Good, Evil and The Modern Mind

Father Hartney F.

When Hartney F. was born in Wales in 1905, his parents had been living there for almost 18 years. He was a late child. His mother was Welsh, his father, an Englishman from Northumberland.

Hartney’s hometown, which he called Casnewydd-ar-Wysg but which is shown on English maps as Newport, stands on the banks of the river Usk in Monmouthshire. He was baptized in St. Woolos parish church.

When Hearty was one and a half years old, his father, a general medical practitioner of the old school, came into a substantial inheritance from his father. Up to that point, the family had struggled to make ends meet. Now, with the sudden affluence, his father gave up his city dispensary and practice. The family moved out of the town to a small village near the confluence of the Usk and Severn Rivers.

There, Hartney spent the next twelve and a half years. His father maintained a small private practice. At their home on the Severn, his first ideas and emotions were formed by his mother and aided by the ambient of Welsh tradition in which the neighborhood-its people, history, monuments, and communal life-were bathed. At the age of six he was sent to grammar school. His daily language was Welsh, but his father tutored him in English from the age of seven.

Up to that time his mother, an ardent Welsh nationalist, steeped in Welsh history and literature, would not allow any English to be spoken in her child’s presence. Only after he was fourteen did she consent to send him to a British public school, where he acquired a thorough grounding in English and developed a deep interest in science. But his English never quite lost the Welsh lilt and cadence.

His parents were Methodists and worshiped each Sunday at the little stone chapel in their village. Between his mother’s fixation with the Welsh soul or spirit, the attractiveness and beauty of their hymn-singing Methodism, and his immersion in the folklore of village and country, Hartney’s mentality was early on soaked in that peculiarity of all Celtic peoples which the Welsh developed to a very particular degree.

The best name for that peculiarity is style, style, as distinct and different from all other humanly valued qualities or powers, and not encompassed by or to be equated with intelligence, cunning, artistry, money, land, blood.

The soul of the Celt has a particular universality of its own: all of life and the world is interpreted in terms of light and shadow. But that innate generalism of their souls has never enabled Celts to achieve military conquest, imperial possessions, huge wealth, or cultural predominance. Early in their history, they were confined to the extremities of France (Brittany), of England (in Wales and Scotland), and in Ireland as the outermost tip of the European continent, dominated by Romans, Vandals, Franks, English, Normans, Danes, and others.

Celts developed the only power that remained: verbal expression and a corresponding mercurial agility of spirit. Oralism, not mentalism, is the mark of the Celt. The aspect of their peculiar style that became most noteworthy and most celebrated was their remarkable verbal expression of emotion.

At that one thing the Celts excelled. The Irish turned their style to express the Celtic twilight: the two dusks of birth and death. The Scots concentrated on the play of light and shadow, never clearly happy, never undoubtedly sad. The Bretons took refuge in the shadow as a covert for their perseverance.

But the Welsh took up the light in style and developed the distinct colors of their singing into a Pindarism all their own; and the clarity and brilliance of their language became a more powerful factor of identity than their nationalism or their religion. They maintained the Celtic shadow as a secret background in which to treasure their emotions. The great presumption of “Welshism” was that the visible and material world was merely a clothing or garment thrown over the living heart of sublime and beautiful reality.

It was this peculiarly Welsh style of thought, feeling, and expression that deeply characterized Hartney through the various stages of a life spent far from his native Wales.

Hartney’s psychic powers were part and parcel of this “Welshism.” Among his fellow countrymen there was no prurient curiosity as to his psychic ability-“Half of the people I knew had it, the other half presumed they had it,” Hartney remarked once. Nor was there any mystery attached to it. Consequently, he did not grow up with a feeling of being abnormal or out of the ordinary. And the security he enjoyed was a distinct advantage.

Only when he went to public school and thence to Cambridge did he realize that his psychic power was a rarity and usually regarded as an untrustworthy abnormality. The English, permissive though they might be about their own emotions and peculiarities, tend to regard emotions or psychic abilities in non-English people as evidence of primitive conditions.
Hartney’s latent psychic perception was mellowed at an early age by three prime, never-forgotten influences: the folklore of his people, the physical countryside, and his family’s Methodism.

Before he knew one rule of English grammar or how to use a test tube, Hartney’s memory was filled with the deep stuff of Welsh folklore that placed him in a living continuity with the “spirit” or “soul” of the land and the people. His mind was filled with the names of romantic Welsh princes such as Rhun ab Owain, Llewellyn, Owain Glyn Dwr, and of poets such as the fifteenth-century Tudur Aled. His mother recited the odes of the sixth-century Taliesin and Aneirin. And his speech was modeled after the metrical forms of the Welsh Middle Ages, the cywydd and englyn. He learned to avoid mentioning the year 1536 (when the infamous Act of Union abolished Welsh national independence).

The Welsh countryside that grew to be a part of Hearty’s inner man was and still is of a special kind. There was a living magic about its whitewashed houses, its stone chapels, the intimate play of light on running water, the aloneness of mountain and valley, the perpetuity of pastureland, the merciless maw of mines where men grew black and sick working beneath the earth but returned to sing in chapel and go home to their wives and children. As Owen M. Edwards wrote, “The spirit of Wales is born in the mountain farmhouse, in the cottage by the brook, in the coal miner’s home.”

This entire complex of nature’s face and men’s haunts was taken as a living thing.

Years later, in the jungles of Burma and in postwar Japan, when waves of nostalgia hit him now and then for the Vale of Usk, Bala Lake, the Swallow Falls, Llyn Idwal, or for the north beach of Tenby Bay, where he spent all the summer vacations of his childhood and youth, Hearty saw himself once again in the long straw-thatched, small-windowed cottages, smelling the flitches of bacon hanging from the kitchen rafters, and eating hot “shot”- ground oatcake and milk. Such a memory was as mystical as a poem about the Vale of Avalon and as faery as the cuckoo’s song in Merion.

Methodism was the third great developing influence on Hartney. The meaning of Methodism was holiness. Not that the chapel was holy, or the singing sacred. (The minister, indeed, used to preach that it was the adjoining graveyard that made the chapel holy, not vice versa). But it was holiness in expression: the hymnal. Worship of God and Christ, performed according to rule and with the characteristic Methodist regularity and rhythm. This expression was holy because it was believed to be a conversation with the spirit of Christ and God. And more than once in his early youth, as Hartney stood between his parents during the soaring phrases of the chanting, the gabled roof of the chapel would no longer be a thick shield against the sky. It was for him a sacred mountaintop opening on to Heaven through which the angels of song descended from God to men and ascended back to God.

The extent of Hartney’s psychic power became clear to him at a young age. He could and did receive clear-often literally accurate- inner intimations of what other people, near him and far away from him, were thinking and-on rare occasions-what they were suffering. It was thus in a Burmese jungle clearing late in 1943 that he knew the exact hour when both his parents died in the German blitz of London.

In 1924 Hartney chose to follow lectures in physics at Cambridge. While at the university, he became interested in Roman Catholicism. When he graduated in 1929, he had already been received into the Roman Catholic Church and had his mind made up to become a priest.

Ordained in 1936, he served in a succession of parishes in the London area, until he joined the British Army as a chaplain in 1941. Shortly afterward, his unit left for India and within a few months of his arrival there was sent into the Burmese jungles to harass the Japanese forces. During this part of his career Hartney was nicknamed “Battling Hearty” by his men. The shortened form, Hearty, stuck to him ever after.

He had his first experience of possession by Evil Spirit during the Burmese campaign. The small force of men with whom he traveled as chaplain had halted for the night in a small clearing. All was quiet and tranquil. But Hearty woke up at about 2:00 A.M. with a strong feeling that other human beings were moving near or around their encampment. He tried to fall asleep again, but the idea would not go away.

He finally sat up and listened for a few minutes. He crawled over to the commander of the unit, woke him up, and told him of his fears. It was not the first time Hearty had had these experiences. And he had always been right. The commander waited a while, talked with the posted sentinels, and finally decided to send a mortar barrage in the direction Hearty indicated. After five minutes, when there was no answering fire, they settled down to watch for the rest of the night.

In the faint light of the new day, scouts were sent out. One was back in minutes. The mortar barrage had found its target. Their night barrage had taken a Japanese hospital unit by surprise. When Hearty and the others arrived, all Japanese personnel, except for one soldier, were dead; the sole survivor was unconscious. Hearty’s unit commander wanted him for questioning. He was brought back to the encampment, and his wounds were tended. When he regained consciousness several hours later, the unit commander knew he would not live very long. He had the poor fellow interrogated by his intelligence officers.

Late that afternoon Hearty went over to talk with the prisoner. He wished to find out if he was a Christian, possibly a Roman Catholic. If he were, Hearty wished to give him the last rites of the Church.

It was at the time of the short Burmese dusk that Hearty approached him. Hearty wore battle fatigues like all the members of his unit. He wore no sign or badge indicating that he was a chaplain. As Hearty approached, the prisoner’s eyes flickered and then opened wide; he was looking straight up at the overhanging foliage and at the sky. Hearty expected a look of fear mixed with hate to appear in his eyes. But what he saw there was neither fear nor hate. It was some other emotion he could not recognize: inimical, yes but with an added trait he could not grasp immediately.

Still interpreting all this as a natural reaction to the sight of an enemy uniform, he drew nearer. The dying man grew more and more agitated; his limbs and torso shook; his eyes rolled around in their sockets; even his short-cropped hair seemed to stand up on his scalp. For all the world, he was like a helpless animal bristling in defense.

Hearty stopped and waited.

He had begun to perceive a very unaccustomed “mental” message. He had approached Japanese prisoners before and he knew their mentality. Hearty did not speak Japanese, but the language difference between him and them created no barrier for mental communication; that communication was not by words, verbal or mental. This dying man’s mentality had some curious trait in it which Hearty was perceiving for the first time in his life in a human being.

Years before, when he and his father with some local hunters had cornered a fox that had been devastating the chickens in the farms around their home on the Severn, Hearty had killed the fox. As he took aim and was about to pull the trigger, his eyes had caught the direct glare of the defiant, snarling animal. Now, in the jungle clearing, looking at that prisoner, he had a similar feeling.

Still thinking that he had been misunderstood, Hearty pulled a small crucifix from his breast pocket and held it up so that the dying man could see it. The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. By this time, one of the intelligence officers who spoke fluent Japanese had joined Hearty. He and Hearty heard strange guttural sounds coming from the man’s throat.

“My God! Padre, he’s cursing your cross,” the officer said. But already Hearty was “receiving.” His mind became full of a strange perturbation; and the wordless message was clear: Go away. Take yourself and all you signify away from us. You serve what we hate.

“Ask him a question for me, Captain,” Hearty said to the officer. “Ask him why does he hate the cross.”

The officer had no sooner put the question than the prisoner started to rise. His right hand flashed up to the bandages covering his chest wounds, tearing them off in a convulsive movement.

“Himiko! Himiko!” was as much as Hearty could catch of his shout before the man fell back. The intelligence officer could not understand the curious word, but thought it must be a name of some sort. In a matter of seconds, the prisoner’s eyes opened with the sightless stare of the dead. Blood flowed for a few moments from his wounds; then it stopped.

It was not until later that Hearty found out what Himiko meant. But, in the jungle, he had a dawning realization that the man who had just died had been dedicated to some spiritual power from which his hate of the cross had come. Obscurely, without fine lines or definitions, Hearty understood the raw elements of possession.

At the end of the war, in 1946, Hearty volunteered for a vacant chaplaincy in occupied Japan. He was posted to the city of Kyoto and settled into his new quarters in April of that year.

Untouched by war and deliberately preserved from bombing by the Allies, Kyoto had been the imperial capital of Japan until 1868. It was the one city of Japan that had been laid out geometrically in rectangular shape, every street running north-south or east-west. In Japan of the postwar period, Kyoto sank deeper and deeper into its traditional past while attracting radical politicians and thinkers. Its Buddhist and Shinto shrines were magnificent, and Hearty spent his spare time visiting them all.
 

It was during a conversation in 1947 with a teacher named Obata at the Ryukoku, the Buddhist school, that he learned about Himiko. Himiko had been, it appeared, a shaman queen in very ancient times, and a modern sect still existed that worshiped her as a devil-goddess. They believed she lived and ruled from among the snow-covered mountains behind Kyoto.

Hearty and Obata became good friends. Obata had graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938. His chosen field was mysticism; his thesis had been a comparative study of Dervish knowledge and Buddhist enlightenment. With the facts he had researched about the dance and rhythms of Dervishes and his own native knowledge of Buddhism, Obata gave Hearty a systematic perception of a type of human knowledge not based on scientifically controlled and verified facts.

Hearty’s scientific background began to fall into a new perspective. He started to realize the meaning of mysticism in his own religion. And very soon, also, he began to see that whatever psychic abilities he had should be carefully distinguished from spirit and the supernatural. For this was the central lesson of Buddhist and Dervish beliefs and practices.

(Here was the distinction that Carl V. had never really understood, indeed had lost almost from the start of his parapsychological career. If any one factor in Carl’s mental makeup had helped preponderantly to his being possessed, this failure was it. Failing in this vital distinction, Carl inevitably took spirit, or soul, and psychic activity as one and the same thing. Any change produced in the psyche was taken by him as a change in spirit; and any illusion imposed on the psyche was taken as an ultimate truth of the soul.)

With Obata, Hearty explored the basic ideas of telepathy and telekinesis as well as bilocation; all these had been current coin over one thousand years before the words “parapsychology” and “extrasensory perception” had been breathed on a Western campus.
Obata used simple expressions and some current terms to instruct Hearty. Hearty’s psyche, he said, was a “screen” on which some powerful psychic sender could flash images. Hearty had, however, a “censor bond,” a faculty with which he could make his psyche opaque to the psychic probe of any “mind reader.”

Obata assessed Hearty as a “receiver.” And, concluding one of their discussions on the subject, he added, “Be thankful.” He would only grin good-humoredly in the Japanese fashion when Hearty asked why he should be thankful that he could not also “send” messages or move objects by telekinesis.

Hearty got only one clue, though a very dramatic one, as to why it was better thus. Once on their way home from an early-morning walk, the two men passed by the edge of the Geon, Kyoto’s renowned geisha district. Obata pointed this out to Hearty, and they stopped a moment. Without any forewarning, Obata suddenly fell forward on his face and rolled over. He was up in a flash, his eyes narrowed with apprehension.

“Hearty-San, they don’t like me to be with you here. Hurry.” He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead where he had struck the pavement.

Hearty was too dazed by the bizarre experience to say anything. But as Obata left him at the gate to his quarters, he said to Hearty, again with good humor, but with a faintly grim note: “You see, my friend, it’s better you be only receiver. But watch. They know you already. And they know always for future time.”

Only by reflecting on this incident did Hearty begin to understand why it was better not to be able to “send” messages or move objects at a distance. To have those abilities apparently laid one open in some mysterious way to assault by others-human beings or spirits-who enjoyed similar powers. To be on the same plane as they was somehow to be vulnerable to them.

By the time Hearty’s enlistment as chaplain came to an end in 1949, the Himiko incident in the jungle as well as Obata’s fall near the Geon had receded in his memory. He had already applied for and received permission to transfer himself to the United States. A bishop on the East Coast was more than willing to accept Hearty into his diocese.

Hearty had been living and working in Newark, New Jersey, for two years when the bishop called him and asked him to assist the diocesan exorcist. There would be nothing to it, the bishop assured him. Hearty had nerves of steel, and the bishop felt anyway that nine-tenths of all these things “are simply bad nerves or bad faith or both.”

The exorcism proved to be neither bad nerves nor bad faith. As far as Hearty could see, the exorcee-in this case, a middle-aged man-was afflicted with some peculiar disturbance and anguish that ceased once the exorcism rite was completed. He reported back to the bishop, adding a request to be included in future exorcisms. The bishop remonstrated; no one, absolutely no one, wants any truck with these matters. “Well, I do. And I don’t know why. But I do,” had been Hearty’s answer.

In the next six years Hearty was assistant at more than 17 exorcisms.

When the diocesan exorcist died unexpectedly after a long and exhausting exorcism, Hearty was clearly the strongest and most experienced man to replace him. When he was approached by the bishop, he did not hesitate for a moment.

In that same year he took his one and only holiday vacation: two weeks in his native Wales. He wandered once again around the countryside he had loved, visited the cottages of the ordinary people, ate great meals of bacon, potatoes, buttermilk, cheese, and oatcakes. He spent evenings reminiscing with old friends around open fires and tasting the fire in cwrw, the Welsh national liquor.

For the next six years or so after his return from Wales, Hearty served as an assistant priest with several assignments in the diocese. He remained diocesan exorcist. In 1963 the bishop offered Hearty his own parish. Hearty took this rather important occasion to sit down for a long and serious conversation with his bishop. With six years as exorcist behind him, as well as broad day-to-day experience with normal parish problems, Hearty had begun to see a subtle but already pervasive change.
 

There was, he said to the bishop, a new situation rapidly developing which the Church had not yet recognized. It concerned a new direction of psychology and psychiatry; but it seemed to Hearty that it also involved popular devotion and piety. Several times when putting candidates for exorcism through psychological and psychiatric tests he had found the experts talking of parapsychology. They seemed to look forward to some future date when all religious phenomena would be easily and understandably taken as the products of the human psyche as the psyche somehow passed through hitherto unknown altered states of consciousness. It bothered him a good deal, he told the bishop, because the new study, parapsychology, tended to displace religion altogether and to empty it of its significance.

There was a sabbatical coming to Hearty. If it was all right with his bishop, he could take a two-year sabbatical and do some private research on the subject. He would, of course, maintain his activity as diocesan exorcist; for anything of that nature he would return home, he said. The bishop gave his consent and promised Hearty the necessary financial support. Only later did Hearty tell him of his intention to follow courses at a university.

Hearty thus came to study on the campus where Carl V. had already made his name. At that point in his life, by the time Hearty started to attend Carl’s lectures, he had developed a very strong instinct in matters concerning diabolism. He knew almost immediately that Carl V. was in trouble. How deeply he could not make out in the beginning. But after three semesters and various conversations with Carl and his group, Hearty was convinced that Carl was heading for serious disturbance and possibly was already well into the first stages of diabolic possession.

In the last few months of his stay at the university, Hearty was somewhat puzzled by Carl’s effect on him. On the one hand, Carl took no pains to hide from him and the others that he regarded Hearty’s clerical profession a definite hindrance to Hearty’s full potential as a parapsychologist. On the other hand, time and time again Hearty “received” subtle “messages” from Carl, messages that were appeals for help.

The process of receiving “messages” always followed a pattern. The “messages” came as little chunks of knowledge suddenly appearing in Hearty’s consciousness, always preceded by a short blank period when, it seemed to Hearty, his mind stopped thinking but he remained conscious. Immediately after that, he knew something without knowing what he knew. And then there was a sudden realization of what he knew; images appeared for what he knew; and after that he attached words to the images.

Hearty finally realized that, if part of Carl was already under the domination of an evil spirit, nevertheless another part of him was still free and as yet unpossessed. It was this profound part of Carl’s being that was appealing for help. In a somewhat disconcerting moment, Hearty realized that Carl must be aware that he, Hearty, knew of the possession.

It was quite a while before Hearty got used to the idea of such a fission in a human personality with whom he was in contact several times a week. But Hearty had already learned enough over the years to realize that evil spirits do not always know everything-they do not necessarily know accurately even what they already possess. He had more than once taken hope from that very fact.

The last three “messages” Carl sent him occurred at some distance apart both in terms of time and space. One came to him on the day of his farewell to Carl at the end of his studies. When he looked back at the office building where he had just left Carl, the message came loud and clear for Hearty’s psyche: “Help me! Come when I am just about to be completely taken.” Hearty dropped into the college chapel and said some prayers. He had to believe and trust that he would arrive in time for that moment when Carl was about to be “completely taken.”

The next message came to him one morning in Newark in late 1972: Carl was about to take some final step; he needed now to be pulled back, but he was helpless. Left to himself, he had to go on and perform the final act of submission to the spirit that had taken possession of him. Hearty came as fast as he could to the university campus, but he missed Carl both at the campus and at the airport.
The last message came to him at the end of July that same year. He knew Carl was home in Philadelphia and that he needed him. Again Hearty set out without delay in order to get to Carl. Hearty lost no time in beginning the examinations and study that were needed in advance of any expected exorcism.


His first undertaking was to acquaint himself with Carl’s life and to test the validity of Carl’s supposed psychic powers. He spoke with all those who had known Carl intimately. He tracked down both Olde and Wanola P. in different parts of the country. They both came to see Hearty; and Olde in particular was an enormous help. Carl’s mother, now divorced from his father and remarried, lived in Malta. But his father and two brothers gave Hearty all the help they could.

The best parapsychologist Carl knew, a Swiss-born German, was in New York for a lecture series. Carl and Hearty spent three weeks there; and the parapsychologist completed his examination of Carl between his lecture commitments. His verdict on Carl: positive. That is, the man possessed extraordinary extrasensory powers, but he was suffering from some deep trauma which was out of the parapsychologist’s reach. Neither hypnosis nor pharmacological treatment was of any avail.

Hearty and Carl returned to Philadelphia, but Hearty was not yet satisfied. He distrusted parapsychologists.

While maintaining a home base in his own diocese in Newark, he went to New York several times with Carl. After a thorough physical examination, Carl was put in the hands of two psychiatrists who put him through a battery of tests. In substance, their verdict was the same as that of the parapsychologist: Carl V. was normal and sane by any standard acceptable to their profession. He had suffered, they said, from a good deal of nervous tension during the previous summer. But they could uncover no abnormality.

One of them urged Carl to return to Aquileia and finish the rite he had gone there to perform. Hearty vetoed this suggestion.

The other suggested mildly that Carl “go easy on the religion bit” for a couple of years, to give himself a chance to recuperate lost ground and gain self-confidence. As Hearty was leaving his office, the second psychiatrist became a little more expansive. He felt a lot of people were crazy on account of religion, he said. All that guilt. “Get him to go out and lay broads, Father. That’ll do the trick.”

“God bless such salutary broads, Doctor,” Hearty said, tipping his hat as he left.

As his investigations progressed over the weeks and months, Hearty was increasingly certain. Carl had to be exorcised. All this while, and right up to the exorcism, Carl was completely docile. He urged Hearty to hurry up. “I haven’t much time, Hearty,” he used to say wistfully.

But Hearty felt he had to be thorough. He had never been involved in an exorcism of a person as psychically gifted as Carl, and he did not know how this unusual element might be used, even against Carl’s will, as a serious weapon against them both. He insisted on covering every inch of ground Carl had traveled in parapsychology since his student days. Only in this way would Hearty be at least reasonably well equipped to follow and deal with any vagary through which Carl might pass during the exorcism.

In addition, Hearty had one profound doubt. For the first time he foresaw the possibility that in an exorcism the exorcee might die or go insane because of the exorcism.

Hearty was rather sure of a few things: that Carl’s claimed perception of the non-thing aura as well as his professed astral-travel trances and his knowledge of former reincarnations were deceptions induced by the evil spirit. And he guessed the only tangible proof that the spirit had been expelled would be the cessation of these effects in Carl.

Hearty felt that, if he was correct in his basic analyses, then the final and possibly the greatest danger to Carl would lie in his reaction to the sudden exposure of how he had been deceived over and over and had consented to each deception. The bottom would fall out of his life. Could he take the strain? Disillusionment or disappointment as profound as Carl would likely undergo in this exorcism could, as Hearty knew from his studies and experience, render a human being not merely catatonic, but in extreme cases suicidal.

Right up to the last moment, in spite of the assurance that every precaution and test he could devise showed Carl to be strong and sturdy, Hearty could not rid himself of this idea of extreme danger for Carl. Finally he gave Carl the option to withdraw or to go ahead. He warned him of what he felt to be the risks if he chose to go ahead.

Carl insisted on going on with the exorcism. “If I live as I am, I will die a real death of soul. If I die under exorcism, I may be saved. If I go insane, perhaps God will take this into account when judging me.”

The choice of locale for the exorcism was easy. Carl wanted it to take place in his childhood home out beyond Chestnut Hill among the hills of the Piedmont plateau, and in the place where he had had his teenage vision-his father’s library-den.
Hearty, going against the practice of many exorcists known to him, had nothing removed from the place except breakable objects such as desk lamps, vases, ashtrays, light tables, glasses, statuettes, and pictures. He had the carpet taken up. Books and bookshelves he left in place.

He had a reason for this which was part of his guessing game at this point. He assessed-rightly, as it turned out-that any special difficulty in unmasking the evil spirit in Carl would arise because its possession of Carl was so subtle and so bound up with his psychic forces.

Carl did possess a power of telekinesis. It was theoretically possible that Carl would use this power to make the exorcism difficult, if not impossible. But Carl, relying on that still-intact part of him with which he had signaled to Hearty before for help, now reassured Hearty that he, Carl, would not use, and could refrain from using, that telekinetic power. Hearty felt, therefore, he could be practically certain that, if there were telekinetic disturbances during the rite, they would be signs of the evil spirit’s displeasure. And in that case, he could follow that clue and seek the further discomfiture and final expulsion of the spirit.

Hearty was ably aided in the exorcism by four men whom he had trained over the years as assistants. They never failed to come to him whenever he was performing an exorcism. One was a doctor; two were businessmen; the fourth was a factory foreman.

The exorcism of Carl V. lasted for five days. It was very unusual in that its course was largely determined, as Hearty had been certain it would be, by the exceptional psychic gifts Carl possessed. Hearty had to deal with Carl not only as possessed, but as a medium in the psychic sense. Indeed, there were brief silences throughout part of the exorcism when only the looks of Hearty and Carl indicated to the assistants what was going on. At those times, the quick interchange of challenge, threat, command, and insult between Hearty and the evil spirit possessing Carl were telepathic. Hearty’s notes serve us well for these verbal blanks.

A dangerous, complicating problem, in addition, was that Hearty could not always determine whether it was Carl or the possessing spirit that was producing psychic effects. In this case above all others in Hearty’s career, all care and alertness had to be maintained. There was no shortcut. As exorcist, Hearty had to get to the core of the possession and make sure that the evil was expelled in its vicious essence.

Hearty also realized his own danger in such an exorcism. He was moving on a slippery psychic plane, where thought and memory and imagination are peculiarly naked and open to aggression. His friend in Kyoto had shown him that many years ago. He had had occasion to learn it again since.

Curiously, but briefly, the one great advantage Hearty enjoyed at the beginning of the exorcism was precisely Carl’s power as a medium. With Carl disposed to help, Hearty had little difficulty in ferreting the evil spirit out and compelling it to identify itself. Therefore, Confrontation with Tortoise, as it called itself, was achieved quickly. But, by the same measure, the Clash between Hearty and Tortoise was immensely painful.

Carl’s cooperation with Hearty was cut off abruptly when the Confrontation took place between Hearty and Tortoise. Carl became helpless and unhelping. In his struggle alone, the wrenching of Hearty’s will and the wound to his mind were acute, sharp beyond words, and irreparable.

In excerpting the exorcism transcript, therefore, choice has been made of passages concerning the identification of the evil spirit, the unmasking of the deceptions Carl had accepted, and the effect of that unmasking on Hearty and on Carl himself. The transcript contains many more details (omitted here) about Carl’s supposed reincarnation in the ancient Roman, Petrus, about early Christian rites, and about Carl’s own psychical development from teenage on.

“Do you feel all right, Carl?” Hearty’s voice at the opening of the exorcism is full of feeling. But Carl is perfectly calm.

“Yes, Father. Don’t worry anymore. Let’s get going.”

Carl is lying on the couch in his father’s den. Hearty’s four assistants are kneeling around the couch. Hearty, flanked by his assistant priest, stands at the foot of the couch. It is 4:30 A.M., the beginning of the first day of the exorcism.

Hearty takes up the opening words of the rite. His chanting stops after the first three sentences.

He looks at Carl. He is motionless. Something alarms Hearty.

“Carl! Carl! Answer me! Don’t slip away, Carl! Answer me!”

Carl stirs and speaks uneasily. “It’s hard, Father. It’s hard.”

“Carl, what’s happening?”

“Low g-g-ga-gate . . .” Carl stumbles off into silence.

“Carl, before you slip into high-gate, tell me. Just before. Do you hear me? Carl! Do you hear me?”

“Ye-e-e-e-e-e-e-es, Fa-a-a . . .” Carl’s voice trails off.

Hearty continues for a minute or two with his monotone chanting of the exorcism prayers, then the chanting stops. Carl’s mouth is opening and shutting. His fists are clenched.

“High-g-g-g-g-g . . .” Hearty can hardly hear his voice.

He motions to the assistants to take hold of Carl’s legs and arms. Hearty speaks.

“Spirit of Evil, you are commanded in the name of Jesus: Do not cloud the mind of Carl. Do not enslave his will. There is to be no deception. In the name of Jesus, stop.”

Hearty looks at Carl: his face relaxes; his fists are unclenched. After a few moments, Carl speaks slowly without opening his eyes.

“I cannot hold against them . . . him . . . them, Father. I cannot hold much longer. Too habit . . .” His voice breaks.
“In the name of Jesus . . .” Hearty breaks off. The strain in the faces and arms of the assistants is a warning to him. Carl’s body is struggling to rise.

“Speak, Evil Spirit! Speak and declare yourself,” Hearty commands.

He sprinkles some holy water and holds up the crucifix. Carl struggles for about a minute or so. There is silence in the room, except for the rustling and heavy breathing of that struggle.

Finally, all signs of life disappear from Carl’s face. Carl’s body ceases to move. His lips open. Hearty hears the voice of Carl, but silken, smooth, ingratiating in tone, without any accentuation; it speaks in short broken sentences. It is like a slowly turning record. Clearly Carl is now a medium for the evil spirit.

“I am the spirit. Of Carl. We are ascending. Into high-gate. And beyond. I am the spirit. Of Carl. We are ascending. Into high-gate. And beyond. I am . . .”

Hearty decides to break in. “You are not the spirit of Carl. You are the spirit of Satan, the evil spirit who possessed him. In the name of Jesus, cease your deception. Declare yourself. Who are you? What name do you go by? Why do you possess God’s creature, Carl? In the name of Jesus, speak. By the authority of Jesus and his Church, I command you. Speak!”
 

All present now notice a sudden change in Carl’s body. In some way or other, it seems to shrink or diminish in size or bulk. The assistant priest afterward described it “as if his body caved in on itself.” The luster goes out of Carl’s black hair, even his curls seem flat. The skin on his face is drawn taut. They see the stretched tendons and veins in his neck clearly. His trunk, arms, and legs look as if a huge, invisible weight rested on them, pressing them down but not flattening them. There is no sound. The silence becomes oppressive.

Hearty decides to speak again. “Evil Spirit, you are commanded. In the name of Jesus, speak!”

Silence ensues. Everyone becomes aware of the slightest sound-the breathing of the others, the scuffing of a shoe on the wooden flooring, the sound of someone swallowing hard, the intake of breath in a quick sigh. But Hearty is not discouraged. It is the Tortoise to which Carl was drawn; and the progress of a tortoise is slow but sure. Hearty is fully confident. He waits.
Then, without warning, a minor bedlam breaks out. Every book on the shelves lining three walls of the den come toppling down pell-mell on the floor, their pages opening, covers flying, book after book toppling off in no order, pages fluttering, onto the floor with dull thuds and tearing sounds. It is as if two pairs of hands attack each shelf simultaneously. The sudden sound unnerves one of the assistants; in sheer surprise and fright he half-screams.

Hearty has not moved even his eyes. They are on Carl’s face. His gamble has paid off. The only thing Hearty does is raise his hand for calm; he knows exactly what is happening. The tortoise is “approaching.”

There is silence once again. They wait. Carl is still sunk into himself.

Hearty has almost made up his mind to take up more exorcism prayers when he feels the first internal pressures. He finds it increasingly difficult to keep his eyes on Carl’s face. His vision keeps fading as his imagination fills with curious images.
“Jesus, Lord Jesus,” Hearty prays silently. “Save me. Help me now. I cannot resist this if you leave me to myself. I believe. Lord Jesus, help me.”

The others know by Hearty’s appearance that something is happening to him. His eyes blink open and shut. He sways slightly on his feet. His knuckles show white as he holds the crucifix.

The assistant priest understands. Hearty has instructed him well; and he, too, has worked frequently with Hearty at exorcisms. He folds his hand over Hearty’s around the crucifix. With the other, he makes the sign of the cross on Hearty’s forehead, saying out loud: “Lord Jesus, have mercy on your servant.” The four assistants take their cue and repeat the same prayer.

Slowly Hearty’s imagination clears. But pain is now his adversary. His head is racked by a shooting migraine. Every look he gives Carl is full of an ache he never felt before. This crisis passes, but like all attacks in exorcism, it has taken its toll.
When he speaks again, Hearty’s voice has changed from a deep vibrancy to a strained and choking tone. His Welsh lilt has thickened.

“In the name of the Savior, the Lord Jesus, you will declare yourself, Evil Spirit!”

They all look at Carl. His head has moved. His mouth opens and they hear a voice that this time in no way resembles Carl’s. It is like the thin falsetto produced by a deep-voiced man as a mockery of somebody else. It rings with a note of falsity, but is quite defiant. It irritates and frightens.

“We will do the bidding of no being but Carl’s friend. We will answer to . . .”

“You will answer in the name of Jesus,” Hearty shoots back vehemently, his voice cracking Under the strain of this effort.
“Hear, then, our voice, and see if you, a miserable, two-legged piece of slime, can command the Lord of Knowledge, the Unconquered.”

Before Hearty gets in a reply, Carl’s voice changes. Hearty looks quickly at his assistants: “Brace yourselves, boys! This is going to be tough on all of us.”

Their ears are suddenly filled with sound. As long as they could concentrate on Carl, it seemed to them that the sound was coming from his lips. But now the force and peculiar quality of that sound rapidly distracts them. They cannot bear to look at Carl or at anything else, so violent is that absorption of their attention. Carl starts to thrash around. The assistants barely succeed in holding his arms and legs.

It is not so much how loud or piercing that sound is. Rather, it is the quality of sound each one hears. For, as they find out by comparing notes later, the sound is tailored to each one’s feelings, experience, and character. Each one is treated to a replay of all past pain made more agonizing now than when it had happened. Each feels the pain of every heartbreaking cry, of every lonely tone of voice, of every harsh piece of news he has experienced during his past life. The doctor hears again the dying breath of the first patient he ever lost-a young mother in childbirth crying as she died, “Let me see my son! Let me see my son!” And together with that, his own crying as a child; and the shout of a man who was knocked down and killed in front of his eyes a year before. Another hears the last crying of his own child, who had died of a brain tumor; another, his own betrayal of his employers at a private meeting with a competitor company. And so on for all. That voice is duplicating and reproducing for each one all those now-remembered sounds of pain, regret, guilt, despair, sorrow, disgust, anguish that make up the sum of his life’s experience of suffering and human weakness.

When one listens to the taping of this part in the exorcism, all one hears is an uneven series of groanings and heavy breathing.

Hearty’s experience is different. The voice does not affect his imagination. It seems to twist his mind. He becomes full of a quietly running commentary: whole sentences are scurrying through his mind-“The Lord of Knowledge must be adored. . . . With knowledge one can be sure. . . . Surety only comes from a clear vision. . . . Clear vision comes from clear thought. . . . Feelings and beliefs are a travesty. . . . The Lord of Knowledge gives possession of the earth. . . . The earth is all one, all one being. . . .”-until the harangue seems endless. Hearty cannot remember it all. When it finally seems to reach an ending, it is only to start again from the beginning, going faster and faster, as it repeats itself over and over again.

Hearty can manage no word, verbal or mental, on his own. But instinctively he presses the crucifix to his lips and holds it there. The gesture is seemingly enough. The grip on his mind eases. The logic countdown stops. He is free again.

“In the name of Jesus, the Savior, you are commanded to declare yourself clearly. Speak, Evil Spirit!”

Hearty’s assistants are recovering. They renew their grip on Carl. Carl himself is still. But his face is lit up with color. He looks alive, well, just like somebody lying down with his eyes closed as he talks calmly. It is not Carl’s voice, however. All present hear it, but each one’s description of it differs from the others. All agree it is calm, almost superior in tone, neither slow nor fast, with just a little suspicion of a laugh or sneer in it. But some of them hear a young person speaking, some a very old man, some a mechanical voice, still others hear that voice as a distant echo. On the tape today, the sex of the speaker is indistinguishable-it could be male or female. To this writer it brought back memories of the tone of voice used by announcers in the music halls of the 19305.- affected, openly artificial, always with a note of laughing ridicule, loaded with suggestive undertones.

“We come in the name of the Tortoise. Tortoise. Call us Tortoise. We have the eternity of the Lord of Knowledge.”

Hearty feels thankful: he has gained a point. But almost immediately he regrets that distraction.

The voice speaks again. “Thankful, eh? Don’t you know what we’ve prepared for you, rooster-lover? Cock-lover?” Hearty concentrates again, restraining his impulse to ask what. The evil spirit may be constrained to Confrontation; but any opening he, the exorcist, affords it can be turned in a flash and fatally to the spirit’s advantage. Hearty swings into his main interrogation.

“Tortoise-“

“Yes, cock-lover-“

“You will speak only in answer to the question put you in the name of Jesus.” No rejoinder to that one, but Carl tries to turn over on his face. The assistants hold him firmly. He struggles a little, then is still.

“Were all Carl’s psychic powers due to your intervention, or because he was so gifted by nature?”

“Both.” At this answer, Hearty concentrates again. Some force is attacking his mentality. His mind is like a barred door with strong hands beating insistently upon its panels.

“Let us take his reincarnation, his supposed reincarnations. Was this your work?”

“We, belonging to the Tortoise, existing in his eternity, have all time in front of us as one unceasing moment.”

“But Carl spoke to people long dead. He knew their thoughts and their surroundings.”

“The living are surrounded by their dead. Those of the dead who belong to us, they do our bidding. Everyone in the Kingdom does our bidding.”

“And those who don’t belong to you-“

“The Latter,” It comes as a snarl, but also, Hearty feels, with a certain note of craven fear. That fear impresses Hearty. Again he is distracted, and again he pays the price.

“You too, cock-lover! Priest! You too will be afraid when you get what’s corning to you.” The door of Hearty’s mind is giving way. That force is battering at him. He falters a moment, then regains concentration in an immense effort. He goes on questioning.

“The astral travels of Carl? Did you engineer that?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get him into such delusion?”

“Once spirit is confused with psyche, we can let anybody see, hear, touch, taste, know, desire the impossible. He was ours. He is ours. He is of the Kingdom.”

Carl is not moving, but his entire body lies once again in the crushed position. The pathos of his captivity makes Hearty wince. He prays quietly, “Jesus, give him strength.” Then he tries to continue his interrogation, but the voice interrupts, this time screaming in unbelievable despair.

“We will not be expelled. We have our home in him. He belongs to us.” Hearty waits as the scream dies away in gurgles. Carl’s own throat is visibly moving.

“Are you the maker of the Non Self aura?” No.”

“How did you use the Non Self aura in Carl’s case?” “The aura is there for all who can perceive it. Only humans have learned to unsee it. If they saw it continually, they would die.” “How did you use it?” “We didn’t.”

Hearty now flings concise questions, most of which need only a yes or no as answer.

His aim is to expose the evil spirit, to make it tell its own deceptions.

“Did Carl see it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you make it clear for him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He wanted it so!”
“Did he ask you?”
“We offered.”
“Did he know who you were?”
“He knew.”
“Clearly?”
“Clear enough.”
“Did he bilocate?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“We gave him knowledge of distant places as if he was there.”
“Had he a double, a psychic double?”
“We gave him one.”
“How?”
“Gave him the knowledge a double would have.”
“When did you start at Carl?”
“In his youth.”
“Did you give him his early vision?”
“No.”
“Did you interfere with it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He wanted us to do so.”
“How do you know?”
“We know.”
“By what sign?”
“We know.”
“What did he do that let you know?”
“We know.”
“In the name of Jesus, I command you: Tell me how you knew.”

There is a long pause of about two minutes. Hearty waits patiently, all the while looking at Carl, keeping his mind on the question. Then the trap comes for him.

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