Afterlife (30 page)

According to Steiner (in the lecture ‘The Dead Are With Us’):

For, says Steiner, there is no one who does not bring with him ‘countless tidings of the dead’ on waking up.
But there is, he explains, one rather odd problem, When we speak to the dead, the relationship is somehow reversed, and when we put a
question to the dead, the question comes
from
him: ‘He inspires our soul with what we ask him.’ ‘And when he answers us, this comes out of our own soul.’ ‘In order to establish intercourse with those who have died, we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say, and to receive from our own soul what they answer.’

It is interesting that in his book on Swedenborg, Dr Wilson van Dusen — whom we encountered in the opening chapter — suggests that Swedenborg’s visions of the ‘spirit world’ were obtained in what he calls a ‘controlled hypnogogic state’ — the hypnogogic state being that curious borderland between sleeping and waking.
And Thomson Jay Hudson, in
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
, describes how he attempted to use the miraculous powers of the ‘subjective mind’ to cure a relative who had become a hopeless invalid through rheumatism.
His method was to concentrate on healing his relative — who lived in another city — just as he was on the point of sleep.
He began the treatment in the middle of May 1890.
A few months later, a friend who knew about the proposed treatment met his relative, and found him so much improved that he was working again.
The improvement had started in mid-May.
According to Hudson, the subjective mind works best on the point of sleep because it is then free of its usual domination by the ‘objective mind’.
We would say, of course, that on the point of sleep the right cerebral hemisphere is freed from its usual domination by the left-brain self.

According to Steiner: ‘We should not seek for the Dead through externalities, but become conscious that they are always present.’ And ‘among the practical tasks of Anthroposophy will be that of gradually building the bridge between the living and the dead by means of spiritual science’.
He is also convinced that ‘a vast transformation will take place in human life when the ideas of reincarnation and karma are no longer theories held by a few people’.

We have seen that, in fact, the argument about reincarnation was to split the Spiritualist movement at a very early stage, and that Kardec’s Spiritism — which taught reincarnation — was virtually driven underground by the Spiritualist teaching that originated in America.
Nowadays, the doctrines of reincarnation are not widely accepted by Spiritualists, although some accept it as a possibility.
When I was writing
The Occult
in the early 1970s, I asked a Spiritualist friend, Professor Wilson Knight, if, next time he attended a seance, he could ask the ‘spirits’ for a straightforward yes or no on this issue.
In due
course, he told me that the answer was neither yes nor no.
Reincarnation, according to Professor Knight’s ‘communicators’, happens occasionally, but should not be regarded as a general rule …

‘Myers’, in his communications with Geraldine Cummins (published as
The Road to Immortality)
, offers an unusual interpretation of the idea of reincarnation.
He speaks of the concept of the ‘group soul’, ‘a number of souls all bound together by one spirit, depending for their nourishment on that spirit’.
He himself, he says, belonged to such a group soul while on earth.
And if we sometimes appear to be paying for the sins of a previous existence, this is because ‘a soul belonging to the group of which I am a part lived that previous life which built up for me the framework of my earthly life, lived it before I passed through the gates of birth’.

The real Frederick Myers — the author of
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
— was fascinated by one of the most striking cases of reincarnation ever collected by the Society for Psychical Research, the case of Lurancy Vennum, and he cites it at length in his chapter on ‘Disintegrations of Personality’.

On 11 July 1877, a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Lurancy Vennum, living in Watseka, Illinois, had a fit and was unconscious for five hours.
The next day it happened again, but then it became clear she was in a trance, for she declared she could see heaven and the angels, as well as a brother and sister who had died.
For the next six months, these trances recurred, and Lurancy Vennum was apparently possessed by a number of disagreeable personalities, including an old woman called Katrina Hogan.
Relatives advised her parents to send her to an insane asylum.
But neighbours called Roff, whose deceased daughter Mary had also been subject to fits of ‘insanity’, persuaded the Vennums to see a doctor, W.
W.
Stevens, of Janesville, Wisconsin.

When Stevens first saw Mary Lurancy Vennum, on 1 February 1878, the girl was ‘possessed’ by ‘Katrina Hogan’, who sat hunched up in a chair staring sullenly into space.
When Stevens tried to move closer, she told him sharply to keep his distance.
Then she seemed to soften towards him, and talked about herself and her parents.
(She called her father ‘Old Black Dick’.) Soon the personality changed; the newcomer described himself as a young man called Willie Canning.
But he talked disconnectedly, and then had a fit.
Stevens tried hypnosis, and
it worked; Lurancy Vennum reappeared, and explained that she had been possessed by evil spirits.
She was still in a state of trance, and told them that she was surrounded by spirits, one of whom was called Mary Roff.

Mrs Roff, who was in the room, said: ‘That is my daughter.’ And she advised Lurancy to accept ‘Mary’ as her ‘control’.
After some discussion with the ‘spirits’, Lurancy announced that she would allow Mary Roff to ‘possess’ her.
Soon after, she woke up.

The next morning, Mary Lurancy Vennum’s father called at the office of Asa Roff, and told him that Lurancy Vennum was now claiming to be Mary Roff, and that ‘Mary’ was asking to go home.

Mary’s case history resembled, in many ways, that of Lurancy Vennum — and even more that of the Seeress of Prevorst, Friederike Hauffe.
Mary had also started to suffer from fits, and in one of these she cut her arm with a knife — deliberately — and fainted.
For the next five days, she was delirious; yet she could read through a blindfold.
After another period of fits, she had died in July 1865, twelve years before Mary Lurancy Vennum’s ‘possession’.
Her clairvoyant powers had been attested by many prominent citizens in Watseka.

Before Lurancy Vennum — or rather ‘Mary’ — could be taken to the Roffs’ home, Mrs Roff and her daughter Minerva came to call at the Vennum’s.
‘Mary’ was looking out of the window as they came along the street, and said: ‘Why, there comes ma and my sister Nervie!’ When they came in, she flung her arms round their necks and burst into tears of joy.

The Vennums were understandably reluctant to let their daughter go, but ‘Mary’ became so homesick they finally agreed.
On 11 February 1878, she was taken to the Roffs’ home.
On the way there, they passed the house in which the Roffs had lived at the time Mary was alive.
‘Mary’ insisted this was her home, and had to be persuaded that her family no longer lived there.
When they arrived at the new home, ‘Mary’ said: ‘Why, there’s our old piano, and the same old piano cover.’ She greeted the crowd of relatives who were waiting there with plain signs of recognition.
A Mrs Wagner, who (under the name of Mary Lord) had been Mary Roff’s Sunday school teacher, was greeted with the words ‘Oh Mary Lord, you’ve changed the least of anyone.’ She told them that ‘the angels’ would allow her to stay until some time in May — three months ahead.

Her family were naturally anxious to test her, and asked her all kinds of questions.
‘Mary’ soon convinced them; she was able to describe hundreds of incidents in the life of the former Mary Roff.
She described in detail her stay at a water-cure place in Peoria.
Asked if she remembered an incident when the stove pipe fell and burnt Frank, she was able to point out the exact place on the arm where Frank was burnt.
Asked about an old dog, she showed them the spot where it had died.
When she talked about slashing her arm with the knife, she started to roll up her sleeve to show Dr Stevens the scar, then recollected that this was not the same body: ‘It’s not this arm — it’s the one in the ground.’ After her death, her parents had tried to communicate with her by means of a medium; Mary was able to tell them the message she wrote out for them through the medium’s hand, giving the exact time and place.

One of the most convincing incidents occurred when Mrs Roff found a old velvet head-dress that Mary had worn during her life time.
Mary’s father suggested leaving it out on the hall stand.
‘Mary’ came in from outside and immediately said: ‘Why, there’s my old head-dress that I wore when my hair was short.’ This reminded her of a box of letters, and when her mother brought this, she found one of her collars.
‘Look, here’s that old collar I tatted.’

‘Mary’ told her family that she could stay with them until 21 May.
On that morning, her mother wrote: ‘Mary is to leave the body of Rancy today, about eleven o’clock.’ ‘Mary’ went around saying goodbye to neighbours, hugged and kissed her parents, and set out for Lurancy Vennum’s home.
On the way, ‘Mary’ vanished and Lurancy Vennum returned.

Four years later, Mary Lurancy Vennum married a farmer, George Binning.
Her parents discouraged her from using her mediumship in case it brought back the ‘fits’, but Mary Roff often ‘dropped in’ when her own parents were there, and seemed quite unchanged from her previous visit.
When Mary Lurancy Vennum had her first baby, ‘Mary’ even put her into a trance so she would not suffer the pains of childbirth.

Richard Hodgson, the sceptical young Australian who ‘exposed’ Madame Blavatsky in 1885, and who went to America to investigate Mrs Piper in the following year, heard about the case, and instantly saw that, if genuine, it was a practically watertight proof of life after death.
He interviewed all the principal characters except Lurancy Vennum herself, who had moved west with her husband.
In spite of this disappointment,
Hodgson ended totally convinced of the truth of the incidents as narrated by Dr Stevens and various family members and friends.
He agreed that this could be a case of multiple personality, but felt, on the whole, that all the evidence pointed to a genuine case of ‘possession’ of Lurancy Vennum by the deceased Mary Roff.
Myers placed the case in his chapter on multiple personality, but added that ‘at a later stage, and when some other wonders have become … more familiar … we may perhaps consider once more what further lessons this singular narrative may have to teach us’.
He died before these ‘further lessons’ could be discussed, but it is clear that he also regarded the Vennum case as a proof of the survival of personality after death.

If Hodgson and Myers are correct, then it would support the picture that began to emerge in the opening chapter of this book through the work of Adam Crabtree and Wilson Van Dusen.
We are inclined to think of death either as a dead end, or as a launching into a totally new kind of existence: some strange mystical state in which all the secrets of the universe will be known.
All the evidence we have considered indicates that this is a misconception.
Life on the ‘next plane’ is apparently not fundamentally dissimilar from life on earth, although many of its conditions seem to be different.
According to various ‘communicators’, there
are
other planes that are inconceivable to us, but under the circumstances, these are no concern of ours.
But unless the evidence of psychical research is an enormous confidence trick, devised by the collective unconscious to satisfy our craving for ‘survival’, the individual survives death in a form not unlike his present mode of being.

There are many ways in which the evidence of reincarnation is more convincing than the evidence of life after death that comes through mediums.
The Cross Correspondences finally convinced the investigators that Myers and Gurney had survived their deaths; but Mary Roffs’ parents must have been quite certain she was still alive within hours of her moving back into their house.

Another of the early classic cases — unfortunately never investigated by a trained researcher like Hodgson — has become known as the Alexandrina case.

On 15 March 1910, a five-year-old girl named Alexandrina Samona died in Palermo, Sicily.
Her mother, Adela — wife of Dr Carmelo Samona — was distraught with grief.
But three days after the death, she had a dream in which Alexandrina
told her not to mourn, because she was going to return.
She showed her mother an embryo.
Adela Samona dismissed the dream, knowing that an ovarian operation had made it almost impossible for her to have children.