception of exorcism. Baldwin writes: The widely accepted method of exorcism seemed violent and without compassion, thus I rejected the traditional religious approach (Baldwin, 1995, p. xviii).

Baldwin is one of many professionals including Fiore (1987), Modi (2000) and Naegeli-Osjord (1988), who have had their own belief systems challenged, and have discovered hidden entities of various forms with their patients. A careful examination of all the literature on SRT reveals that all practitioners have had both their scientific and religious beliefs challenged and are essentially guided by their own clients; and depending on the nature of the intrusive spirit, it is dealt with appropriately, and not as a form of exorcism. As a diagnostic system, SRT has been found to be a far more efficient method of identifying the aetiology of a very wide range of illnesses, including mental, emotional and psychosomatic, than traditional medical diagnostics (Modi 1997; 2000), and these claims need to be substantiated by rigorous empirical studies.
(...)
Discovering an Earthbound

Wickland describes his experience of discovering his first discarnate earthbound soul when he was a medical student practising dissection on the corpse of a sixty year old man. On his return home, his wife spontaneously entered into a state of somnambulism, and as Wickland reached out to assist her into a chair a commanding voice issued from her voice box and demanded to know, ‘What do you mean by cutting me?’ (ibid, p.18).

It transpired that the earthbound spirit of the man to whom the body had belonged had followed him home and had taken advantage of Mrs. Wickland’s gift of mediumship18 to communicate his displeasure at being molested without realising that he was dead. Following this incident Wickland and his wife, aided with the guidance of discarnate beings who, Wickland claims, were of a superior intelligence from other realms in our universe, proceeded on a career lasting thirty years to help earthbound spirits of deceased individuals move on to where they were supposed to be on their path of spiritual development. The result of Wickland’s experience is an archive of documented cases of spirit possession and his method of removing them, supported by stenographically recorded sessions of psychical research with his wife acting as the medium of communication between the two worlds of the living and the deceased (ibid, p.21).

Psychosis or Spirit Attachment?

Among Wickland’s recorded cases are several where a patient who had been diagnosed with psychosis was cured following a successful spirit release session. These cases are of particular interest because they represent a group of patients whose suffering is at the extreme end of the scale of diagnosed mental illnesses and are the most difficult to treat using traditional medical and psychotherapeutic methods. They are therefore essential examples to illustrate the efficacy of SRT in treating illness that is automatically assumed to be mental illness by medical science. As an example, Wickland cites his case of ‘Mrs. M’:

One summer evening we were called to the home of ‘Mrs. M’, a lady of culture and refinement; she was a musician of high rank and when the social demands made upon her proved too great she suffered a nervous breakdown. She had become intractable and for six weeks had been in such a raving condition that her physicians had been unable to relieve her, and day and night nurses were in constant attendance.

We found the patient sitting up in bed, crying one minute like a forlorn child, and again screaming in fear: “Matilla! Matilla!” Then suddenly fighting and struggling, she would talk a wild gibberish of English and Spanish, (the latter a language of which she had no knowledge).

Mrs Wickland immediately gave her psychic diagnosis, saying the case was unquestionably one of obsession, 19 and this was unexpectedly confirmed when Mrs Wickland, who was standing at the foot of the bed, with wraps on ready to leave, was found to be suddenly entranced. We placed her on a davenport in the music room, where for two hours I talked in turn with several spirits who had just been attracted from the patient.

There were three spirits – a girl named Mary, her suitor, an American, and his Mexican rival, Matilla. Both of the men had vehemently loved the girl and just as fiercely hated each other. In a jealous rage one had killed the girl, and then in a desperate fight the two rivals had killed each other.
All were unaware of being ‘dead’, although Mary said, weeping wretchedly, “I thought they were going to kill each other, but here they are, still fighting.”

This tragedy of love hatred and jealousy had not ended with physical death; the group had unconsciously been drawn into the psychic atmosphere of the patient, and the violent fighting had continued within her aura.20 Since her nervous resistance was exceedingly low at this time, one after the other had usurped her physical body, with a resulting disturbance that was unexplainable by her attendants (Wickland, 1924, 25-26).

Dissociative Disorders and SRT

On the arguments put forward by psychologists with regard to dissociative disorders Wickland writes:

In the study of cases of multiple personalities, dissociated personalities or disintegrated states of consciousness, modern psychologists disclaim the possibility of foreign intelligences on the ground that these personalities give neither evidence of supernormal knowledge, nor of being of spiritistic origin.

Our experience, to the contrary, has proven that the majority of these intelligences are oblivious of their transition and hence it does not enter their minds that they are spirits, and they are loathe to recognise the fact (ibid, p. 29).

Carl Wickland’s records from his thirty years of clinical experience and organised psychical research are a valuable contribution to scientific knowledge and testimony to the reality of non-corporeal existence. Together with the documented scientific evidence provided by earlier mystics and scientists such as Emmanuel Swedenborg (1758), Allan Kardec (1857), Edgar Cayce (1970), William James (1902), Frederic Myers (1903) and James Hyslop (1919), Wickland provides validated scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of spirit attachment as a reality to modern medicine that is difficult to ignore or refute. More recent research into the validity of the hypothesis that there is an afterlife has the valuable resource of Wickland’s records to provide a foundation for exploring this avenue of human experience (Fontana 2005). It is to Wickland, therefore, as a pioneer in Spirit Release Therapy that we turn to in the first instance for medical descriptions of the phenomenology of spirit attachment and methods of releasing them from their unwilling hosts.

Dissociation and Paranoia

In support and validation of his own experiences of dealing with cases of dissociation and paranoia, Wickland quotes James Hyslop, professor of logic and ethics at Columbia University from 1889 to 1902, and editor of the American Journal of Psychical Research:

The term obsession is employed by psychic researchers to denote the abnormal influence of spirits on the living.... The cures affected have required much time and patience, the use of psychotherapeutics of an unusual kind, and the employment of psychics to get into contact with the obsessing agents and thus to release the hold which such agents have, or to educate them to voluntary abandonment of their persecutions.... Every single case of dissociation and paranoia to which I have applied cross-reference has yielded to the method and proved the existence of foreign agencies complicated with the symptoms of mental or physical deterioration. It is high time to prosecute experiments on a large scale in a field that promises to have as much practical value as any application of the scalpel or the microscope (Wickland 1924:8-9).

The observation by Hyslop that ‘every single case of dissociation and paranoia ... are complicated by the presence of foreign agencies’ provides initial support for the hypothesis that dissociative disorders can be confused with spirit interference. Furthermore, Hyslop’s reference to ‘the use of psychotherapeutics of a very unusual kind, and the employment of psychics to get into contact with the possessing agents’ is arguably the first mention of a treatment method that has subsequently become known as Spirit Release Therapy.

Carl Wickland was one of the earliest in a series of twentieth century professionals who discovered discarnate entities affecting their own patients and published their findings. These professionals include (in chronological order of publishing) Adam Crabtree (1985), Edith Fiore (1987), Hans Naegeli-Osjord (1988), Irene Hickman (1994), William Baldwin (1995), Shakuntala Modi (1997), and others since. It is impractical to examine the wealth of individual contributions of all of these authors due to the need for brevity. However, I shall present below some of the contributions of Adam Crabtree, Edith Fiore and Irene Hickman.

Multiple Personality or Spirit Possession?

Adam Crabtree has taken the time to research the development of psychotherapy in the treatment of those who are diagnosed either correctly or incorrectly as mentally ill from his own clinical experiences with patients (Crabtree 1985). Crabtree’s work is important for two reasons. Firstly, because he has developed an interest in these anomalous phenomena from a scientific research perspective, and secondly from a personal one where, as a psychotherapist, he has experienced the phenomena that are relevant to the practice of SRT. Crabtree was a Benedictine monk and ordained in the Catholic Church as a priest in 1964. As a serious student of the human psyche he became a psychotherapist. He has also been a lecturer in philosophy and the psychology of religion. In the introduction to Crabtree’s first book Multiple Man (1985), Colin Wilson has this to say:

...he is first and foremost a scientist, and his first response to the mystery of multiple personality was to study its medical history in detail. The first part of the present book is as balanced an introduction to this bewildering topic as I have ever come across. But the most important section of the book is the one that begins with chapter 10, describing Crabtree’s own experiences of such cases. It was, I think, just as well for Crabtree to offer his credentials as a scientific historian in the first part of the book, otherwise some of these cases – and I draw particular attention to those of ‘The Confused Father’ and ‘The Complaining Mother’ – would give rise to the suspicion that he is stretching the facts. While some psychologists will, no doubt, prefer to ignore Crabtree’s findings, those who are open-minded enough to consider them without bias will find that they open strange and exciting perspectives (Wilson 1985).

The first part of Crabtree’s book provides an in-depth overview of the conceptual frameworks that accommodate multiple personality and spirit possession phenomena; the same concepts that Wickland identified regarding the spirit world and life after death, but with the addition of the collective phenomena of altered states of consciousness, which is a significant component of Myers’ work, and therefore of prime importance in my argument to support Myers’ framework in this thesis.

SRT, Hypnosis and Secondary Selves

On a foundation of the discoveries of the early mesmerists from Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) to the present day, Crabtree identifies various methods of inducing magnetic sleep (hypnotic trance, or the dissociated state) and the observable phenomena of the induced trance state. According to Crabtree, it became apparent to the early magnetisers that the subject entered into a trance-like state that facilitated at least two distinct groupings of phenomena that were different from the normal waking state. One group of characteristics are described as ‘lower phenomena’ and the other are described as ‘higher phenomena’ (Crabtree 1985, pp.2-20).

Characteristics of the lower consciousness included:
a) A sleepwalking kind of consciousness
b) Double consciousness and double memory
c) Loss of sense of identity
d) Suggestibility
e) Heightened memory
f) Deadening of the senses
g) Insensibility to pain
h) Intense rapport with the magnetiser

The higher consciousness characteristics included four special groupings:

1. Physical or sensorial rapport [perceptions of the physical senses of the other]
2. Mental rapport [mind reading - telepathy]
3. Clairvoyance [clear seeing in spirit realms]
4. Ecstasy [mystical experience]

Crabtree reports that the early magnetisers attributed these phenomena to a second self, or double-consciousness, and this discovery was accepted as an observable scientific fact.
In 1842, the English surgeon James Braid, introduced the term ‘hypnosis’ and took the scientific investigation into trance phenomena into a new direction. He discovered that the hypnotic state had a number of different stages or depth. A subject could move through different stages from light trance to somnambulism to unconscious. Opinions differed between investigators as to how many distinct levels of consciousness could be accessed as the trance deepened. Experiments conducted by Myers’ colleague Edmund Gurney in the 1880’s at the British Society for Psychical Research (Gurney 1884) revealed that each different level of consciousness produced a different memory chain. Each memory chain characterised a different personality that was separate from the others. Later researchers discovered as many as eight different memory chains in subjects which indicated that there may be no limit to the number of distinctly separate sections of consciousness into which the hypnotised subject could divide or have access to.

Moving deeper into an altered state could be regarded as moving along a continuum of depth that is similar to moving down a series of steps where each step is a discrete state of consciousness or ‘personality’ with a discrete memory chain that differentiates one from another. Hence the concept of the continuity of dissociation and the concept of discontinuity can both be accommodated.

According to Crabtree, this on-going research was revealing what was referred to by the early magnetisers as the second self was more probably a much more divided or multiple self (ibid, p.21).

The Hidden Observer or Higher Self

A problem revealed itself in experiments to try to discover the nature of these separated personalities or discrete states of consciousness. According to Crabtree, it was known by early researchers into hypnotic phenomena that the somnambulist was highly suggestible and could be influenced to experience positive hallucinations, i.e. to see something that wasn’t there, or negative hallucinations, i.e. to not see something that was there. Crabtree describes the experiment that confounded observers, (but in retrospect has significant meaning to SRT practitioners):

The hypnotised subject is at one end of the room and the hypnotists at the other. There is a table between them. The hypnotist gives the subject the post-hypnotic suggestion; on awakening he will perceive the room as devoid of furniture – a negative hallucination with regard to the table. When the subject is awakened, careful questioning reveals that he really believes there is no furniture in the room. The hypnotist then asks the subject to walk over to him and he does so, but instead of walking in a straight line, he moves in an arc to avoid the table. When the hypnotist asks why, the subject does not know why, or makes some weak excuse, but when asked whether he was trying to avoid something, he will reply, “Of course not.” When further questioned about whether there is any furniture in the room, the subject will again answer no.

But in order that the subject not see something and act in the manner suggested by the hypnotist, something within him had to see the object and act upon that perception (Crabtree 1985, p.30).

Alfred Binet describes the problem:

...in order to cease to see an object – to have that alone excluded from sight – a person must begin by perceiving and recognising it, however that may be done, and the rejection of the perception can only take place after it has been established ... Now, who does this supervising? What is the intelligence that always decides that the subject shall perceive this and not that? It is not the normal ego, for that is not conscious of anything. It only accepts what it gets. It must be therefore, a personality capable of seeing the object ... As to what this personality may be; I for one am completely in the dark... (Binet 1886, cited in Crabtree 1985, p.30).

To clarify the nature of the problem further; the waking consciousness is hallucinating and is not aware of the table but avoids it without knowing why. The hypnotised personality is hallucinating and is unaware of the table and is therefore unable to guide the waking consciousness around it. Who then is aware of the table?

This problem has been tackled by the contemporary researcher Ernest Hilgard (1977), who identified what he called ‘the hidden observer’. This behind-the-scenes hidden observer is a part of consciousness that observes everything that is going on between all other parts of the personality or states of consciousness and the hypnotiser and all other persons that interact with the subject. According to Crabtree it was Hilgard’s intention to use the term hidden-observer as a metaphor. He didn’t intend for the hidden observer to be considered as a secondary personality with an autonomous consciousness of its own.

As we make use of the detailed literature reviews of Crabtree in gaining some understanding of the concepts surrounding the phenomenon of altered states of consciousness, multiple personality and spirit possession, we are obliged to take very special note of the scientific discovery of the hidden observer. One of Hilgard’s subjects makes a clear statement of the phenomenology of her experience of her hidden observer:

The hidden observer is analytical, unemotional, and business-like. The part of me that was hypnotised was off on a tropical island. The hidden observer is a portion of ME. There’s ME 1, ME 2 and ME 3. Me 1 is hypnotised, ME 2 is hypnotised and observing, and ME 3 is when I’m awake. The hidden observer is cognizant of everything that is going on; it’s a little more narrow in its field of vision than ME 3, like being awake in a dream and fully aware of your actions. The hidden observer sees more, he questions more, he’s aware of what’s going on all the time but getting in touch is totally unnecessary. The first time [ice, water, pain] I thought it was an artefact of the situation, but after the second time, with hearing, I don’t think that’s the case. He’s like a guardian angel that guards you from doing anything that will mess you up. The hidden observer is looking through the tunnel and sees everything in the tunnel. It’s focused, doesn’t pay attention to extraneous things. It’s aware that the tones are coming through, aware that I was saying, “zero”, that the ME 1 was also busy floating. ME 2 is watching all of this. Unless
someone tells me to get in touch with the hidden observer I’m not in contact. It’s just there (Crabtree 1985, p.32).

The subject of the above quotation was involved in experiments to control pain using iced water and numbing suggestions. The context under which the experiment was conducted is not important with regard to SRT, but the importance of the concept of the hidden observer is realised when the techniques of SRT are applied and acknowledged. Hilgard, being a positivistic scientist is not considering the hypothesis that the hidden observer is anything other than psychogenic in the makeup of the multiple personality, and like the majority of researchers into the phenomena of hypnosis he disregards the possibility that the essential nature of the psyche is spiritual. In the practical application of Spirit Release techniques the hidden observer is of paramount importance. In SRT protocol there is a spiritual component of the individual that is regarded respectfully as the ‘higher-self’, and it is from the higher-self that permission to proceed with a therapeutic intervention is always sought.21 In spiritual language, the higher-self is that part of the personality that is furthest away from the earth-plane and closest to God. It may be hypothesised that if Hilgard and other scientists’ investigations into hypnotic phenomena were able to broaden their conceptual framework then they may find sympathy with the notion of the spiritual higher-self rather than trying to understand the hidden-observer as a purely psychogenic phenomenon.

If the assumptions made regarding the higher-self by SRT are true then much of the scientific research that has been conducted into the phenomena of magnetic sleep, somnambulism, hypnosis and altered states of consciousness can be considered as blindly groping in the dark. The need for scientific explanations for extraordinary subjective experiences such as multiple personality and spirit possession have been side-tracked down a blind alley by rejection of the earlier concept that was identified by Carl Wickland and earlier researchers, including Frederic Myers; namely that a spirit world exists in parallel with the physical.
Crabtree cites several examples from the literature that have been assigned by psychological rationalists as double or multiple personality. He makes no comment on the phenomenology of each case until collectively at the end of the chapter where he makes this comment: When examining the data of multiple personality, one cannot overlook a phenomenon which exhibits certain striking similarities: “possession.” Here, too, the subject exhibits a duality or even multiplicity of personalities which disclaim any identity with each other. Also in both the multiple personality and the possession experience, amnesias of various kinds may be present (Crabtree 1985, p. 60).

We shall see later in this thesis that Frederic Myers made precisely the same assertion more than 100 years ago.