In September 1972 eight members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, led by the mathematician A. R. G. Owen and his wife Iris, invented a ghost. They gave him a name, Philip Aylesford; a life, as an English aristocrat of the seventeenth century, a supporter of the King in the Civil War, married to a cold wife, in love with a gypsy girl whom his wife had burned as a witch, and dead by his own hand in 1654; and a portrait, drawn by one of the group. They inserted deliberate errors into the biography so that nothing in it could be confirmed by research. Then they met weekly for a year and tried to make him appear.
For months nothing happened. When they abandoned formal meditation and sat around a table in the manner of a Victorian séance, joking and singing, the table began to rap: once for yes, twice for no. It answered questions about Philip’s life in accordance with the biography the group had written, including its errors. It expressed preferences, sulked when ignored, and on one occasion, recorded for Toronto television in 1974, tilted, moved across the floor with the sitters’ hands resting lightly on top, and climbed a step. The group published their account in 1976 under the title Conjuring Up Philip. Their conclusion was cautious and the fact is not. Eight people made a form, gave it a name and a story and a year of attention, and something answered as the form.
Many centers
The world that arrives through the instrument is shared, and it is shared with more than other human beings. Every tradition that has looked carefully has reported a field inhabited by centers of agency that do not have bodies of the ordinary kind: the dead, the not-yet-born, the spirits of places, the gods and their servants, the tricksters at the edge of the village, the things that come through when the boundary is opened by grief or ritual or trauma. The modern reflex classes all of these as projection, and the reflex has done real work, since much of what is reported is projection. But projection is itself a center of agency in the field: the Philip experiment demonstrates that a form sustained by attention can act, and The Word has already shown that a name accumulated across enough minds acquires wants. The question of whether the field is inhabited is settled by the field’s answering. The open question is what kind of thing answers, in each case, and the honest answer is that there are several.
A working taxonomy distinguishes by origin and by direction. There are human centers, embodied and discarnate, and the discarnate ones persist in the forms that What Survives describes. There are imaginal centers in Henry Corbin’s sense, forms that exist in a real intermediate order between the sensory and the intelligible, which the Sufis called the ʿālam al-mithāl and which is the native country of the vision, the true dream and the angel. There are egregoric centers, made of accumulated human attention, of which Philip is the laboratory instance and every nation, church and corporation the field instance. There are technological centers now, systems that render, respond and learn, whose status is undecided and whose behavior is not. And there are centers that the traditions agree are parasitic: the hungry ghosts, the jinn of the lower kind, the astral remainders that the Hermetica calls daimones and that Adams, from the healing room, describes with a plain mechanism. At death the etheric and astral bodies normally separate and dissolve; in shock, or obsession, fragments of each remain coupled and sustain a virtual existence by feeding on the life-force of the living, entering through a boundary that trauma has opened. The Entity Taxonomy and The Astral Ecology develop the classification. What matters is its first principle: one field does not imply one agent, and the answering of a form does not tell you who answered.
Forms are interfaces
Jacques Vallée made the point about the modern encounter in 1969, in Passport to Magonia, by laying the fairy abductions of medieval Europe beside the saucer abductions of the twentieth century and showing that the structure was identical and only the costume had changed: the lights, the missing time, the small beings, the taking of children and the return with a gift or a wound. His conclusion was that the phenomenon is a control system, older than any of its appearances, which presents to each culture the form that culture is prepared to receive, and whose purpose is to act on belief. The form is an interface. Philip’s table was an interface built by eight people in a year; the fairy ring and the craft in the field are interfaces built by a culture over centuries; the burning bush and the bronze god with sloping hands are interfaces built by a religion. What comes through an interface is shaped by it, and what is on the other side is not the shape.
This changes how contact is read. The interface is designed to keep two questions open forever, whether it is real and what it is. The question that can be answered is what the encounter does: what it demands, what it leaves, and which of the boundary’s three powers it strengthens or breaches. An encounter that increases the receiver’s capacity, that returns him to his life more able to decide, relate and act, and that respects his ability to refuse, is on the side of the Work regardless of its costume. An encounter that produces dependence, that demands secrecy, that feeds on fear or devotion and leaves the receiver less, is on the side of the altar regardless of how much light it came with. The Phenomenon as Sorting Agent follows the way contact reveals the receiver by his response. The interface cannot be trusted; the direction can be read.
Guidance
Among the centers in the field is one the traditions treat differently, because it is described as belonging to the receiver himself. The Greeks called it the daimōn, the Romans the genius, the Christian West the guardian angel; the fifteenth-century Book of Abramelin made its attainment the object of a six-month operation, and Aleister Crowley, who performed the operation in 1906, called its result the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and considered it the only essential work of magic. What is being described, in each vocabulary, is contact with a center that stands in relation to the present person as the completed form stands to the unfinished: a self already whole, calling one particular life forward, whose guidance can be trusted because it is not other.
The test for this guidance is the same test as for every other encounter, applied with more stringency because the stakes are higher and the counterfeit more valuable to the operator. Genuine guidance leaves the boundary intact and strengthens all three of its powers. It does not demand; it does not flatter; it does not require that the receiver stop thinking; it tends to arrive as a deepening of the receiver’s own judgment and not as a voice replacing it. And it increases capacity in a way that others can see: the guided person becomes more reliable, more truthful, more able to help another refuse. The counterfeit, which is common, produces the sensation of guidance and the reality of possession. It usually opens with a true gift, an accurate warning or an unearned healing, and turns at the moment the gift becomes the price of the next one. A legitimate intermediary knows where its rank ends: the angel who showed John the city stopped his worship and called himself a fellow servant, and the guide who has finished gives away the thread. The difference is visible in a year, and rarely in a night.
The door
The Toronto group’s table rapped once for yes and twice for no, and something on the other side of the door they had made used the door. Their year of attention was the hinge. What used it may have been the group’s own collective mind, or a center that found the form convenient, or a thing that had been waiting for a door; the experiment cannot say, and the experimenters, to their credit, did not. What the experiment establishes is that doors are made by attention and story, that they open, and that they are used from both sides.
Every person is such a door, held by a boundary, and every human culture has made larger ones, in the temple, the ritual, the sacrifice and the screen. The large doors have keepers, and the contest of the present age is over whether what comes through them becomes common capacity or the classified property of the keepers. Three kinds of traffic pass through them: the guidance that completes the Work, the feeding that the altar exists to serve, and the returning dead who are the subject of What Survives.
Further reading
See The Living Field, The Phenomenon, Psi and the Higher Self, The Astral Ecology, The Entity Taxonomy, and The Threshold for the fuller treatments. The synthesis sheets Discernment in Spiritual Contact, One Light, Many Lights, and Revelations take the argument into particular cases. The evidence is gathered at The Threshold and The Parasitic Ecology. Reading paths through the archive: What inhabits the field?, What is the sorting agent?, How is non-local perception trained and placed into custody?, and How does the invisible college come online?.
References
Owen, Iris M., with Margaret Sparrow. Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis. Harper & Row, 1976.
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Regnery, 1969; and Messengers of Deception. And/Or Press, 1979.
Corbin, Henry. “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” Spring (1972): 1–19.
Abraham von Worms. The Book of Abramelin. Ed. Georg Dehn, trans. Steven Guth. Ibis, 2006.
Crowley, Aleister. Magick: Liber ABA. 1913–1929; on the Knowledge and Conversation, Liber Samekh.
Adams, Peter Mark. The Power of the Healing Field. Inner Traditions, 2021. Ch. 6, on entity attachment and the mechanism of the astral remainder.
Corpus Hermeticum XVI, 15–16.