Books of the occult

Science and the supernatural

Colin Wilson

Supernature Lyall Watson (Hodder and Stoughton E3.25. To be published on September 24th) The polygraph, or lie detector, is a machine that measures, among other things, the elec tical resistance of the skin; so if a question leads a criminal to sweat, the lie detector shows it. One morning in February 1966, a lie detector specialist named Cleve Backster was watering the office plant when he was struck by a curious idea. Should it not be possible to detect the ' sweat ' of a plant if you tortured it? He attached the polygraph to one of its leaves, and dipped another leaf in hot coffee.

No result. He decided to burn the leaf with a match — and as he actually made this decision, the recording pen suddenly swept upwards. The plant had read his mind. Later tests left no doubt at all that this is what had happened. He tried dropping live shrimps into boiling water in the vicinity of the plant; every time he did it, the plant registered the violent death of the shrimp.

This anecdote, which occurs towards the end of Lyall Watson's book Supernature, seems to me of tremendous importance. Dr Watson, who has been an assistant to Desmond Morris, is a biologist and a zoologist. I do not know why he decided to write a book about 'the occult' — perhaps simply because his publishers thought it would sell. But whatever the motive, he has produced a book of considerable importance: perhaps the most significant book about the ' supernatural ' to appear in the past decade.

For a long time now, it has been obvious that there is going to be a revolution in this occult field, Science has always refused to have any truck with the occult. Freud talked to Jung of the "black tide of mud of occul tism," and it is clear that it really worried him, ' Occultism ' meant hysteria, wishful-thinking, self-deception, downright dishonesty. Freud can be accused of over-reacting, but basically he was right. A believer in the supernatural who sets out to find ' scientific evidence' will usually find what he is looking for . . .

But what happens when the evidence begins to come from inside science, from scien

tists who are not in the least interested in providing support for the Spiritualists? This is what has been happening for the past decade or SO.

Consider, for example, the curious case of Karl Von Reichenbach. He was an orthodox German scientist, and in the 1840s, he became convinced that powerful magnets had an effect on 'sick sensitives.' A long course of experiments, all painstakingly documented, convinced him that there is an unknown force in nature, akin to electromagnetism, which he called 'odic force.' He said that it streams from the finger ends in the form of a kind of aurora borealis, which can be seen by sick sensitives, and even by some quite healthy people. At first scientists were excited by his findings; then they decided it was too much like the new ' spiritualism ' that was becoming so fashionable. Reichenbach was suddenly 'a laughing stock; his reputation never recover ed. In the early 1930s, a Yale physicist named Harold Burr established that living things produce a feeble electric current, He con nected trees up to a voltmeter, and charted their electrical forces for years, establishing that they fluctuated with sunspots and storms. The same sensitive voltmeter, connected in human beings, showed fluctuations according to health; a woman's field of force changes when she ovulates — an observation that provides new hope for the childless. The voltmeter can register cancers long before they are otherwise medically detectable. Burr's researches into 'life fields' have only been recently published, and they lead one to wonder whether Reichenbach was not correct after all.

In Rusia, more than thirty years ago, tWo scientists called Semyon and Valentina Kirlian invented a device consisting of two metal

plates through which a high frequency alternating current is passed. If a living object i5

placed between these plates, in contact with a piece of film, the result is a photograph of the ' life field' of the object. If the stalk of a newlY

cut flower is placed between the plates, a kind of light can be detected streaming from the stem in the form of 'sparks.' Another scientist, Viktor Adamenko, has invented a similar, device that causes a light to flash on and Of as it passes over acupuncture points in the body. In unhealthy people, this light is dimmer than in healthy ones.

It begins to look as if Reichenbach was, right about the odic force' — and as ir another misunderstood man of genius, Wilhelm Reich — who was imprisoned as a scientific fraud — had made basically the same discovery, which he called 'argotic energy.' (Reich finally diet1 in prison.)

The scientific evidence goes on accumulating. The time had to come when a scieatist without any 'occult' affiliations would undertake to try to put it into some sort of logical order. This is what Lyall Watson has done, in this rather hefty 340 page book. In fact, for the first two or three chapters, he is unconcerned with occult topics; he sets out to summarise what we know about 'life fields,' brain waves, the sun, the moon and biophYsics. The first thing that becomes clear is that there may be more in astrology than most people think. Gravitational and electromagnetic forces of the sun and the planets exert a measurable effect on plants and animals. Even on dead matter: a ten year course of experiments showed that the speed of chemical reactions depended on the sun — not on its light, but on other forces. Watson also quotes a fascinating test on astrologers conducted bY an American psychologist, Vernon Clark. The horoscopes of ten unknown people in various professions were handed to a group of astrologers, and also to a control group of social workers and psychologists. These latter got the expected 'chance' score, but seventeen out of twenty astrologers got a score that was a hundred to one above chance. And a Czech psychiatrist who has worked out a Way of determining the sex of unborn children based on the moon's position at the time of conception has a 95 per cent accuracy rate.

Obviously, a book like this cannot explain the supernatural in scientific terms; there is simply not enough evidence available. All it can do is point out where new scientific discoveries lend support to occult theories. For example, on the subject of ghosts, Watson is inclined to be downright sceptical. But he still has some exciting things to say. For example, when mouse brains are separated into their component cells and then put into a culture solution, the cells tended to reconnect into pieces of brain tissue. Again, some 'field' seems to be at work — a field that seems to be independent of the individual cells. Once admit the existence of such a field, and you are already halfway to explaining many phenomena involving ' ghosts.'

LThere is an even stranger suggestion. A atvian psychologist, Konstantin Raudive, discovered that if magnetic tapes are tuned in to the spaces between radio stations on a radio dial, strange voices can be heard when the tapes are played back. I have a recording Made by Raudive, and it is certainly convincing. Watson thinks these voices may have a natural explanation — perhaps they are a kind of ' recording ' made by nature, fundamentally similar to a gramophone record. A pot revolving on a potter's wheel ought to records the sounds of the pottery. Work on unglazed pottery from the Middle East has already produced encouraging results. Perhaps if we could find the right gramophone needle, we could replay the battle of Trafalgar, That is one of the oddest implications

but by no means most important — of a very exciting book.