A handful of scholars and critics in the humanities such as Rice University historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal have begun to take seriously the precognitive or prophetic dimensions of art and literature. Kripal envisions a scholarship of the impossible that he calls “the Superhumanities,”6 and in his 2011 book Mutants and Mystics, Kripal wrote about precognitive and other paranormal experiences as they shaped the lives and works of several comic book artists and science-fiction writers, including Philip K. Dick.7 Dick is an oft-cited example of a literary “precog,” since he was uniquely aware of precognition operating in his writing as well as in his dreams. He would write characters into his stories that he would subsequently meet, and situations that he would subsequently live through. In 1962, he wrote a novel about a robot Abraham Lincoln that no publisher would accept; then, two years later, he read in the news that Disneyland had created exactly such a thing—still one of its most famous exhibits. In 2013, a researcher in England named Anthony Peake wrote a biography of Dick that catalogued numerous instances in which that science-fiction writer’s works foreshadowed unpredictable events and developments in the culture, as well as charting the author’s evolving understanding of precognition as the root of his own creativity.8This phenomenon isn’t confined to the weirdos who write imaginative fiction. The weirdos who write regular fiction—the unimpeachably “literary,” even canonical stuff that gets taught in high school and college literature curriculums—are just as liable to channel the future in their works. Between 2005 and 2016, the French critic Pierre Bayard wrote a trilogy on literary prophecies in authors like Sophocles, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, as well on as the idea of literary influence actually running in temporal reverse.9 And as we will see in Chapter 1, Cambridge theologian, songwriter, and poet Malcolm Guite published a book-length biographical study of Coleridge in 2017 that relates the themes and imagery in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner to events in the author’s life after he wrote his poem.10 Guite’s book, especially, was an important touchstone for my project in this book. But the argument that inspiration might inherently or always have some prophetic component is not one that academic writers have felt safe to make, partly because there has never been a scientifically plausible theory of how a capacity like precognition could really exist or arise in embodied beings such as ourselves. It has seemed like something spiritual or metaphysical, New Agey. That could soon change.
Precognitive experiences of one sort or another, especially in dreams, are reported by a quarter to a third of people and are experienced but not reported (for fear of ridicule) probably by many, many more. I’ve had such dreams, and after writing about the topic for more than a decade, I’ve received hundreds of emails from people all over the world who’ve shared their incredible (but really, not incredible) stories. Ours is the only culture on Earth, ever, that doesn’t accept precognition as an ordinary part of human life.11 Part of the story of precognition—and the part I have been especially interested in as an anthropologist—is the story of the stigma around it, the taboos that it breaks, and the boundaries it transgresses, in a society that resolutely sees time and causation as unfolding in a strictly linear way. A kind of superstitious revulsion against “things going backwards” has until recently kept the subject off the academic radar.12 But as precognition gains more widespread interest and awareness, especially among a younger generation more accepting of once-stigmatized subjects that commonly fall under the heading of the paranormal, some of the academic prejudice may break down.
The evidence for precognition is not just anecdotal. Ample evidence from methodologically rigorous experiments conducted by numerous laboratories over several decades also supports its existence.13 Jessica Utts, a UC-Irvine statistician and one-time president of the American Statistical Association who had been commissioned by the U.S. government to evaluate the findings of decades of parapsychological research, found the evidence supporting ESP, especially precognition, to be overwhelmingly robust methodologically and statistically.14 (An oft-rehearsed talking point among parapsychologists is that the evidence for ESP is much more robust statistically than the strong evidence supporting aspirin in the prevention of heart attacks.15)
(...)
In other words, our vaunted free will forces our future to speak in riddles. This makes the lives of prophets—or those in the orbit of prophecy—incredibly ironic. The ancients, who understood the premonitory nature of dreams and practiced other forms of divination, grasped these complexities of foresight and fate. Sophocles’ Oedipus fulfilled the prophecies about him—that he would kill his father and marry his mother—precisely by trying to evade those prophecies. And lo and behold, we find the same irony on full display when looking at the lives of many modern creative geniuses. The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky is a particularly tragic example I examined in From Nowhere. His 1979 masterpiece Stalker seems to have been a premonition, in film form, of his hindsight regrets and wishes after belatedly realizing that filming that movie in a toxic Estonian landscape had given both his star actor and himself fatal lung cancers. Incredibly, the film embodied—literally, depicted within itself, in the form of a parable told by the Stalker of the title near the end of the film—these hindsight regrets. More famously, Stalker also seems to have prophesied the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
(...)
Picnic at Hanging Rock was not Lindsay’s first book. In 1966, when she wrote her novel, she had already penned a memoir, Time Without Clocks, and many journalistic pieces, and she had even published a satirical novel under a pseudonym when she was much younger. But while she had always aspired and intended to write something literary, she had not yet done so. Like many women of her generation, she had mostly subordinated her own artistic and intellectual aspirations to support those of her high-achieving husband.
Daryl Lindsay had been one of the leading Australian painters of his generation and was a high-profile director of Australia’s oldest and most prominent art museum, the National Gallery of Victoria. He retired in 1956, when he was knighted for “services to art.” For more than four decades, the Lindsays had lived in a drafty house called Mulberry Hill that they had built after their marriage in the early 1920s on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne. They led an enviable life there, surrounded by fascinating bohemians and celebrities. They hosted fabulous parties and entertained an endless parade of guests—some, Joan recalled, stayed for days or weeks or longer and returned year after year.267 Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh had been visitors to Mulberry Hill during its heyday, among many other notables. Through it all, Joan had little time or opportunity to express herself or develop her own considerable talents as a storyteller, und unfortunately she received little encouragement from Daryl. But her week of dreams changed everything.
The dream-origins of Picnic at Hanging Rock were later attested by the Lindsays’ live-in housekeeper, Rae Clements, who said they occurred in the coldest part of winter, 1966.268 On the bleak morning of Joan’s first dream, she told Clements that she had had a dream that would make a good book. She would allow no person from Porlock (or inquisitive spouse or housekeeper) to destroy her fragile recollection, so she promptly ensconced herself upstairs in her writing room, wrapped in a blue cardigan against the chilly drafts of the house, and hurriedly got down on paper all she had seen and heard. Clements recalled to Lindsay’s biographer Janelle McCulloch that the first dream was so vivid that Lindsay said she could still hear the laughter of the girls setting out on a Valentine’s Day picnic and could feel the hot summer breeze—February 14 falls in Australian summer, in case you had forgotten that the world is spherical in our fallen times. Lindsay had long wanted to write some story involving Hanging Rock, a place that had always fascinated her, but that first dream had finally given her the plot. Clements said Lindsay fully sketched out her novel by midday and spent the rest of the day furiously fleshing it out. And then she had the dream again—or some variant of it—that night … and then again every night for a week.
Dreaming and then furiously writing down what she had dreamed totally consumed Lindsay, as the story poured from her unconscious. She could think or talk about nothing else. “I just sort of thought about it all night and in the morning I would go straight up and sit on the floor, papers all around me, and just write like a demon!”269 When Lindsay wasn’t madly writing it all down, she talked about the characters and their actions like they were real people. Clements recalled also that Lindsay’s dreams unfolded the story in the sequence matching the chapters of her novel.
Lindsay completed her draft less than two weeks after her first dream, and the title she put on her cover page she borrowed from a beloved painting by William Ford that had hung in her husband’s office at the art museum. At the Hanging Rock shows a group of Victorian picnickers under the looming rock formation, in what could almost be a promotional still for Weir’s film. Before sending the manuscript to her publisher, Frank Cheshire, Lindsay also added a brief preface, planting the seeds for the cult that would later grow around the book and movie:
Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, or both, readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. Seeing that we live in an age when Fact is nearly always harder to swallow than Fiction. For the author, who knew Mount Macedon and the Hanging Rock very well as a child, the story is entirely true.270Cheshire delegated the manuscript to his publishing director Andrew Fabinyi, who in turn entrusted it to a junior editor named Sandra Forbes, who would play a fateful role in the events I will describe. It was Forbes who delivered the good news to Lady Lindsay that the firm would publish her book, and her acceptance letter revealed that she took the author’s preface as meaning that her novel was indeed a true story: “Given that the actual disappearance of the girls is a fact, it is a fascinating problem, well presented in a style very much in keeping with the period and personages involved.”271 During the editing process, Lindsay held her own on various stylistic preferences, but she allowed Forbes to make some important editorial changes that we will discuss momentarily. Lindsay also allowed the publisher to cut the last two sentences of the preface, including the business about it being “entirely true.”
Picnic at Hanging Rock came out in hardcover almost a year after Lindsay submitted it, on November 1, 1967. Although it received good reviews, it was not a hot seller at first, nor did the publisher really expect it to be. But by a twist of fate, one of Cheshire’s staff was poached by the much larger British publisher Penguin in 1969, and he brought Picnic at Hanging Rock with him as the first of a new line of Australian fiction he envisioned. Then, an Australian TV presenter who read the novel after finding a copy in a discount book bin found she couldn’t get the story out of her mind and thought it would make a good movie. She sent a copy of the book to a young up-and-coming director she had once interviewed, Peter Weir, thinking he would be the perfect person to make the film. And the rest, as they say, is history. With the boost of Weir’s film adaptation, which Lindsay assisted with and fully endorsed, her maybe-true story cast a spell on a nation.
It begins with the following white text on black:
On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria.
During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace …
You could not ask for a more irresistible hook for a mystery than disappeared or dead schoolgirls. David Lynch adopted the same formula for his 1989 TV hit Twin Peaks, which begins with the discovery of a murdered high-school prom queen. Lindsay’s hints that her story had some basis in fact only added to its mystique. Besides that coy prefacing paragraph, the author also alluded in interviews to the fact that “something did happen.” It led Australian fans to obsessively scour newspapers from the period for reports of missing students at Hanging Rock.272Hanging Rock had been a pretty dangerous place in the late 19th century, near the time when Lindsay’s story was set. People sometimes did go missing. Prospectors returning to Melbourne from nearby gold fields were sometimes robbed and killed there. According to a 1975 documentary accompanying and promoting Weir’s film, a town in the vicinity has a monument to three children who went missing in the 1860s.273 Hanging Rock also was haunted by Australia’s colonial history and the murder of indigenous peoples, for whom the site was regarded as sacred. Still today, visitors regard it as a spooky, mysterious place. But fans searching for some true story about missing schoolgirls at Hanging Rock around the turn of the century came up empty handed. While it must have been amusing at first, the numerous uninvited visitors to Mulberry Hill seeking answers quickly became wearying for the ageing Lindsays—yet Joan did nothing to dispel the mystery by giving any more details.
Although director Weir was advised prior to his production of the movie not to ask Lindsay about the truth of her story, he couldn’t resist, and the displeased author kept mum and just said she hoped he wouldn’t ask the question again. In 1980, a critic named Yvonne Rousseau even compiled various theories of the girls’ disappearance in a book called The Murders at Hanging Rock—again, taking Lindsay’s book to be a real unsolved mystery rather than a work of fiction. Among the theories she presents in the book were that the girls were murdered, that they slipped into a parallel dimension, and that they were abducted by a UFO.274There are several clear autobiographical components in Lindsay’s novel. Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies was based on a real private girls’ boarding school, the Clyde School in Mt. Macedon, near Hanging Rock, which Lindsay had attended as a young woman in the late 19-teens. In her research, McCulloch found that the novel is really a roman à clef, as some of the characters seem to have been based on people Lindsay would have known at the school, even if she set her story a decade and a half earlier to give it a more nostalgic, Edwardian-era atmosphere. McCulloch’s research revealed that in some cases she used her models’ actual names.
As they begin ascending the Rock in Lindsay’s novel, one of the girls, wealthy heiress Irma (the one who is later rescued by the boys), says “If only we could stay out all night and watch the moon rise.”275 Joan had been editor of the Clyde School’s paper, The Cluthan during her time there. McCulloch discovered that in 1919, a couple years after she graduated, a math teacher named Miss McCraw—undoubtedly the basis for the character in her novel—published in that paper an account of a nighttime field trip of the school’s Camera Club to Hanging Rock, to take moonlit pictures. The trip was evidently a fiasco. They departed, Miss McCraw described, as a row of “freshly clad maidens” yet returned, after difficult scrambling over rocks and brambles, in a disheveled state: “sorry objects.” The field trip evidently became a source of rumor and mild scandal among students in subsequent years.276 Joan would have known of this event, but on the surface at least, it hardly seems to qualify as something worthy of all the secrecy and coy allusions. Sleuths scouring newspapers for stories of missing schoolgirls around the time the author attended the Clyde school—thinking Lindsay’s true story might simply have been displaced in time, in her novel—also turned up nothing.277A strange encounter with the elderly Lindsay during the filming of the movie led Weir’s 19-year-old lead actress, Lambert, also to believe that there was indeed a reality to Lindsay’s story and that there had been some actual Miranda. Lambert recalled that during a difficult day of shooting, she went off on the Rock to be alone, but she sensed she was being followed. She turned and found it was an old woman, whom she recognized immediately as the then-78-year-old author. Lindsay embraced her tightly like they were old friends and spoke into the young woman’s ear: “Oh Miranda! It’s been so long!” Lindsay clung to Lambert shakily, in tears, as though it were a real reunion.
“It was very moving,” Lambert said. “And it was clear she’d regressed into some part of her past. To her, I really was someone she had known, somewhere in time.”278 This encounter gave the young actress needed encouragement at a time she was doubting her abilities to master the role: “Right then, I felt then that if Joan Lindsay believed I was Miranda, I must have been doing okay. I felt that if she believed in me, I would be okay.”
Lindsay died ten years later, in December 1984, at the age of 88. At that point, any hope of learning the truth about her novel seemed lost. But astute readers and people who had been friends of the author suggested that whatever truth there was to her story, it wasn’t some mundane, lurid crime or scandal, but that it was somehow connected to Lindsay’s spiritual beliefs and her fascination—really a passionate love/hate relationship—with time. In Lindsay’s 1962 memoir, Time Without Clocks, she described her hatred of the clock-bound life most people lead.279 The only clocks allowed at Mulberry Hill were for the housekeeper, Clements. And Lindsay harbored a particularly irrational hatred of 4:00 PM. In the novel, after the girls disappear, the next chapter opens with Mrs. Appleyard awakening suddenly at 4:00 PM, having been dreaming of her dead husband. It was at 4:00 PM on a summer day in 1976, ten years after Lindsay wrote that scene and a year after Weir’s film came out, that her husband of 54 years, Daryl, had a fatal fall at age 86.280Lindsay in real life had claimed that clocks would not function near her, and friends confirmed that their watches would stop in her presence—a minor technology curse that is not uncommonly reported by people with psychic ability. In fact, during the filming of Picnic at Hanging Rock, watches and clocks went haywire or stopped frequently, just as happens to the girls’ watches in the novel when the coach arrives at the massive rock formation. It prompted Weir’s crew to wonder if it was a geomagnetic effect of the Rock itself or somehow was due to Lindsay’s involvement.281
Calendars were similarly problematic for Lindsay. She claimed that for most of her life she didn’t even know her own birth date, until she finally asked a journalist friend, Terence O’Neill, to help her research it. He discovered that she had been born November 16, 1896.282 In his own confusion of chronology, another journalist friend, Phillip Adams, described in a newspaper column that “Long before Einstein revealed his relativity theory, in which time ceases to be something solid and dependable and becomes elastic, Joan believed that it was somehow dreamlike, that yesterday is still with us while tomorrow is already here.”283 In reality, Joan was only nine when Einstein formulated his theory, but what’s a little time warp between friends?
Besides the stopped watches, there is another time-related anomaly early in Lindsay’s novel. The girls who have left the group gaze down on the valley below and muse philosophically on human purpose, almost like aliens surveying people from some Archimedean vantage point. Irma then hears a sound like drums:
The plain below was just visible; infinitely vague and distant. Peering down between the boulders Irma could see the glint of water and tiny figures coming and going through drifts of rosy smoke, or mist. ‘Whatever can those people be doing down there like a lot of ants?’ Marion looked out over her shoulder. ‘A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Although it’s probable, of course, that they are performing some necessary function unknown to themselves.’ … The ants and their business were dismissed without further comment. Although Irma was aware, for a little while, of a rather curious sound coming up from the plain. Like the beating of far-off drums.284
Readers who are paying attention note that members of a search party several hours later bang on sheets of tin to try and signal to the missing girls. “No wonder the bloodhounds lose the trail,” Adams remarked, “For the girls aren’t lost on the rock. Like Alices stepping through the looking glass, they’re moving into another dimension.”285 Again, it is Irma who is found high on the rock a week later, asleep and unharmed except for a few scratches, but with no memory of what became of her companions. “Missing time,” again.
But here’s the thing: Amid all the speculation and sleuthing by readers, there were rumors of a final chapter that had been cut from Picnic at Hanging Rock prior to publication, which contained the answer to the mystery. Those rumors proved … entirely true. Three years after Lindsay’s death, the missing “Chapter 18” was published in a thin volume along with a couple critical commentaries, as The Secret of Hanging Rock. The chapter does indeed return us to the Rock and to what happened to Miranda, Marion, and their math teacher Miss McCraw. But its explanation is one that few readers could understand, let alone accept, especially in 1966-7. It is nothing that would fit within the usual coordinates of a romantic mystery novel. It is instead one of the most fascinating and beautiful pieces of paranormal fiction I have ever read. And the story of how it came to be excised from the novel is just as interesting and significant.
Slips Through Time
Chapter 18 opens with the otherworldly beauty Miranda, the intellectual Marion (who gazed down on the picnickers like at ants), and heiress Irma standing on a high ledge, finding themselves drawn toward a stone monolith that exerts a kind of spiral magnetic force, “pulling, like a tide.”286 They work their way past it, and then the girls fall asleep briefly, after which a disheveled “living creature,” a “clown-like figure” dressed only in her undergarments and boots—comes toward them from behind some bushes. It is clearly the math teacher, Miss McCraw, whom Edith earlier in the novel embarrassedly reported seeing coming up the hill in only her drawers. Yet Miranda and her companions don’t recognize the woman—they are already in a dream-like state where reality has been transfigured.
The woman faints from the heat, and the girls remove her restricting corset to help her breathe. Upon reviving her, Marion gets the idea they should all discard their corsets. They toss them off a precipice, only to see them hanging motionless, “becalmed on the windless air like a fleet of little ships.”287 The revived math teacher/stranger says “they are stuck fast in time,” at which point Irma tells her “when you said that about time I had such a funny feeling I had met you somewhere. A long time ago.”288 The older woman replies, “Anything is possible, unless it is proved impossible. And sometimes even then.” She then asks for the girls’ names, even though she should know them, and notes she has forgotten her own name: Waving toward a bush, she says “I have apparently left my own particular label somewhere over there.”289It is a trippy exchange—indeed, like a group of people under the influence of a powerful psychedelic. And it only gets stranger. When the intellectual Marion suggests they keep moving before the sun sets, the older woman utters further perplexities:
“For a person of your intelligence—I can see your brain quite distinctly—you are not very observant. Since there are no shadows here, the light too is unchanging.”
Irma was looking worried. “I don’t understand. Please, does that mean that if there are caves, they are filled with light or darkness? I am terrified of bats.”
Miranda was radiant. “Irma, darling—don’t you see? It means we arrive in the light!”
“Arrive? But Miranda … where are we going?”
“The girl Miranda is correct. I can see her heart, and it is full of understanding. Every living creature is due to arrive somewhere. …”290
Which is when they see a hole open up before them, and the woman formerly known as Miss McCraw beholds it rapturously:
It wasn’t a hole in the rocks, nor a hole in the ground. It was a hole in space. About the size of a fully rounded summer moon, coming and going. She saw it as painters and sculptors saw a hole, as a thing in itself, giving shape and significance to other shapes. As a presence, not an absence—a concrete affirmation of truth. She felt that she could go on looking at it forever in wonder and delight, from above, from below, from the other side. It was a solid as the globe, as transparent as an air bubble. An opening, easily passed through, and yet not concave at all.
She had passed a lifetime asking questions and now they were answered, simply by looking at the hole.291
The “hole in space” fades out, after which they observe a snake slither into a physical hole below two vertically stacked boulders, which seems to be the tiny opening of a cave. The girls’ erstwhile math teacher now becomes a kind of shamanic pied piper, confidently announcing that she will be privileged to enter first and that the girls will follow. When Marion expresses surprise at this idea, their leader corrects her: “Quite simple. You are thinking in terms of linear measurements …”292 At which point, she begins to undergo a metamorphosis: “Before anyone could answer, the long-boned torso was flattening itself out on the ground beside the hole, deliberately forming itself to the needs of a creature created to creep and burrow under the earth. The thin arms, crossed behind the head with its bright staring eyes, became the pincers of a giant crab …”293The crablike being, still clad in frilled pantaloons, wriggles through the small opening and out of sight. On the vanished teacher’s signal—tapping on the rock from within—Marion follows, and after Marion’s signal, Miranda. Both effortlessly conform their bodies to the shape and narrow size of the opening. But then to Irma’s horror, while she is awaiting her signal to follow, one of the boulders falls on the hole, sealing it off.
Irma had flung herself down on the rocks and was tearing and beating at the gritty face of the boulder with her bare hands. She had always been clever at embroidery. They were pretty little hands, soft and white.294
And that is how Joan Lindsay originally ended her novel: with Hanging Rock itself devouring the girls and their teacher after an encounter with what can only be called a black hole. In contrast to the relatively matter-of-fact tone of the rest of the book, it is more like something out of Carlos Castaneda. In fact, it is exactly like something out of Carlos Castaneda … although Castaneda would not publish his first book of psychedelic pop-shamanism, The Teachings of Don Juan, until the year after Lindsay wrote this shamanic-seeming scene. Nor would Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Arthur C. Clarke’s companion novel), with its “monolith” and its psychedelic passage through a monolith-stargate, come out until two years later. And although the possibility of gravitational singularities had been described in the upper echelons of astrophysics for years, they did not enter the public consciousness until, wait for it, 1967, when the term “black hole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler. In the vicinity of such objects, time is dilated, exactly what the girls and their teacher seem to experience. Yet Lindsay’s “hole in space” image was, again, written (and presumably dreamed) the previous year.295Lindsay’s finale is a stunning vision of the solidly four-dimensional spacetime continuum, often called the “block universe,” described by mathematician Hermann Minkowski on the basis of his former student Einstein’s theories. It is an Einsteinian vision, but with a Lewis Carroll twist. And as Yvonne Rousseau wrote in a commentary to this chapter, it bears close rereading. Among other peculiarities, there is something punnily akin to dream in these strange events: Miss McCraw’s crab-transformation is into a kind of claw. The corsets that hang in midair were colloquially called “stays,” and stay in spacetime is what they do.296 In fact, if there was any doubt about Picnic at Hanging Rock coming to its author in dreams, these materialized puns in its final bizarre chapter would have to eradicate it. The final metamorphosis of the girls and their teacher as they enter Hanging Rock is Freud’s “dream-work”—the active symbolic transformation of the primary process, Coleridge’s primary imagination—on full view. (And for what it’s worth, any reader of Wells’ The Time Machine, published the year before Lindsay’s birth, may also recall the Time Traveler’s farthest-future vision of a dying earth populated by crablike beings, perhaps humanity’s ultimate evolutionary transformation.)
***
To understand the enigmatic Chapter 18, it is necessary to first understand some of the real paranormal experiences of its author. They go way beyond recalcitrant timepieces and clock-time resonances.
Like other of the authors and artists I have examined here and in my previous book From Nowhere, Lindsay was clearly someone who, in another time and another culture, would likely have been something like a shaman. McCulloch writes:
Some of Joan's friends called her a “mystic”. According to those who were close to her, she had certain abilities, sensitivities. She could “see” things that others couldn’t, especially in the bush landscape. She knew things without being told. She could not only tell what had happened in the past, but also predict events in the future, without knowing why or how. And she could communicate with those who live in that grey space between life and the world beyond it. Those friends feel that Joan's novel is the result of this curious ability, which she'd had ever since she was three.297McCulloch gives few concrete details, unfortunately, except for one particularly strange story Lindsay had told a few of her friends in confidence. In 1929, she and her husband were driving to another town, Creswick, to visit Daryl’s parents. On the way, Joan saw something peculiar: a group of nuns running through a field, seemingly fleeing from something. The clothing of one of them seemed to be burned, and Joan thought she could see a burning building behind them. Daryl, however, saw nothing. She felt that what she had seen was a vision of the past. When they arrived at Daryl’s family home, Joan asked Daryl’s mother if there was a convent nearby. Her mother-in-law, no doubt perplexed by Joan’s question, replied that there had indeed been a convent but that it had been destroyed in a fire years earlier.298It is undoubtedly because of this strange experience that Lindsay was drawn to a remarkable book, first published anonymously in 1911, called An Adventure.299 The authors were a pair of English schoolteachers, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain—principle and vice-principle, respectively, of St. Hugh’s College for women in Oxford—who claimed to have experienced what paranormal writers now call a “time slip” while on vacation in France in 1901. While wandering the Trianon gardens on the grounds of Versailles, the women wrote, they both fell into a strange depression and then encountered people in anachronistic dress that they later determined must have been the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and her courtiers circa 1789, just before their execution during the French Revolution. It seemed to the experiencers like they had seen actual people and events of that year, as well as catching those doomed aristocrats’ despondency as it somehow lingered in the landscape from that time. Lindsay confided to her friend Adams that her writing of Picnic at Hanging Rock had been influenced by Moberly and Jourdain’s book.300
Moberly and Jourdain were writing at a time of exciting new technologies that were providing novel, semi-sciencey interpretations of unexplained phenomena. The popular idea of telepathy, for instance, was based on the metaphor of the telegraph, which in the last decades of the 19th century was linking people across great distances.301 Classicist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers, who coined the term telepathy, was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, a precursor to the parapsychological laboratories that emerged in the next century. Lindsay was a believer, and probably experiencer, of such things: Albert’s dream of his sister on the night she jumps to her death would fit right into the numerous anecdotes of purported telepathy collected by Myers and his SPR colleagues in their book Phantasms of the Living. (In the novel, among the inquiries Mrs. Appleyard receives about the mysterious disappearances is a letter from an investigator with the SPR.)
And at the same time Myers was writing, new photography and sound-recording technologies suggested the idea that matter could store not only images and sounds but also thoughts and feelings from the past—and that places, as SPR researcher Eleanor Sidgwick wrote in 1888, could have a kind of “memory.” Thomas Edison patented the technology for recording and playing back sounds on wax cylinders in 1877, and the explosion of this technology in the subsequent decades made things like hauntings thinkable in a new way: Tragic or sad events could etch themselves in the setting where they occurred like a groove in a wax cylinder or, later, a phonograph record. A psychically sensitive person visiting the landscape was (per this metaphor) like the needle of a phonograph enabling playback of the past. (The method of mass-producing wax cylinders, which made phonographs affordable to consumers, was developed just a year after Moberly and Jourdain’s experience.) In 1939, another SPR researcher, H. H. Price, proposed that a “psychic aether” was the medium of such imprinting.302Seemingly facilitated by this new metaphor, the 20th century’s annals of the unexplained include many seeming time slips similar to the adventure of Moberly and Jourdain. For instance, an SPR investigator names James McHarg wrote of a fascinating experience reported to him by a spinster named E. F. Smith from the village of Letham in eastern Scotland. In Smith’s account, late one winter night in 1950, she had been walking along a road after her car broke down on her way home from a Christmas party in a neighboring hamlet. Below a prominent hill near her village, called Dunnichen Hill, she saw torches of what she took to be ancient soldiers searching for their fallen comrades after a battle. That plain was then thought, at least in local folklore, to be the site of a famous Dark-Age battle, the Battle of Nechtansmere in the year 685, in which an outnumbered Pictish army routed an army of pursuing Northumbrian soldiers—a bit of history recorded by our old friend Bede, the great historian of the period. Smith’s account particularly interested McHarg because the specific roundabout path the soldiers appeared to take through the field corresponded precisely to the shoreline of a long-vanished lake, which Smith was unlikely to have known about, as it had only been described in an archaeological journal. This detail, he felt, lent authenticity to her claim. Although the journal article with the detail about the lake had already been published by the time Smith had her vision, she assured the investigator she had not read that article, nor did she know very much of the local historical lore until her experience drove her to research it.
Another well-known time-slip case occurred in 1953 in the English city of York. An 18-year-old apprentice plumber named Henry Martindale reported that while installing a new boiler in the cellar of the city’s Treasurer’s House, he fell from his ladder and then saw a line of Roman centurions march past, but sunken slightly into the stone floor almost like they were wading through a shallow stream. Six years later, excavations revealed a Roman road passing under the cellar floor in that spot. The soldiers in Martindale’s vision bore round shields, which Roman soldiers were not known to use in York until another archaeological discovery a few years after Martindale saw his spectral centurions. Again, these archaeological discoveries lent a certain credence to Martindale’s vision, because there is seemingly no way he could have known about the presence of a Roman road under the Treasurer’s House or the unique shape of the shields carried by Romans in that part of Britain.
Although Moberly and Jourdain’s account of the “ghosts of the Trianon” remains the best-known time slip, it has proven to be one of the least persuasive. One critic chalked it up to costume parties an aristocrat was known to throw on the grounds of Versailles around the turn of the century. Another, Lucille Iremonger, attributed the women’s experiences to a lesbian folie-a-deux (because lesbians, evidently, are prone to hallucination).303 The biggest problem with the teachers’ story is time: The women admitted that weeks had elapsed after their visit before they even conferred on what they had seen, and both seem to have experienced different things. And there is no telling how much their memories of their first visit may have been shaped by their subsequent decade of research delving into the history of the Trianon garden and Versailles as well as their further visits to the location. Nor can it be determined whether and to what extent each woman’s memories influenced those of the other.
Still, it made for an interesting and exciting book—one that was influential on many writers, including J. R. R. Tolkien.304 And more importantly, the edition of An Adventure that Lindsay is likely to have read, from 1931, also included an introductory note by J. W. Dunne, author of the most important book ever written on the subject of precognition and its relation to the Einsteinian, time-elastic universe, An Experiment with Time. Dunne writes that he was asked to comment on the scientific plausibility of the women’s account and states that “if Einstein is right, the contents of time are just as ‘real’ as the contents of space. Marie Antoinette—body and brain—is sitting in the Trianon garden now.”305 Dunne is referring here to Minkowski’s block universe, in which the future already exists and the past still exists, indelibly, permanently. More than anything in Moberly and Jourdain’s text, it is that one line from Dunne’s introduction that surely exerted its effect on Lindsay when opening her hallucinatory Chapter 18:
It is happening now. As it has been happening ever since Edith Horton ran stumbling and screaming towards the plain. As it will go on happening until the end of time. The scene is never varied by so much as the falling of a leaf or the flight of a bird. To the four people on the Rock it is always acted out in the tepid twilight of a present without a past. Their joys and agonies are forever new.306
The pun that Yvonne Rousseau misses, although Lindsay herself may well have been conscious of it, is that the girls and their teacher atop the Rock, having discarded their dresses and stays, would have been clad in slips.
An Uncomfortable Style
You will be right to ask about Chapter 18’s authenticity. A missing chapter to a nationally beloved novel turning up shortly after the death of the author should always be suspect. However, in this case, there is no question of the text being a forgery, as there are living witnesses to the original manuscript with the chapter in place, including Sarah Forbes, the editor who asked for its removal.
Although Forbes wrote in her acceptance letter to Lindsay that she enjoyed the novel, she felt the story could use more ambiguity and was uncomfortable about the ending. “I’m very doubtful about the last chapter. On the whole, would prefer to omit it altogether.” In an interview with McCulloch, Forbes asserted that the decision to cut the chapter had been agreed on by the author: “We all discussed it and it seemed the right thing to do.”
Without being able to ask Lindsay, it is hard to know how to evaluate Forbes’ claim. The author’s friend and literary agent John Taylor, to whom she entrusted the typed pages of the cut chapter in 1972 and who published it in 1987, insisted in his commentary that Lindsay did intend it to be published one day. It was part of her original vision and clearly expressed spiritual truths that were important to her. “What artist wants to conceal an unflawed work?” But, Taylor claimed, despite her natural artistic wish not to excise part of her novel, she allowed herself to be persuaded by others: “She was meticulous in respecting the interests of those who were exploiting her work, and understood that it might have worked against those interests.”307Besides losing a very personal and important part of her story, the absence of the final chapter also had become a kind of Albatross for Lindsay by the time of her death. It left readers to concoct fictions of their own to solve the puzzle—those theories of Yvonne Rousseau, for instance—and all the demands for confirmation left her and Daryl with little peace during their old age. Taylor wrote: “Although she knew perfectly well that the huge success of both book and film had a lot to do with the mystery of ‘what really happened’, she had moments of wishing she had published the final chapter and saved herself the pestering.” Lindsay gave Taylor the copyright to the final chapter after Weir’s film came out, “as part of her general horrified reaction to the flood of demanding inquiries” about the true fate of the girls.308 As her literary agent, it was Taylor’s job to field the constant questions.
Thinking purely in terms of the bottom line, Forbes clearly made the right editorial decision, since the book would likely never have been as successful without the question mark it leaves in the reader’s mind. Taylor acknowledges this, keenly comparing the missing chapter to the Psalmist’s “stone rejected by the builders” that becomes the cornerstone of the edifice. Chapter 18 is “the previously invisible foundation stone on whose absence the Australian film industry built itself.”309 The missing Chapter 18 is, he notes, “totally unfilmable.” Still, despite Forbes’ implication that the decision to cut Chapter 18 was mutual, it appears to have been a very difficult one for Lindsay.
In a 2017 interview by Helen Goltz for the book No Picnic at Hanging Rock, Forbes recalled conversations with Taylor in 1984, after Lindsay’s death, about the possibility of publishing the missing chapter; she reiterated her earlier sentiments: “I didn’t like the final chapter, it was not written in the same style, it was an uncomfortable style and I don’t think the final chapter did the book any service to publish it.”310 Goltz herself seems to share Forbes’ discomfort with the chapter, agreeing with the decision to leave it out and finding it merely bizarre: “I suspect the reader will be more bewildered as to the outcome of the young women on reading The Secret of Hanging Rock.”311
These are clearly not fans of science fiction or the paranormal, nor readers of pop-shamanism like Castaneda (a genre that was, again, still in the future when Lindsay wrote her novel). Indeed, the core issue with Lindsay’s book is that, in its original form, it transgressed genres. Although Forbes may not have articulated it this way, Chapter 18 turned Picnic at Hanging Rock into some kind of supernatural Gothic mystery. Lindsay’s friend Adams called her novel “science fiction in crinolines instead of space suits.”312
Where Was It Before the Dream?
TIME LOOPS AND INTERPRETATION
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Eric Wargo
