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Renée Haynes
Great-granddaughter of T. H.
Huxley. Coined the phrase "the boggle threshold". Received
B.A. and M.A. degrees in Oxford. Joined the Society for
Psychical Research in 1946, editor of the JSPR from
1970-1981, past vice President and council member. Member of the
Alistair Hardy Research Centre and the Churches' Fellowship for
Psychical and Spiritual Studies. Contributed chapters to many
books and wrote numerous articles in a variety of publications,
including The Christian Parapsychologist, Theta,
Parapsychology Review, The International Journal of
Parapsychology, Fate, Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research, and many others. Received into the
Catholic Church in 1942. |
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IN CONNEXION with
psycho-kinesis one ought perhaps to consider the phenomenon known as the Evil
Eye. In Italy, where belief in it is still very much alive, it is considered to
be of two kinds. With the first, malocchio, I am not concerned here; it
is thought to be a voluntary and deliberate piece of ill-wishing, and is
probably to be explained in terms of suggestion. The other kind, the
jettatura, is very much more interesting. It is conceived as an involuntary
power over which its unfortunate possessor has no control, and its effect is to
bring bad luck to his neighbours. It used to be thought superstitious to speak
of certain people as "unlucky", attracting misfortune to themselves; but it is
now intellectually respectable to do so provided that the current verbal
fashions are followed and that one uses the term "accident prone". Accident
proneness is officially recognized as a risk among factory workers, and
industrial psychologists have investigated the subject in some detail. It
springs from various unconscious sources, including the need to purge away guilt
in self-punishment.
It is not far from the idea of the accident-prone individual to that of the
Jonah, the man who makes the boat dangerous, the man whose own personal ill-luck
is believed to involve his companions. It is easy to see that, say, an
accident-prone worker in an atomic power plant might be an outsize in Jonahs,
bringing disaster not only on his work-mates but upon the surrounding
countryside.
Now the possessor of jettatura need not himself be accident prone. He
projects his accident proneness on his surroundings. He is unlucky by proxy, a
Jonah whose misfortunes occur only to those around him, unknowing or unwilling
scapegoats in whom his conflicts are worked out. On a journey, it is his
friend's luggage, not his own, which falls inexplicably off the dockside into
the water. Pots of azaleas carefully arranged on a shelf for a party topple on
to somebody else's head when he comes into the room, and so on.
It looks very much as if this sinister misfortune - life is understandably
difficult for the man believed to possess the quality of jettatura - were
a combination of accident proneness and psycho-kinesis, and thus closely
connected with poltergeist activity. Both varieties of phenomena are associated
with given individuals. Neither is primarily associated with the conscious mind
of those individuals. Both may affect physical objects.
There is room for considerable research in both subjects. It has been claimed
that poltergeist phenomena clear up when the conflict in the unconscious mind of
the person in whom they are centred is resolved, though not much evidence on the
point has been published, partly perhaps for reasons of professional etiquette.
In 1942, I was told myself, in circumstantial detail, of an elderly cook around
whom poltergeist activity developed at a period of acute war-time tension and
who lost several jobs through no fault of her own, because her employers could
not stand the strain, let alone the expense, of seeing saucepans float gently
off stoves and crockery crash from the table to floor without her touching any
of them. She was then given psychiatric treatment for some other condition, and
the poltergeist trouble cleared up at the same time. This, however, is purely
anecdotal. It would be interesting to know if any systematic records of such
cases have been made in England and whether Italian psychiatrists have thought
of investigating and treating instances of jettatura on these lines.
Those to whom it is attributed are not always peasants living in remote
villages; at least one distinguished academic character is said to be afflicted
in this way and to be uncomfortably conscious of the fact. Men of intellectual
ability might well be willing to co-operate in experiments designed not only to
illuminate this condition but to rid them of it.
It would also be interesting to know whether this particular form of the Evil
Eye is recognized in other parts of the world as well as Italy and the Near
East, or whether it develops particularly easily in people born into those
mental and physical climates, just as the peculiar precognitive phenomenon of
"false arrival" seems especially prone to develop in Sweden and Finland. In this
- which occasionally occurs in England as well, though not nearly so often - all
the sounds of a man's coming home, front gate banging, feet running up the
steps, key turning in the lock, front door slamming - are unexpectedly "heard",
say, an hour, half an hour, twenty minutes, before his actual coming repeats
them in every detail, like a delayed echo. It is an alarming experience in
countries where it is unfamiliar, and apt to be deceptive to anyone who is
cooking; no explanation has been put forward, except under the general heading
of telepathy between those involved. I have known three first-hand instances of
this. In each the home-coming was of an unpredictable person so vague about time
that no expectation could be formed of when he was likely to arrive.
Note:
The article above was taken from Renée Haynes's "The Hidden Springs. An Enquiry
into Extra-Sensory Perception" (Hollis & Carter, 1961).
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