Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

Superpsi and super-pk explanations of apparitions with multiple percipients usually place the motivation for the apparition in the mind of the main percipient. This requires that the main percipient know the deceased person, and have some reason for wanting to perceive the person. Otherwise, the motivation would then lie with the deceased, which would give evidence for survival, the very thing the superpsi and super-pk explanations are meant to exclude. But there are cases of collective apparitions where the primary percipient did not know the deceased. Here is one such case from Myers’s Human Personality . On Christmas Eve of 1869, just as a woman and her husband, Willie, were about to go to sleep, the woman saw a man dressed in a naval uniform standing at the foot of the bed. She touched her husband, who was facing away from the image, and drawing his attention to it, said, “Willie, who is this?” Her husband said loudly, “What on earth are you doing here, sir?” The figure said reproachfully, “Willie, Willie!” The figure then moved toward the wall of the bedroom. The woman recalled, “As it passed the lamp, a deep shadow fell upon the room as of a material person shutting out the light from us by his intervening body, and he disappeared, as it were, into the wall.” After the disappearance, Willie told his wife that the image had been that of his father, a naval officer, who had died fourteen years earlier. She had never seen him. Her husband had been in anxiety about a large financial transaction, and he took the apparition of his father as a warning for him not to proceed (Griffin 1997, p. 222,). Taking the wife as the principal percipient and the apparition as a hallucination, it is unusual that she should hallucinate an image of her husband’s dead father, whom she had never met or seen. A paranormal researcher might propose that by super-esp the wife picked up on her husband’s anxiety and his unconscious thoughts of his father, and from that material manifested a real apparition by super-pk, causing it to be visible not only to her but her husband. But this is straining perhaps too much to avoid the survival hypothesis. In this case, it is simpler to propose that the surviving spirit of Willie’s father, desiring to save his son from financial ruin, was responsible for his own apparition. Griffin (1997, p. 223) points out that in such cases “Frederick Myers suggested that the postmortem soul, or some element thereof, produces quasi-physical effects in the region of space at which the apparition is seen.”

Evidence for Superhuman Personalities in the Cosmic Hierarchy

In the apparition, possession, and communication cases we have considered above, the appearing, possessing, or communicating entity appears to be a departed human. But in some cases the entity appears to be superhuman, giving evidence for contact with beings at a different level of the cosmic hierarchy than that occupied by departed humans.

Demonic Possession

On January 15, 1949 members of the Doe family in the Georgetown district of Washington, D. C., heard strange knocking and scratching noises in their house (Doe is a pseudonym used in the reports of the case). At first they thought it was the ghost of a departed relative. Eventually, the sounds stopped, and small objects began to disappear and reappear in the house. Pieces of furniture moved inexplicably, and paintings shook on the walls. After a few weeks, the Does’ son Roland, thirteen years old, began to manifest strange symptoms. He talked in his sleep and shouted obscenities. One night the family members heard him screaming and went into his room to see him. They found him and his mattress floating in mid air. The Does, who were Lutherans, sought help from a clergyman. A few nights later, this clergyman witnessed a similar levitation by Roland. These levitations were repeated, not only in the Doe home, but in other houses and hospitals. After the levitations started, Roland started manifesting symptoms of possession. He suffered violent seizures, and a demonic personality took control of his body and speech (Rogo 1982, pp. 41–42).

At this point, the parents concluded that the only cure was a Roman Catholic exorcism. Church officials accepted their petition, and Roland was taken to a Catholic hospital in St. Louis for the exorcism. The priests conducting the exorcism were Father Raymond Bishop, Father F. Bowdern, and Father Lawrence Kenny. They kept a diary, which recorded the many supernatural events that took place during the exorcism. Roland levitated, read the minds of the exorcists, manifested understanding of Latin, and exercised unusual strength, breaking away from attendants who were trying to hold him down on his bed. Father Charles O’Hara, of Marquette University in Milwaukee, was present for some of the sessions. He later said to Father Eugene Gallagher of Georgetown University: “One night the boy brushed off his handlers and soared through the air at Father Bowdern standing at some distance from his bed [with] the ritual [book] in his hands. Presumably, Father was about to be attacked but the boy got no further than the book. And when his hand hit that—I assure you I saw this with my own eyes—he didn’t tear the book, he dissolved it. The book vaporized into confetti and fell in small fine pieces to the floor” (Rogo 1982, p. 43).

After several weeks, Roland was finally freed from the demon’s control. Rogo (1982, p. 43) says: “Unfortunately, a large portion of the diary kept by Roland’s exorcists is now lost. The case report written by the priests was in the possession of Father Gallagher until 1950, at which time he lent it to a colleague. Somehow a number of its sixteen pages were misplaced at that time. However, many of the original witnesses who took part in the case, in both St. Louis and Georgetown, are still alive.” It was on this case that William Peter Blatty based his novel the exorcist, which was turned into a film that became a classic of its kind.

On December 22, 1693, Carlo Maria Vulcano, a boy sixteen years old, entered the monastery of the Hieronymite order in Naples for training as a novice (Gauld and Cornell 1979, pp. 158–166). During the night of May 4, 1696, stones mysteriously fell into the hallway outside the room where Carlo and some other novices were sleeping. The same thing happened the next night. The novices rushed into the hallway, but saw only the stones lying on the floor of the hallway. Later that night, Carlo, alone in his room, noticed some movements in the dark. Then a voice cried out in his room, pleading for a prayer to be said for him. Carlo ran out the room screaming, “Jesus, Jesus, help me, help me” (Gauld and Cornell 1979, p. 162). One of the masters, Master Squillante, pacified Carlo, blessed the room, and told Carlo to go to sleep.When Carlo was lying in his bed, he saw a figure dressed as a Benedictine monk in the doorway. It came into the room, again crying out for prayers to be said on its behalf. Carlo and the novices ran to the prayer room, where they said prayers and chanted the rosary. As they did so, they heard a great commotion in the hallway, and then everything was quiet.

During the first part of the next day, stones fell in different rooms throughout the monastery, and then things became quiet. That night, as Carlo was trying to go to sleep, he again heard a voice calling him. He ignored it, thinking it a product of his imagination. But then the voice challenged, “You do not want to reply?” At that moment, his bed collapsed and the sheets and blankets flew into the air. Carlo ran out of the room, as behind him all the furniture crashed down and the window burst open. On the days that followed, stones continued to fall in various places. The demon pounded on doors, all the while crying out loudly. During the attacks, mattresses, sheets, and pillows were flung wildly around. The demon put pots of excrement in front of sacred images, threw excrement at Carlo, and threw paving stones at other persons.