Exorcistis invocare

Extract from Seán Manchester's autobiographical works:

“I will show you fear

in a handful of dust.”

~ T S Eliot

W

By the mid-1980s, covert operations that took me to the dark corners of human existence were necessarily abandoned. Within three years, the wolf’s clothing required for that task was finally discarded, as my declaration of faith was published:

“My key beliefs can be summed up as follows: I accept the divinity of Jesus Christ who lived as God made flesh and died for our sins upon the cross before being resurrected. I believe that, as the Bible states, by grace we are saved through faith as a gift of God; that the Bible is the supreme authority and is God’s revelation to man who is made in God’s image but has gone his own way rather than God’s thus having a bias towards evil. Because of this predilection, man cannot know God except through Christ who died for our sins. Salvation is available to all who choose the way of God. And the way is by Jesus Christ alone.” (From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, page 6).

It was with considerable relief that I no longer needed to work covertly within a darkly occult hemisphere; dealing with deceit and chicanery; having to say things to draw out intelligence to uncover facts. It was like awakening from the nightmare of a colourless void into a beautiful landscape of multifarious hues. I sensed being reborn again. Two brief meetings with David Farrant occurred during the last years of my working undercover. The final one in Highgate Wood, as recounted in From Satan To Christ, witnessed him, almost without substance, wafting betwixt trees in the dark aimlessly. The penultimate meeting on 11 May 1982 found me confronting him with incontrovertible evidence of his deceit and press collusion. Taped conversations with a solicitor identifying him now existed.

Confronting him at this late stage revealed that I had been gathering evidence against him, and was not the “wolf” I had appeared to be throughout our conversations during the preceding period. A previous confrontation, ten years earlier, had simply been a challenge for him to be put to the test over his “witchcraft powers.” In the interim, I thought I had managed to gain his confidence by adopting a neutral and pliant stance toward his games. Playing on his ego, telling him what I felt he wanted to hear, I believed I was able to draw him out. I would raise certain topics purposely to see if he would take the bait. However, new evidence revealed that, despite these attempts to win his trust, I remained high on his list of intended targets. Farrant was one person whom nobody could surpass in the art of deception. However, the assistance of the News of the World, especially their legal manager, Henry R Douglas, and solicitor John E Payne of Oswald Hickson, Collier & Co, put paid to Farrant’s devious plan to once again try and frame innocent people. He had already secretly colluded with a journalist in 1977 to try and harm my reputation, but on this occasion Farrant came unstuck. The newspaper was having none of it. The scheme involved framing Anthony Hill with a counterfeit article forged by Farrant’s second wife Colette Sully (with whom he was still in touch, albeit they were no longer living together) in what ostensibly appeared to be Anthony Hill’s hand. Ultimately the intended target, of course, was me. I was named throughout the fraudulent article. I played Farrant the taped evidence, told him what I knew, and asked him to explain himself. He stood in stony silence. Eventually, despite being confronted with this cast iron evidence, he attempted to deny everything. He was visibly shaken. In that moment I recognised his emptiness and his weakness, which no amount of pity could rectify. I told him to his face that he was a charlatan who had yet again been found out, and that our meetings were at an end. We did meet briefly one last time five years later, but this was related solely to him sending a “challenge to a duel” on 21 December 1986. (A facsimile of Farrant’s “challenge” is reproduced in From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, page 51.]

Following that final meeting, I would write: “The sombre figure of David Farrant can still be seen shuffling through London’s Muswell Hill as the Eighties draw to a close. He occupies a bed-sitting room opposite Highgate Wood where he once shamelessly flaunted his witchcraft. Now stooped and haggard-looking, he dwindles in his own peculiar oblivion.” (From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, page 24). Sadly, in the new century, he advanced no further than where he was in 1970. He still haunts the same old pubs where he smokes his cigarettes and plans his pranks on unfortunate victims. But if his story provides a warning to others who foolishly dabble in the occult, pretend to be something they are not, and seek publicity for no good reason ― his existence will, perhaps, have served some useful purpose. Yet his life has so obviously been a tragic waste.

*       *       *

On 15 December 1985, I was invited to play some of my own piano compositions at the Savage Club, Berkeley Square, London, to commemorate Peter Underwood’s twenty-five years as president of The Ghost Club. It was a delightful occasion which allowed me the opportunity to meet his wife, Joyce, and present Peter with a signed copy of by recently published book The Highgate Vampire. Sadly, Peter Underwood’s wife passed away close to his eightieth birthday in May 2003, and Peter himself died on the morning of 26 November 2014, aged 91 years of age. His wife was able to celebrate Peter’s birthday party which is a wonderfully touching facet and somehow encapsulates her. Joyce Elizabeth was a source of constant strength to him in his writing and paranormal research; a constant strength in every aspect of his long life. On their first date they went to see the film The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Joyce features a great deal in Peter Underwood’s autobiography No Common Task. It is dedicated to her and the family “with love.”

Peter was one of the world’s leading authorities on psychical and occult matters, and had been a renowned researcher for more than half a century. He was also the author of over fifty books, had taken part in hundreds of television and radio programmes, and in 1987 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His integrity and dedication were an inspiring example for all exploring at the edge of the unknown. In his own words: “An open mind is necessary for careful, truthful and objective observation, reasoning and conclusion, and if I have not always achieved such aims, at least I have tried … if I have succeeded in opening only one closed mind just a fraction … then my journey into these difficult regions will not have been in vain.”

Peter Underwood knew Montague Summers well enough to have been presented with a protection medallion by him which, in turn, was passed to me. Summers’ fame as an expert on the occult began in 1926 with the publication of his History of Demonology and Witchcraft followed by other studies of witches, vampires and werewolves; notably The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929). He also introduced to the public, as an editor, along with many other works, a reprint of The Discovery of Witches by the infamous Matthew Hopkins, and the first English translation of the classic fifteenth century treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum. In later life he also wrote influential studies of the Gothic novel, another lifelong enthusiasm; notably The Gothic Quest: a History of the Gothic Novel (1938), and A Gothic Bibliography (1940). Much of Summers’ life remains in obscurity, many of his personal papers have been lost; yet he left an autobiography, The Galanty Show, that was published over thirty years after his death.

The Rit Rev'd Montague Summers.

Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, in whose memory I would dedicate my most popular work in print, entered the Old Catholic priesthood, having been diaconated in 1908 in the Church of England, and later becoming ordained in the diaconate of the Roman Catholic Church a year later. He was episcopally consecrated for the Order of Corporate Reunion on 21 June 1927 by Dominic Albert Godwin, and was later consecrated sub conditione on 21 March 1946 by Roger Stephen Matthews and appointed Nuncio for Great Britain. One of his biographers is the late Roman Catholic Carmelite Father Brocard Sewell.

The final resting place of the Right Reverend Montague Summers.

Montague Summers died of a heart attack in 1948, and his mantle awaited the arrival of myself via Peter Underwood. When Sandy Robertson launched The Summers Project in 1986 to raise money for a tombstone to be laid on Summers’ unmarked grave in Richmond Cemetery, then known only as plot 10818, it was to me that he turned for support. The simple stone, bearing the legend “Tell me strange things,” was erected on 26 November 1988. Summers invariably opened his conversation with those words when people visited him. He yearned to hear strange things. In 1950, two years after his death, Summers’ longstanding friend, Hector Stuart-Forbes, joined him in the then unmarked plot at Richmond Cemetery. This Old Catholic bishop’s work in the filed of demonology, not least the specific area of vampirology, is unparalleled. It was when I studied this spectrum of the supernatural in my early teenage years that I first came across his books. They proved to be invaluable.

My appreciation of Summers’ work is apparent, but I have no actual knowledge of his private life, or his degree of involvement in esotericism about which rumours abound. I do not question his ordinations, as have some commentators, and I am not qualified to judge him beyond his published works. I have grown more than accustomed to misrepresentation and cheap jibes against anyone vaguely knowledgeable of the supernatural and the arcane. The only other information that I have been privy to relates entirely to his ordinations and episcopal consecration within the Old Catholic Church.

*       *       *

The British Occult Society had outlived its usefulness by 1988, so I moved to have it dissolved by the executive committee, which it was on August 8th. Even its title was largely misinterpreted; many enquiring because they thought it was a group of occult practitioners, when, in fact, it was an investigative bureau. This misunderstanding certainly assisted my undercover operations throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, but they had now ceased. The claims of occultists and magicians are usually either delusional or fraudulent. Their weapons are largely psychological, and consist principally of control and fear. Few occultists anywhere can demonstrate any power externally derived. After a quarter of a century of meeting the leaders of witchcraft covens, magical groups and esoteric orders, none showed they had any ability to heal, curse or indeed have a causal effect on anything via their so-called hidden powers. They were either deluding themselves, or other people, and frequently both. David Farrant exploited anyone he could, including his second wife, an ex-art student, to fabricate and forge documents in order to turn people against those he despised, not myself. His skullduggery tended to work mostly with social misfits, like himself, who believed that by associating with somebody infamous, a sort of latter-day poor man’s Aleister Crowley, they would somehow become less of a nonentity themselves. In reality, quite the opposite occurs. They become more lost by knowing Farrant, and they become much more a nonentity. Those with any real intelligence would not be taken in by such as him, unless it suited a particular, albeit devious, agenda. The occult spectrum attracts a large proportion of feeble-minded and weak people who seldom rise beyond the ranks. They are fodder engaged by “advanced initiates” who possess the so-called “secrets” ― the leaders who employ manipulation and all the control techniques.

That is not to say that hidden supernatural forces do not exist. Any fool can open the door to a nether region to invite demonic interference into their environment. To do so requires no occult knowledge; no evocation ceremony; no complicated ritual. Training and expertise is required, however, to cast out, ie exorcise, the darkness released and purify the contaminated area.

Exorcist and former Roman Catholic priest Dr Anthony B Finlay states in the introduction to his worthy book on this subject: “Credence in demons has been a mark of Man since the earliest times. They and a ruling spirit of evil have a long history going back millennia before Christ. With the establishment of the Christian faith, belief in the Devil and his cohorts also became more firmly established. … Certainly down the years there have been many unexplained phenomena generally attributed to evil spirits. Some seem to offer very convincing evidence for a reigning supernatural power ― but who can definitely say? In the times of the New Testament people were certain, but they had precious few sciences to help them. Now, only traditional Christians of the main faiths are still sure ― and especially the Roman Catholic hierarchy. For them demons are not peripheral. We are strongly engaged in spiritual warfare as ever we were. Satan is (or was) malevolence personified ― and for many of those in religious orders throughout the ages this is exactly what he was: the manifestation, in corporeal form, of the Prince of Darkness. He is the cause of sin, aided by his cohorts, the demons, who are ready to do his bidding.” (Demons! by Anthony Finlay, Blandford, 1999, pages 9-10).

Reminders from the past were never far away. In the year I was ordained to the sacred priesthood, “Rosemary Ellen Guiley, an American author, asked me to assist with part of the research for her book … and we met outside Highgate Cemetery on Friday 13 July 1990.” (The Highgate Vampire, Gothic Press, 1991, page 102). Jon King, editor of UFO Reality, believes that at this time Guiley was an Aviary government operative with the code names Oriel and Morning Dove. This is an alleged clandestine working group comprising high-ranking officials from various American intelligence departments “formed to undermine any serious research into phenomena,” according to an article he wrote in the June 1996 issue. I found Guiley extremely amicable, despite her many strange and sometimes dubious connections. What she wrote about me was not hostile, and she attended my entry into the priesthood at a nearby church two days later.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley was accompanied by Tom Perrott, chairman of The Ghost Club, which had now separated from Peter Underwood’s renamed and perhaps better established Ghost Club Society whose honorary life members include Dennis Bardens, Colonel John Blashford-Snell, Sarah Miles, Jilly Cooper, Dulcie Gray, Sir Patrick Moore, Uri Geller and me. Seldom have I met anyone who held membership in so many esoteric organisations as did Guiley, however, whose books about witchcraft amount to apologia. When her work Vampires Among Us was published in 1991, I found much about my research, and, moreover, myself, to be sloppy and careless ― but, at least, it was not malicious.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley and I at Highgate Cemetery in 1990.

It was strange to return to the scene of what had been responsible for much of my celebrity in the previous decades when, on the morning of 27 February 1970, I had discovered myself on the front page of the Hampstead and Highgate Express.

Returning for possibly the last time to Swains Lane where something malevolent unearthed 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 eerie 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, of course, commenced with the Highgate case, leaves me in absolutely no doubt that such things exist. Calmet’s attempt to establish the veracity of 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 personal reflections on them. Calmet defined the phenomena as corpses which returned from their graves to disturb the living by sucking their blood and even causing death. The only remedy, he surmised, was to exhume the afflicted body, sever its head, and drive a stake through the heart. Cremation was also considered 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 he also properly 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 mystery 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 own discovery at Highgate Cemetery in August 1970 no such dilemma about their existence would ever trouble me again; though I did speculate on explanations for the peculiar abilities attributed to them.

“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, Gothic Press, 1991, page 39).

All spirit creatures are outside the limitations of time that are so placed upon us who are born, live and invariably die. 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 presence is expelled. The evil spirit is not destroyed, however; it is merely removed from our time and dimension.

It is no coincidence that during Jesus’ ministry amongst the people of Palestine, His miracles in the Synoptic Gospels are recorded for the most part as exorcisms, ie casting out demons. “For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the principalities and the ruling forces who are masters of the darkness in this world, the spirits of evil … ” (Ephesians 6: 12).

†