Soul-death, or, to use its modern name, malignant anima psychosis (MAP) is a reaction to stress or stimuli where an individual’s soul or anima turns upon them, much as cancerous cells turn upon the healthy tissue surrounding them. Unless treated—formerly with charms and incantations, now more frequently by hypnosis and parapsychology—MAP is invariably fatal, sometimes through suicide but usually from complications resulting from victims failing to take care of their physical health or, in common parlance, losing the will to live.
MacGregor’s journals for the months after Madeleine’s death reveal a man contemplating suicide and the concerned letters from his friends—all available in the MacGregor Archive, box xix 1858–59 King James University, Edenborough—show that he was scarcely eating or sleeping at this time and appeared unshaven in his few public appearances. In a letter to Charles Palliser, dated October 7th, 1860, MacGregor credits his housekeeper, Edith Cave, and assistant Jock Strange, writing:
Truly, it is they I must thank for saving me from a monstrous creature that would have chilled the very blood beating in my heart and taken everything of life from the air I breathed for its own fell nourishment and yet was such a part of me, equal to my own limbs, that I think it must always have dwelt benignly within and only assumed its evil form when I was at my weakest.
That, according to the paraphysicist Professor Hans Frum of my alma mater, Israel College, Oxford, is as accurate a description of the symptoms of MAP as one will find in any medical text book.
MacGregor left no exact account of his battle with MAP and was inclined in conversation to ascribe his recovery wholly to the intervention of friends and his meeting Helena Northwood, but his journal at this time makes several references to a “journey,” albeit without clues to the nature of the journey. Whether this journey was through what Jung would later term, the subconscious, or was a metaphysical journey into an otherworld, is unexplained. Certainly, history is full of accounts of journeys to unearthly paradises or hellish netherworlds and while most are obviously allegorical not all can be easily dismissed.
The same uncertainty appends Sarah’s Pinsker’s journey through the otherworld in chapter twelve of This Iron Race. By turns, whimsical, amusing, menacing, even erotic, her journey has the capriciousness of a dream, and yet has repercussions in the real world. On the one hand, Sarah’s father remarks that she has been missing for three days (during which she must surely have been somewhere) and her eyes have changed from brown to blue, yet her entry into the otherworld through a rack of fur coats, encounter with the bear, fox and squirrel and return via a tapestry are so implausible the text begs us not to take it seriously.
The detail regarded Sarah’s eyes occurs in both the printed edition of 1865 and in MacGregor’s first draft and it was investigated by Dr Claude Crabtree in The Wizard of the North, (King James University Press, 1930). Medical science has moved on a great deal in the past eighty years, and I have confirmed with a visit to my optician that children are commonly born with blue eyes, that is, without pigmentation of the iris, and the eyes will gradually change colour between the ages of one and three. Subsequently, this colour is fixed for the great majority of people, though changes may occur during puberty and pregnancy as a result of hormonal changes in the body. Heterochromia is a rare condition that can cause changes in eye colour but as it was not documented in MacGregor’s time he is unlikely to have been aware of it. In any event there are no known circumstances where eyes change colour within the space of three days.
At this point it is important to remember that this is not an event in the narrative present but Sarah’s recollection of an event some years before. Therefore, MacGregor is not asking us to believe that this happened, only that it is Sarah’s recollection. The true question then becomes whether Sarah’s recollection is trustworthy and, with the proviso that something undoubtedly did happen to her in the magick quarter, I suggest its whimsical presentation intends us not to trust her. Ultimately, however, MacGregor offers an emphatic ambiguity allowing the reader to interpret Sarah’s account as fact or allegory as they see fit.