Zulu time

Vitor, in comments, asked me to transcribe Lyall Watson's account of a Philippine case that Watson personally witnessed.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

The case is presented on pages 152 -160 of Watson's 1987 book Beyond Supernature, under the heading of "Possession." Here it is:

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Long before either Spanish or American colonisation, the islands of the [Philippine] archipelago were a patchwork of well over a hundred distinct linguistic, cultural and racial groups -- many of which still survive.

Cagayan Valley in north-eastern Luzon is home to one such community -- an Igorot or mountain people who are marked by Christianity and post-war developments, but nevertheless leave all the most important decisions of their lives to solemn rituals that involve animal sacrifice and lead to consultation with the spirits. Communion is accomplished by aniteras or female shamans who are now rare, but carry on like gently beating hearts in dying tribal life. It was to meet one such woman that I made the long journey from Bayombong up into the forests of the Cordillera. I spent several bewitching weeks living in the old lady's compound, watching the daily work of weaving and basket making, taking part in the evening rituals of healing and spirit worship. It was an altogether magical time, but one I remember best for my involvement in what I can only think of as a kind of exorcism.

A child was brought to the aniteras suffering from a complaint like none I have ever seen. He was said to be ten years old, and from the right side he looked about that age; but from the left, he had the appearance of an aged and diseased dwarf. From the front, you could see a line running down the centre of his body ...

[T]he effect was truly horrible. The hair on the right side of his head was dark and glossy, while that on the left was dank and lifeless. One eye was clear and bright, the other squint and rheumy. Half his teeth were widely spaced and drawn out into fangs by the retreat of bloody gums, and the skin on that side of his face and down his left arm was covered in running sores. He walked slowly and with obvious pain, hunched with every other step over a left leg shortened several inches by a clawed foot. And when he spoke, which he did rarely, it was out of the twisted left side of his mouth in a snarl and in a language which nobody there understood. Nobody except me. I was astounded to hear, in amongst the deep-throated growl, a few phrases in clear and ringing Zulu -- the one African language that I was able to speak when I was his age. The words were odd ones and inappropriate to that situation, but they left me feeling very vulnerable, as though I had just had my pocket picked.

The aniteras decided that the child was possessed by busao, an evil spirit -- which, in the circumstances, seemed like the only reasonable diagnosis. And for three days she worked her wiles on the child, plying him with herbal potions, saturating him with ceremony and invocation. All to no avail. On the fourth night, however, she was otherwise occupied and the boy/dwarf was sitting on the ground next to a fire encircled by a group of elders, frightening me from time to time with occasional obscene twitches. The people and I were talking in reluctant Tagalog, which is no more their language than it is mine, just passing the time. Nobody was concentrating on the figure at the fire, he was not subject of conversation and he was looking away from me into the flames. Then slowly, one by one, our cases focused on him, the talk stopped, the air became almost heavy with condensed attention; and suddenly, as if by prearrangement, the old lady was there with us, standing tall on the edge of the circle. She hurled something into the fire, which flared up in a green blaze and she shouted very loud, very angry, a long quick string of words hurled directly at the afflicted boy.

There was a moment of silence, complete silence, then a terrible scream as the child threw himself down on the ground and began to thrash around violently. Again she shouted, and once more he screamed -- a searing combination of pain and anger. It was a duel in sound, a pitched battle that raged and grew into a frenzy, and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun as the child hurled himself face down to the earth and lay still with one arm and shoulder in the glowing coals. For a long, awful moment nobody moved, and then the old woman stepped forward, gently lifted the body up and carried it away to her hut. And it was as though she took with it a great weight from our shoulders -- a burden that we were not conscious of carrying, but that had been with us ever since the weird child had arrived.

The next morning, the boy was up early with the rest of the women, helping carry water. He looked straight at me for the first time and his eyes, both eyes, were clear. By that evening he was talking normally, in his own tongue, and walking with only the suggestion of a limp. And by the end of the week, his skin and teeth and hair, his whole appearance, were those of any other healthy, unmarked, active and attractive Filipino child.

I make no apologies for telling this story in such detail and without corroboration. I am not offering it in evidence, but as a starting point for a line of argument. Three things about it are of interest to me. The first is the laterality of the affliction -- which, however it was caused, suggests at least a biological vector, involving just half of the brain. The second is the nature of the cure -- which was both rapid and dramatic, suggesting the sort of catharsis that has mental rather than physical origins. And the third is the use of an unfamiliar language -- in the presence of perhaps the only person out of fifty million in the Philippines who could have understood.

I am not claiming that the child was possessed. I discovered later that his problems had begun three years before when his mother was run over by a truck -- killed and hideously disfigured as he was walking down the road with her -- holding her right hand. There are, however, strong resemblances between this incident and several other accounts in the literature of what has been identified as demonic possession -- most notably the case of fourteen-year-old Karen Kingston, who was cured of a similar affliction in North Carolina in 1974 by a group including three clergymen, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a general practitioner.

[He cites the 1977 book The Devil and Karen Kingston, by Robert Pelton, and describes the exorcism, which cured the girl of major psychiatric problems. Then he continues:]

But to me the crucial aspect of both cases, is that events were clearly culturally determined. They followed the scenario appropriate to the circumstances, drawing on beliefs and expectations relevant to those involved. The cures remain mysterious, amenable one day perhaps to the liberal tenets of the fledgling science of psychosomatic medicine, but the process was essentially traditional and social. Which is why I believe it succeeded. I suggest that the clergyman who acted as Karen's exorcist, also played the devil's role -- just as I somehow contributed a few words of Zulu to the Philippine performance. Neither of us was conscious of doing so, but I am convinced that at some saman level [sama is Watson's term for the interconnectedness of minds] we were involved. We added social weight to an individual dilemma and helped move it to communal resolution....

Let me return, however, for the next step in the argument, to those Zulu phrases. Parapsychology has a name for the ability to use a language of which a person has no ordinary knowledge. It is called xenoglossy or "foreign tongue" and comes in two forms. "Recitative" xenoglossy is the utterance of fragments of a strange language, as one might parrot Latin phrases without having any idea of their syntax for actual meaning. And [there is] "responsive" xenoglossy, which is something far more intelligent, involving an ability to converse in the unknown language....

The Filipino child was not speaking Zulu, he was practicing recitative xenoglossy. There are many similar examples in the literature on spiritism -- of mediums reciting the Lord's prayer in Greek or throwing in the odd word that turns out on later analysis to be Egyptian or even Hawaiian. Some of these borrowings can be traced to a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia or "hidden memory", in which we dredge up information from unconscious areas without being aware of doing so...

[But] I cannot imagine any set of circumstances which could have brought a ten-year-old boy in the Cagayan Valley into contact with Zulu at any stage of his life. Nor am I disposed to assume that he was possessed by the discarnate spirit of a Zulu witch doctor. It seems altogether more reasonable to assume that somehow, the mechanism is still far from clear, he was able to recite phrases that were familiar to me, borrowing them from my mind...

-----

Watson goes on to give examples of "the sudden acquisition of linguistic, musical and artistic skills" by apparently paranormal means, such as the well-known case of Sharada, reported by Ian Stevenson (and described here by Scott Rogo), and the case of Rosemary Brown, who wrote classical music compositions by apparently channeling deceased composers. His overall point is that "the actual limits of the senses... can be surprisingly elastic."

Personally, I have no particular problem with the idea that the Igorot boy (and probably Karen Kingston, too) was actually possessed -- not necessarily by a "demon," but perhaps by a low-level, earthbound spirit. Indeed, the possessing entity in the Kingston case reportedly gave its name as "Williams," which sounds decidedly human. I also find it likely that a possessing entity could possess the kind of freewheeling ESP that could indeed grab random thoughts from the minds of bystanders, including snatches of Zulu.

In any event, the Philippine case is not particularly strong as a case of xenoglossy, since only a few random words were spoken, and it is possible that Watson simply misheard some scattered gibberish. What is strong about the Philippine case, if we are willing to take Watson's word for what happened, is the remarkable effectiveness of the shaman's cure, which healed the boy both mentally and physically almost overnight.

As Watson himself notes, there is no corroboration of his story and therefore, strictly speaking, it cannot be counted as evidence. But I find him to be an intelligent, sensitive, and honest observer, so I'm prepared to take him at his word.

Comments

[Michael Prescott]

By the way, in looking up some links for this post, I came across a very useful Web site with a good summary of evidence for the afterlife, and many links to original sources:

http://snipurl.com/t250v

I'm surprised I'd never come across this site before.

[Sandy]

Anonymous just moved his site there recently, and it looks like he added more stuff to it, so no wonder you just found it.

[Zerdini]

I have seen this site before - it has a great deal of interesting information although I do not always agree with some of the conclusions having known some of the people involved.

[Zerdini]

Michael wrote: "...it is possible that Watson simply misheard some scattered gibberish."

That may be so-equally it could also have been Zulu. I knew some Zulu, and Xhosa, when I lived in South Africa so I, too, would have easily recognised Zulu phrases.

The famous voice medium, Mona van der Watt, was known among some of the African peoples as 'Mama NaBantu' - 'mother of the people'.

[Vitor]

Thank you very much, M.P!!

[Kris]

Okay I got a few questions

a.) what exactly is an Earthbound Spirit?

b.) Why do some many of them seem to have attitude problems?

c.) Why do they stay

d.) are there any kind, intelligent, decent earth bound spirits

[Sandy]

Hi Kris. I’m no expert, but I can tell you what I’ve gotten from my own experiences. I think what people refer to as an “Earthbound Spirit” is someone who has problems after they die. Sometimes they are just confused. I met this man once who died in a car accident and he didn’t really understand that he had died. It must be like when people wake up in the hospital after an accident and they don’t know what happened or how they got there. So they are really confused. I guess if you die in an accident, you might not understand what happened. I just tried my best to explain to the guy that he had died. It turned out that he had died over five years ago based on some stuff that he told me about. Once he understood where he was and what had happened, he seemed OK.

I don’t know if that many have attitude problems. They seem like living people in attitude as far as I’ve seen. You get all sorts, but most people are pretty nice.

They seem to have various reasons to stay. One lady I know is waiting for her elderly sister to pass on so they can go together. Another lady I know is having more fun dead than she ever did while alive and doesn’t want to mess up a good thing. A man I met doesn’t believe in an afterlife. He knows he is dead, but he still manages to maintain a really strange denial of his situation. He seems to like watching his kids grow up, although he dislikes his oldest daughters boyfriend.

Yes, there are decent people, living and dead, out there.

[Zerdini]

You certainly have some interesting experiences, Sandy.

[Zerdini]

By the way, Sandy, I forgot to mention that I really enjoy your Blog. I am sure it will help a lot of people.

http://snipurl.com/t250v

I'm surprised I'd never come across this site before.

Sandy is right the site recently moved when my old hosting service stopped providing free web sites. At first I thought you were being humorous because I've mentioned a few other pages from the site (chs4o8pt) many times in the comments to other blog posts here, but after checking google I don't think I ever mentioned that page here before.

Anyway, thank you very much for the link and praise. I saw a lot of traffic on my web stats to that page but the snipurl hid the referrer. Now I know where it came from. Your readers seem take your recommendations a lot more seriously than they do those of anonymous commenters.

Actually your post
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2007/09/better-evidence.html
which I link to on that page was one of the inspirations for it.

"I have seen this site before - it has a great deal of interesting information although I do not always agree with some of the conclusions having known some of the people involved."

Can you elaborate on that?

One of the things I try to do on that page, whenever possible, is to provide short but compelling bits of evidence with links to high quality on-line sources for more information. There are so many book length works I didn't need to do that again. I just wanted to get people's attention and quickly spoon feed them the facts, and then tell them where to go if they want more information or a more rigorous discussion of the evidence. That seems to be the best way to it on the internet.

[Zerdini]

Hi |

I will contact you by email rather than get involved in a discussion on here.

Z

[Sandy]

Thanks for the kind words, Zerdini. I’m still surprised that anyone reads it, lol.

[Kris]

Thanks Sandy

Have you ever met any mean ones?

[Sandy]

Kris, I've met jerks. I don't think I would classify any of them as mean though.

[spirit rescue]

In addition to what Sandy said I will add...

a.) what exactly is an Earthbound Spirit?

A spirit who is so attached to things of the earth life that their mind is focused on it and as a result they sometimes don't want to make the transition or they don't perceive they are dead or they don't perceive spirit guides who come to help them with the transition. It is more likely to happen to people who die a sudden death in an accident or as a victim of violence or sometimes even a sudden illness. During a natural, gradual death people are prepared for the transition, sometimes with death bed visions of spirits and the spirit world before they die.

b.) Why do some many of them seem to have attitude problems?

The ones with attitudes generate good stories so you are more likely to hear about them either causing problems as poltergeist, or causing hauntings in other ways, or bother living people they become attached to, or giving trouble to mediums who they find they can communicate with. A medium might not recognize an pleasant earth bound spirit as being earth bound. A nice earth bound spirit that becomes attached to a living person might be confused with a spirit guide or helper and not referred to as earth bound.

c.) Why do they stay

They either can't conceive that they are dead, they can't perceive spirit guides who are trying to help them, or they want to stay near the earth. One of the thing that makes living people perceptive of communicating with spirits is belief that it is possible. Doubt is an obstacle. It is true of spirits too. If a spirit isn't thinking about the fact that they are dead, or doesn't believe in the afterlife, or doesn't think that spirits might be coming to help them, they might not be able perceive guides coming to them. This is one reason spirits communicate through mediums - to help people understand and believe there is an afterlife so that when they die they have an easier time with the transition and don't cause so much trouble to their spirit guides.

d.) are there any kind, intelligent, decent earth bound spirits

Yes. They don't make it into the folklore because they don't make trouble so any stories about them are not very exciting. Also see above "b".

If you want to help earth bound spirits you can talk to them and tell them the facts of the afterlife:

http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/rescue

"If a spirit isn't thinking about the fact that they are dead, or doesn't believe in the afterlife, or doesn't think that spirits might be coming to help them, they might not be able perceive guides coming to them."

This is a principle of psychology in living people too. In many situations, you have to believe in something to be able to see it.

Selective perception is a cognitive bias where people are found to see only what they believe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_perception

[william]

that appears to be an interesting website spirit rescue linked to

"b.) Why do some many of them seem to have attitude problems?"

Sometimes it's not the spirit, it's the person. Some people are prejudiced against or afraid of all spirits and will make negative comments about them no matter what they do.

I know one woman who is a medium and even she gives her children a spray bottle of water to spray if they are afraid a ghost is in their room at night.

Isn't that a terrible way to welcome Grandma who might be coming to see how her beloved grandchildren are doing? As a society we have a lot to do to learn to accept spirits and treat them fairly, the way they deserve.

[Paul]

I am constantly amazed by what people are prepared to do to each other with little or no provocation. I suppose there is no reason to suggest that unpleasant people or mischievous folks on Earth change much after physical death.

As for only hearing about the bad things, we already do it ourselves don't we? Most newspapers and TV news reports seem to be reporting 90% negative news and very little good news or the many kindnesses that most of us experience in day to day life (not that I would expect them too).

"Sometimes it's not the spirit, it's the person."

Many people don't realize how hard it can be for a spirit to communicate with a loved one who is still on the earth plane. Sometimes the best the spirit can do is to tap on the wall or turn the lights on and off. And what happens? The person freaks out. Sometimes they move out of the place. Other times they call the exorcist. Either way, a new story about "evil earth bound spirits" starts making the rounds - even when there is nothing evil about the spirit.

[Sandy]

Sometimes it's not the spirit, it's the person.

I’m guilty of reacting badly to ghosts. They don’t scare me like they used to, but it is easy to interpret things in a negative way. One man who was trying to get my attention made me feel really sick when he came close to me. I thought he was trying to hurt me so I ran away in a panic. A parapsychologist suggested that I should just talk to the ghost if I saw him again. He said the ghost couldn’t hurt me.

It turned out that this ghost had been trying for a very long time to find someone to talk to. He was trying various ways to communicate, but no one else had picked up on him. He wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was trying to tell me about how he had died of a very painful form of cancer. When I started talking to him I discovered that he wasn’t a bad person at all. He just wanted to talk. He didn’t make me feel sick after that.

[Ulysses]

Off topic. This "gossip" may be of interest.
Telepathy And The Quantum: Will the Randi Challenge Prize soon be awarded?
http://www.scientificblogging.com/hammock_physicist/telepathy_and_quantum_0

[Ulysses]

The link was too long. Try this instead:
http://tinyurl.com/yftucvu

[Michael Prescott]

Thanks for the link, Ulysses. Personally I doubt that the million dollars (if it exists) will ever be awarded, no matter what results are obtained. I would like to be wrong, though.

[Breanainn]

It's all made up, check the link again. How irritating...

[Michael Prescott]

Having had a chance to read the article all the way through, I see that the claimants are explicitly saying they do not have any paranormal abilities, though they are coy about what they are really doing. Even if the prize is awarded, it will apparently not mean anything in terms of proving psi. Evidently the whole thing is some kind of trick, which the claimants cheerfully admit.

[tc]

am i missing something?

in the postscript, near the end of article,
the author wrote,

"I landed on the scenario described above. And yes, that means Cora and Reid and their dealings with the JREF are purely the product of my imagination."

it did get me excited for a moment there...

[Michael Prescott]

"am i missing something?"

Nope, I'm the one who missed it. I didn't read the postscript.

Whole thing seems pretty darn stupid to me.

[alanborky]

Yeah, Michael, I fell for the Cora and Reid show, m'self.

I understood, in the end, the guy's purpose for his approach, but when I reported the ultimate punchline to my brother he observed it was precisely the sort of account Randi and his Bright chums'll be dining out on for months, especially when it starts being repeated on the net as something that actually happened, so much so he wondered at the guy's ultimate motivation...