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than in the previous 60 centuries.He meant, of course, in technology.Yet it seemed to me that man himself has also changed more in the past 2 centuries than in the whole of his previous evolution, and that he is now close to the stage at which a new creature will emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
    The Morning of the Magicians had also talked about a ‘new kind of man’, and the possibility that human beings may be about to achieve an ‘awakened state’.The authors had even made the important comment that what is now needed is an Einstein of psychology who can understand the hidden powers of the mind.Yet it was hard to see how these important ideas connected up with their talk about the Hollow Earth, vanished civilisations and aliens from outer space.Which is why I continued to feel that the ‘occult revival’ was something I could safely ignore.Yet on lecture tours of America—which I made at intervals in an effort to keep my bank-manager happy—I frequently bought paperbacks with titles like Famous American Hauntings or Exorcism—Fact not Fiction to read on the plane.And, like Ouspensky, I continued to find something oddly fascinating in this strange if occasionally lunatic world of speculation.
    It was in 1969 that my American literary agent wrote to ask me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’.I accepted because I needed the money; besides, I felt I probably knew as much about it as anybody.But I found it hard to take the commission seriously—I only had to re-read that passage in Ouspensky about Atlantis and Lemuria and The Temple of Satan to feel that I was going to have to write it with my tongue firmly wedged in my cheek.That winter—1969—I took the family to a small village in Majorca, where I was supposed to be a ‘visiting professor’ in the extramural department of an American college.There I met the writer Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess had given me severe headaches many years before, and I asked his advice on writing a book about the occult.He gave it in one word: ‘Don’t.’And I have to admit that, if I had not already received half the advance, I would probably have taken his advice.
    It is difficult to say at which point I began to change my mind, I think it was the day Joy read aloud to me a passage from Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand, in which he tells a story of how, just before the First World War, he and a group of brother officers went to see a famous palmist ‘as a lark’.What happened dismayed him.The palmist kept looking at hand after hand and saying: ‘I don’t understand it.I can see nothing...’The explanation came a few months later when the war broke out, and the men whose palms had been ‘blank’ were killed ...
    Now it seems clear from Sitwell’s other works that he was not a ‘believer’ in the supernatural—in that respect he seems to have shared the attitude of his father, Sir George Sitwell, who once grabbed a ‘spirit’ that was walking around at a seance, and revealed it to be the medium in her underwear.And the more I studied this subject of the paranormal, the more I discovered that some of the most convincing witnesses were not spiritualists or occultists, but unbelievers who had had just one odd experience.
    Charles Dickens is another example.In a letter of May 30, 1863, he decribes how, the previous Thursday, he had had a dream in which he saw a lady in red, who stood with her back towards him.He thought he recognised her as someone he knew, but when she turned round, saw that she was, in fact, a stranger.The lady remarked ‘I am Miss Napier’.And as he was dressing that morning, he thought: ‘What a preposterous thing to have such a distinct dream about nothing.And why Miss Napier?’
    That same evening Dickens gave one of his famous public readings, and some friends walked into his dressing-room with the lady in red, who was introduced to him as Miss Napier ...
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