Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch
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‘Yes, of course you do. But Nicholas, even if your motive was as pure as driven snow, this apparently harmless attempt at prayer could still have been dangerous. If someone’s emotionally disturbed – and in particular if they’re haunted by guilt – any psychic activity, even prayer, can trigger an unpleasant reaction.’
‘But this was worse than just an unpleasant reaction from Katie! There was an interruption by a discarnate shred.’
‘Are you quite sure you weren’t conducting a séance?’
‘Oh no, Father! That was why I was so surprised when –’
‘I too find it surprising. An emotional disturbance from Mrs Aysgarth is easy to explain: the psychic activity of prayer might have caused her to break down as she sensed the opportunity to express her grief and guilt – she could easily have had hysterics or possibly even a psychotic episode if the channel of prayer wasn’t wide enough to contain her emotions. But I wouldn’t have expected an infiltration of the scene by a discarnate shred unless you were actively trying to align yourself with the dead.’
‘Father, it wasn’t a séance. Honestly. It was just a pseudo-séance. I –’
‘You appal me.’
‘But Father, listen –’
‘Did you all hold hands and deliberately try to align yourselves with the spirit of a dead man?’
‘Yes, but since Christian’s at peace with God, surely an alignment could only be beneficial?’
‘How do you know he’s at peace with God?’
‘Well, I –’ I stared at him. Then as my scalp prickled I stammered: ‘I assumed – I felt sure – I mean, I just knew, it was “gnosis” –’
‘Don’t you dare use that word to me!’
‘I’m not using it as a Gnostic – I’m using it as a Christian who needs a code-word for psychic certainties –’
‘There are no psychic certainties.’
‘But Father –’
‘Be quiet. Now listen to me. Never try to communicate with the dead, even those likely to be at peace with God, because even a seemingly harmless attempt to align yourself with a departed soul can have a profoundly disturbing effect on the living.’
‘Yes, but I still don’t understand why what happened did happen. The discarnate shred was malign – I mean, it was very malign, it was driven by the most tremendous power, and in the end I realised that this power could only have been generated by –’
‘I should think it most unlikely that the Devil could have been bothered to drop in on your shoddy little séance. It’s much more probable that you lost your nerve and began to fantasise once the energy disturbances spiralled out of control. I assume that there were, in fact, energy disturbances?’
‘Yes, and Katie was in a sort of coma, moaning and groaning as if she were possessed –’
‘Rubbish, of course she wasn’t possessed! She was merely manifesting her deep psychological troubles. Did you hypnotise her?’
‘No, Father, certainly not.’
‘It would explain the appearance of coma. How on earth did you regain control of the scene?’
‘I shouted to the Devil: “In the name of Jesus Christ, Satan, be gone from this room!” and all the glass in the picture-frame shattered as he went out of the window.’
‘Nothing went out of the window, Nicholas, except the vibrations of your guilt and your panic’
‘But Father, that force I experienced – okay, maybe it wasn’t the Devil himself, maybe it was just a malign shred acting alone – well, whatever it was, it came from without. It wasn’t welling up from within.’
‘How did you experience it?’
‘As a mounting pressure on the psyche.’
‘Exactly. It was a pressure exerted by your unconscious mind – which in your panic would have seemed quite external to your ego.’
‘But Father –’
‘All right, Nicholas, calm down. I think our disagreement is an illusion created by the fact that we’re mixing up two different languages, the religious language employing symbols such as “the Devil”, and the scientific language which employs concepts such as “the unconscious mind”. Why don’t we try to produce a version of your story in each language so that we can see we’re talking about a single truth? Then perhaps we won’t get so cross with each other.’
I was hooked, just as I always was when religion and psychology were seen not as mortal enemies – the grand illusion of so many people – but as complementary approaches to a multi-sided truth. I gave Whitby another long, lingering stroke. Then I said to my father: ‘Okay, go on.’
VIII
‘Whichever language we adopt,’ said my father, ‘it’s safe to say that some very unpleasant forces were on the loose in that room. It’s also safe to say that Mrs Aysgarth was in a highly disturbed state and that you too became disturbed when you found the scene was moving beyond your control.
‘Very well, let’s express ourselves in religious language first. We can say that something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth; we can describe it by a symbol and call it the demon of guilt. When you finally saw how horrific that demon was, your psyche was opened up by your understanding with the result that the demon was tempted to move from Mrs Aysgarth to you. You experienced this demon as a strong pressure on the psyche. However, you then repelled this demonic invasion by calling on the greatest exorcist who ever lived and who we believe is living still; by invoking his name you aligned yourself with his power and succeeded in expelling the demon from the room.
‘So much for the religious language. By the liberal use of important symbols we’ve created a true description of what happened, but there’s another way of expressing the truth and it doesn’t diminish the religious description; it merely complements and confirms it. Let’s now turn to the verbal symbols of psychology.
‘Something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth, we said. We can express that in the other language by saying that she was suffering from a neurosis – obsessed by a sense of guilt. This neurotic guilt is rooted in her unconscious, but has recently begun to break into her conscious mind and lead to an impairment of her health. When you interfered, conducting this séance and subjecting her to psychic manipulation, the control normally exercised by her conscious mind was removed with the result that the darkest and most chaotic emotions began to rise out of the unconscious and manifest themselves in a variety of frightening ways.
‘Mrs Aysgarth may not, medically speaking, have been experiencing a psychotic episode, but I suspect her behaviour had the same effect on you as if you’d been witnessing the behaviour of a violent schizophrenic: you were terrified of what was going to happen next and your terror combined with your guilt that you’d induced such an appalling state of affairs. This made you unusually receptive to the guilt now spewing out of Mrs Aysgarth’s unconscious mind, and when her guilt merged with yours the merger appeared to you as a highly dangerous invasive force. In an instinctive gesture to repel the invasion you invoked the name of Our Lord – which is the point where the two languages meet. The invocation gave you the confidence to regain control; or in other words, the invocation resulted in an outpouring of grace which enabled you to triumph over the evil.’
My father paused for a moment before concluding: ‘So the disaster can be accurately described in both languages and there would appear to be no mystery at all about what happened, but I confess there’s one feature which still puzzles me: Mrs Aysgarth’s guilt. It must have been very extreme to create such a disturbance. Indeed it hints at something grossly abnormal.’