A Demonologist’s Reflections on Time Travel

(from +Seán Manchester’s Stray Ghosts)

All text and pictures

© Seán Manchester

Returning for possibly the last time to Swains Lane where a nether region had been experienced all those years prior ― even in the preceding two centuries, before the graveyard itself existed, when “hobbs, ghaists and dæmons” were apparently sighted in the same vicinity ― I cast a lingering glance through the bars of the north gate.

Viewing the eerie path from the north gate to the notorious heart of the graveyard.

Looking again at this once afflicted part of Highgate Cemetery, no longer harbouring a demonic contagion amongst its denizens, I faced the early evening sun as it shone from the direction of nearby St Michael’s Church. Then I continued to walk up Swains Lane and departed ― unlikely ever to return ― leaving the dead to take care of the dead. My work had long since been completed in connection with this place.

The journey had been long and oftentimes difficult, and I wondered what the French vampirological and biblical scholar, Dom Augustin Calmet, would have made of it all. He entered the Benedictine Order in 1688, becoming ordained into the priesthood in 1696, after which he was offered consecration to the episcopate by Pope Benedict XIII, but turned it down. More than anything else, Calmet is remembered for his 1746 work on vampires: Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges des Démons et des Espits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, et de Silésie.

My own experience in this field, which commenced with the Highgate case, leaves me in absolutely no doubt, but Calmet’s attempt to establish the veracity of such predatory demonic entities lacked first-hand evidence. He seemed to concentrate on the collecting of vampire reports, which he certainly did not dismiss out of hand, and then offered his reflections on them. Calmet defined the phenomena as corpses that returned from their graves to disturb the living by sucking their blood and even causing death. The only remedy was to exhume the afflicted body, sever its head, and drive a stake through the heart. Cremation was another effective alternative. Using that definition, he gathered all the accounts he could find, and it is these reports of collected data that take up the majority of space in his volume. He justifiably condemned the hysteria which accompanied several of the reported vampire incidents, and also considered all the natural explanations that were offered for the phenomenon.

His findings were inconclusive. However, Calmet did not state that the reports could be explained away by natural causes, but he shrank from proposing an alternative answer. In other words, he left the entire matter unresolved. Yet he seemed to favour the existence of vampires by noting “that it seems impossible not to subscribe to the belief which prevails in these countries that these apparitions do actually come forth from the graves and that they are able to produce terrible effects which are so widely and so positively attributed to them.” Calmet had posed five possibilities for all the accounts he had considered. Three of these he dismissed. The remaining two consisted of the possibility that vampires are the result of the Devil’s interference, or just superstition. No firm conclusion was apparent until the third and last edition, published in 1751, where in his bestselling work he makes clear that he could conclude naught save that such creatures as vampires really did return from the grave.

In the wake of my mysterious and terrible discovery at Highgate Cemetery in August 1970 no such dilemma about their existence would ever assail me again; though I did speculate on explanations for the peculiar abilities attributed to this phenomena.

“They exist outside of normal time; therefore, when discovered after centuries, a [corporeal host] might appear three score years at most ― possibly much younger. … Time will do nothing thereafter to efface its condition … Our earthly bodies move in time. The vampire’s does not.” [The Highgate Vampire, page 39].

We are all stray ghosts to those who glimpse us across the passage of time, which exploration Professor Ronald L Mallett believes has already replaced space as the new challenge facing scientists in the twenty-first century. All spirit creatures, of course, are outside the limitations of time that are placed on us. This includes demons, and, therefore, by default, vampires. Only by exorcism can the effected organic matter be returned to its true condition ― and thus real time ― when the demonic entity is expelled. The evil spirit is not destroyed; it is merely removed from our time frame.

Sightings of living persons who are mistaken for ghosts are probably few and far between because the circumstances which make such an apparent haunting possible need to be precise. This does not rule out the genuinely supernatural manifestation of either angelic or demonic origin, as my late colleague Professor Devendra Prasad Varma would have been be quick to point out. And I would have been no less quick to agree. Yet all along I have wondered about time travel. That is not to say that much of what we sometimes mistake as shades is to be viewed as time travellers from the past or future passing through our present. More likely are we are experiencing a glimpse of the same space in a different time frame. Albert Einstein showed us that time and space are linked. Dr Mallett, who is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Connecticut, is in the process of constructing a time machine that he claims will enable him to send sub-atomic particles into the past. To do this he proposes to create a time warp where light is slowed down to a crawl and contained in two opposing beams of light using a ring laser. Mallett calculates that at high enough intensities, space and time could be twisted in the circle within. His time machine might resemble a long light cylinder. “Once it can be done, even in the simplest situation, in the most primitive way, the engineering obstacles will be overcome,” says the professor, adding: “I honestly believe this will be the century for time travel.” There is one inescapable drawback. The machine being designed by Professor Ronald Mallett will only be able to travel as far back as the moment it is switched on.

Mark 9: 23 tells us: “All things are possible to him who believes.” However, the possibility of time travel poses ethical and theological quandaries. Stephen Hawking has proposed a “chronology protection conjecture” ― an as-yet-unknown law of physics that would preserve causality and safeguard history from meddlers. I would not be able to return to that fateful afternoon in August 1970, for example, and execute, instead of the spoken exorcism rite inside the vault, a more effective, albeit illicit, remedy to expel the demonic presence with the possible direct consequence of Lusia, and other victims after 1970, still being with us. Moreover, an astrophysicist would quickly point out that most of the blueprints for a time machine stipulate that the traveller cannot journey back to an era before the device was first switched on.

Yet it is claimed that a time machine able to take the traveller into the past, far beyond when it was constructed, was built in the 1950s. It was described as the Chronovisor.

Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti (1925-1994) was a Benedictine monk, scientist and foremost authority on archaic music (2000 BC to AD 1200). Along with the help of scientists Enrico Fermi and Werner von Braun, Ernetti is said to have developed the Chronovisor, a time machine that could reach back into the past way beyond its own invented existence to reconstruct the sights and sounds of history. A world-class scholar of prepolyphonic music, he also held a degree in quantum and subatomic physics. His principal research was in the field of time travel. Father Père François Brune knew Ernetti well, and, based on his own experience, concludes that Ernetti was too upright, knowledgeable, intelligent and accomplished to have any need to fabricate a story, and wonders if the Chronovisor, or information pertaining to it, may lie somewhere in the Vatican where it remains hidden from the rest of the world.

My own immersion in music, the arcane and indeed ecclesiasticism led to impressions of an understanding of a form of time travel not so removed from those of Ernetti. Using his knowledge of the physics of chordal structures, and based on a new principle he had uncovered, involving musical frequencies, harmonic resonance and the relationship of these things with the astral plane, Ernetti constructed a time machine from which he claimed to have taken photographs of the past. Such images from across the millennia were gained by an approach and perspective significantly removed from Mallett’s dependance on s^2=x^2+y^2+z^2-ct^2 where s stands for space-time (based on Einstein’s revolutionary concept of space-time, ie time is distance and distance is time) and a Lorentz transformation invariant, ie the distance has the same value for all inertial observers. That notwithstanding, Einstein’s conclusion that space and time are aspects of the same thing, and that matter and energy are also two aspects of the same thing (E=mc^2), is invaluable to all potential builders of time machines. Venice-based Father Ernetti, of course, incorporated rather more than theoretical physics into his calculations when inventing his camera that allegedly could focus into the past or future and take pictures of events from that time.

My early career as a professional photographer, life-long involvement in music, and later embrace of ecclesiasticism made the Benedictine monk’s approach to time travel at once comprehensible and something I naturally felt empathetic toward. Whether it was, is, or ever could be a reality, is not something I feel qualified to conjecture ― for I have already experienced enough to know that all manner of things are possible. Yet it is patently the final frontier to tempt those who might seek a future in the past.

Though courtesy, gentleness, honour and dignity might have all but departed from our world, there perhaps remains the possibility of catching a glimpse of these lost qualities somewhere in time.

The author giving the homily during an Ecclesia Vetusta Catholica celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

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The above text and pictures from Stray Ghosts by Seán Manchester (unpublished memoir) are copyright protected and cannot be reproduced without consent.