By Professor Hans Frum of Israel College, Oxford

It is widely believed that the dead surround us always. Most enter their company only at death, but a rare few, while yet living, are temporarily joined to their number by adventure or mischance. Of these few, some are unwitting trespassers, or captives; others demand passage to the afterlife in the hope of retrieving a deceased wife or lover; and others resurrect the dead to consult with them.

Odysseus was among the latter, but having raised Tiresias, the one-time blind prophet of Apollo, with an offering of wine, honey, barley meal, and the blood of a black ram, Odysseus failed to follow Tiresias’s advice. After many misadventures, including: offending the gods, losing his ship and crew; and seven years as the reluctant consort of the nymph, Calypso; he eventually returned home to Ithaca. There, having killing the suitors who had attempted to woo his wife and take his house, Odysseus at last obeyed Tiresias’ instruction and, carrying an oar upon his back, he began walking inland.

This fragment of Homer’s Odyssey inspired one of my favourite poems by Thomas Warbrook whom I had the privilege of knowing in my early years at Israel College, Oxford. Tom was something of a mentor to me and I think Nevil Warbrook will not mind if I quote his father’s poem in full, given its theme is not far from what we will discuss.

The Corn Flail

‘Odysseus?’ My new companion said,
And I was glad the name was strange to him.
‘Why do you carry that upon your back?’
‘This?’ I asked him, shaft in hand
As though I had not carried it long,
‘You do not know its purpose?’

‘I know it well enough,’ he said,
‘But you are one-thousand miles from shore.’
‘Name it then, or have I carried it far enough?’
‘An oar,’ he said. ‘But you have no need
Here in this wilderness, and the sea lies upon your back.’
‘Tiresias had me carry it,’ I said.

The man looked sideways on me, saying
‘I had heard Tiresias was dead.’
‘I had heard the same,’ I said.
‘And yet lately I sat with him.
At the sign of the Black Ram we drank
His health and mine in honey, blood, and wine.’

‘I should be walking on,’ my new companion said.
And I, having troubled him, waved him by
Saying, ‘I have given up my sword,
Both long and short.
Am an old man wandering
And no threat to you or any other.

‘But tell me, if you must go,
How far is the land of corn?’
‘The land of corn?’ my new companion said.
‘I do not know how many miles
But sure it is upon this road.’
He did not walk on

But puzzled, glanced again at me
And the oar upon my back.
‘Tiresias had me carry it,’ I said.
‘Until a man sees a corn flail
And not an oar upon my back.
Only then will Odysseus lie far enough from the sea.’

Thomas Warbrook, from ‘Greek Gifts’ (Brunswick Press, 1958)

The poem is about redemption and how far a man must go before he can be forgiven. Though the text stands on its own merit, anyone familiar with its author recognises an autobiographical element for Tom Warbrook never entirely shook off his association with unsavoury, not to say scandalous society during his student days at Oxford. A fact borne out by his obituaries, which, while universally praising his work, found space to mention his association with the notorious Lester Rookwood and The Helios Club. Our deaths invite the raking of embers we wish had grown cold and leave our friends free to speak of our indiscretions.

The sea is the great barrier between Odysseus and his return to Ithaca and he journeys to its outermost part, identified in The Odyssey as a harbour at the edge of the world, to speak to the shade of Tiresias. Twice, thus far in Sir Tamburlaine’s novel, a journey by water has taken us near the land of the dead. We saw it in the subterranean adventure of Sarah Pinsker and, less obviously, in George Huck’s redemptive return to Clovenstone to release his lost love, Elisabet.

Mud mired his boots till every step hauled up a mountain on his soles. He bent forward, the better to grab handfuls of reed and moss and haul himself higher. In the starlight he saw the broad sweep of Clovenstone, even the stone itself dark under sky, its cleft face darker still. He trusted to his hands to find the way. Hope led him on, hope and love. He would not be swayed now. He found a low mound beneath his fists and dug his hands into the roots, dragging out handfuls of thick brown moss.

—I’m here, Bet. Like I said. Like I promised.

Breath scorched his throat. His insides burned with pain. Yet his flesh was chill, his hands cold. Water ran clear through his fingers, welling from the ground like tears. This, under his hands was the source of the flood; all the water in the dale began here, the origin, the beginning.

This Iron Race, book two, Chapter 14.

Water, in the form of a river or sea, separates the worlds of the living and the dead in a number of beliefs. In Greek myth Charon the ferryman sculls us across the River Styx. In Norse myth the Rainbow Bridge, Bifröst carries over the chasm of the Kerlaugar. In Hindu myth the river is the Vaitarani. In Japanese Buddhist tradition the Sanzu-no-kawa. In the Rigveda, the ancient Indian text, it is the Rasā.

In Celtic myth the souls of Cornishmen sailed across the western approaches to Brittany, while in Welsh and Irish myth the land of the dead lies beyond the setting sun, far out in the Atlantic. And in The Odyssey, as we noted, the Gates of Hades lie at edge of the world, beyond the sea.

In all these examples the afterlife must be travelled to; we do not fall into it, as though through a rabbit hole. It is a sea voyage, a journey into the unknown, whether taken deliberately while alive, or undertaken at our deaths: death must be, as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan tells us, an awfully big adventure.

Having established that the land of the dead, as presented in myth, lies over water, we turn to the dead themselves. When Odysseus calls Tiresias up from the dead, we read:

Then came also the ghost of Theban Tiresias, with his golden sceptre in his hand.

He knew me and said, ‘Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, why, poor man, have you left the light of day and come down to visit the dead in this sad place? Stand back from the trench and withdraw your sword that I may drink of the blood and answer your questions truly.’

So I drew back, and sheathed my sword, whereon when he had drank of the blood he began with his prophecy.’

Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI.

You will note that Tiresias is presented whole. Though still blind, his clearsight identifies Odysseus immediately. He drinks the offered blood and converses with Odysseus without difficulty. There is nothing to indicate, other than the word ‘ghosts’ earlier in the scene, that this is anything other than a dialogue between two mortal men. It would, however, be unwise to read too much from this: Homer’s audience would bring their own assumptions and they are not our assumptions. Tiresias’s ghost appears to be corporeal, but while we know that cannot be, our knowledge is not that of the Ancient Greeks: the past here is truly a foreign country.

To date, the scientific investigation into the nature of the dead has restricted itself to anatomy: the butchery of corpses to understand the processes of the living. Anatomy is of no use to our investigation. The pseudoscience of ghost-hunting almost entirely postdates the writing of This Iron Race, and it too cannot directly serve us, if our aim is to understand the presentation of the dead within that work. Anecdotal evidence for the nature of the dead is ancient, but if we investigate it thoroughly this article will be nearly as large as the work for which it is a preface.

I restrict myself, then, to those relevant works of literature in the library of Sir Tamburlaine MacGregor and Edenborough’s Speculative Society. These I will test against knowledge: literary, pseudoscientific, and anecdotal; acquired since MacGregor’s time. I shall be brief.

Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Leipzig, 1807) describes four forms of the dead: corporeal, animated corpse, pure spirit, and vampyric. Hegel allows that these distinctions are not always absolute. For example, although Tiresias appears corporeal, he can only speak once he has drunk the blood of the ram, suggesting he is partly vampyric: that is to say, his presence among the living depends upon another’s life essence—here, a slaughtered ram.

Paraphysicists have now identified a fifth form that survives as pure information within an extant electrical field. In former times they haunted streams and running water, but are now usually found near telecommunications equipment and radio transmitters. Most of us will have heard mysterious voices speaking to us through the static of a badly tuned radio or while waiting for someone to take our telephone call.

The corporeal dead have only the illusion of flesh. It is glamour with the appearance and sometimes the touch of flesh, but their real flesh lies lifeless in the ground, decaying, or is grey ash. Tiresias cannot drink the blood of the ram since he has no mouth or throat or gut, but he can consume the essence of it and gain strength. That is our rationalisation of what Odysseus reports. It is, perhaps, not the only rationalisation, but it serves.

The animated corpse is known by various names, but corp-walker will serve our needs. They are not, and never have been except in second-rate fiction, zombies: the zombie is a wholly separate phenomenon. Corp-walkers show a preference for their own flesh, at least initially; but once their flesh is no longer serviceable, they will occupy the corpses of other humans and even animals. Like the homeless, in extremis they will accept any roof over their head. It is probable that the animating force gains either pleasure or familiarity from the flesh, and also energy released by the processes of decomposition: energy presumably greater than that needed to animate the flesh. Naturally, the more recently dead a corpse is, the more attractive it is to a corp-walker and the monumental gravestones and tombs in our cemeteries were intended to deter them. Poor people, unable to pay for elaborate and heavy funerary monuments employed grave watchers to look over the deceased for the first week or two after death. Graves would also be planted with nails and other ironware to deter corp-walkers.

One book in particular in MacGregor’s library would have furnished him with sufficient material on corp-walkers: The Customs and Antiquities of Alba, by Mrs Elspeth Divine (pub John McConnell, 1804) and the Edenborough Speculative Society also had many pamphlets and lecture notes on talks on the subject dating from the 1820s. Mrs Divine’s work in particular is a thorough compendium of hauntings and post-mortem phenomena in Scotland and Northern Anglia.

Like the corp-walker, the vampyre requires a source of energy, since it is no longer able to generate its own. Unlike the corp-walker, it prefers to take that energy parasitically from the living and was therefore a particular concern. Like the corporeal dead, the vampyre has the illusion of flesh, allowing it to walk among us, but the illusion is unable to resist sunlight and casts no reflection in a mirror. All the dead are, to some extent, parasitical but only the vampyre is injurious to the health of the living. Again, Mrs Divine’s book provides many examples and suggests several remedies including posies of wild garlic and mutilating the corpse of a supposed vampyre.

It is unclear whether the dead existing as pure spirit are wholly a separate form from those mentioned so far, or whether they are the final stage of post-mortem decay. Aristotle and the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, described similar phenomena in antiquity but very little was known about them prior to 1800 and Mrs Divine’s work only mentions them fleetingly. Commonly known as candlesnatchers because of their attraction to light and warmth, their transient and ephemeral appearances rendered it difficult to study them until the electrical field discoveries of the German physicist, Thomas Johann Seebeck (1770–1831) and the Dane, Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851). Perplexed by apparently random results in their experiments both men eventually concluded that their work was being haunted by candlesnatchers feeding off the electrical currents. Only after sealing their laboratories with lead could they work uninterrupted. Following Ørsted’s findings, the Anglian physicist, Jerusalem Behr (1805–1882) discovered how to capture candlesnatchers in a de-polarised electro-magnetic field, thus inventing the Behr Cage. This is still the basis of modern systems protecting electrical installations from paranormal interference.

MacGregor’s main interest was in the fields of history and literature and his library at Arbinger was not well appointed with the latest scientific works. His arcane pursuits and antipathy towards the railroads and other industrial developments, led many in his lifetime to accuse him of a romantic attachment to the past and ignorance of the benefits of progress. Among them—though uncritically, since his own views were similar—was Dr Claude Crabtree whose The Wizard of the North (King James University Press, 1930) promulgated the image of MacGregor as a man out of sorts with his time: “a medieval makar let loose in the age of iron”, to quote Dr Crabtree.

This image survived until the 1960s and the work of Professor Evelyn Bishop. In A Writer’s Life, (Exeter Books, 1962) Professor Bishop analysed MacGregor’s representation of magick and paranormal phenomena in This Iron Race and concluded it was congruent with the latest scientific research in Anglia and Europe. Knowing MacGregor’s own library did not have the relevant material, Professor Bishop turned to the Edenborough Speculative Society. Unfortunately, their records are incomplete, and we do not know which texts MacGregor consulted, but studying the library’s acquisition list from the society’s founding to the present day Professor Bishop succeeded in correlating several scenes in This Iron Race with specific research papers in the collection. Her work provides compelling evidence that MacGregor was aware of and interested in what science had to say about magick.

Thus far we have only described the revenant dead without examining why they are unable to join the greater number in passing to the afterlife. One cause, the survival of an identical twin, is dealt with in MacGregor’s text and it remains the only cause proven by scientific investigation, thanks to the work of my father, the paraphycisist, Adolph Frum of Berne University, in the early 1970s. The other cause is explored in literature, folklore, and anecdotal testimony: it is redemption, or lack thereof.

Returning to Tom Warbrook’s poem, Odysseus’ strange quest is an act of redemption for blinding Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. That Polyphemus was the Cyclops who imprisoned and attempted to slaughter Odysseus and his men is of no account; one does not anger Poseidon, no matter the justification. Only when Odysseus finally encounters a stranger who mistakes his oar for a corn flail; which is to say one who has no knowledge of the sea, will his offence be redeemed. It is true that at this point in the narrative, Odysseus has years more life ahead but the message that we must make amends for our crimes if we are to rest easy is clear.

Assuming that we die with a clear conscience, what lies ahead remains a mystery. Dead men, as they say, tell no tales, and accounts from those who have supposedly visited the abode of the dead are so varied we cannot gain a clear picture. What is agreed on are two clear strands: an earthly paradise of permanent summer without want or hunger, and a bleak, perhaps subterranean wasteland, but this is not always the Christian choice of a heaven or a hell for in some mythologies all go to paradise and in other accounts all are in the wasteland.

When judgement is passed before entry to the afterlife the good go to paradise and the wicked to the wasteland, or Gehenna, as it is called in Hebrew accounts. Most of the great religions describe some form of winnowing of the dead, with good behaviour rewarded and bad punished, but it is unclear how much of this is based on truth, insofar as we understand these forms of truth, or whether it is founded on the sociological need to encourage moral behaviour among the living. This is particularly the case among the religions associated with the great civilisations and one can argue that the moral imperative became more vital with the dawn of complex urbanised society. For earlier religious beliefs, the ethnographical research suggests that nomadic and hunter-gatherer societies did not distinguish between the wicked and the virtuous. The dead were simply the dead.

Hebraic society retains a vestige of this older belief in the word She’ol, which described an abode of the dead without moral demarcation. Hades of Greek myth also lacks a distinction between the good and the wicked, but is identified with the underworld. In contrast, among Celtic peoples the Cornish Lyonesse, Ys of the Bretons, the Welsh Annwn, and the Eirish Tir na nÓg are all paradisiacal lands of plenty and eternal summer. The Picts, Scotland’s original inhabitants, have left few traces of their beliefs and Scotland’s history of migrations from Scandinavia to the east, Anglia to the south and Eireland to the west leaves modern Scotland with only fragments of her ancient beliefs. There is no name for the afterlife surviving from Scotland’s pre-Christian period.

World-wide, there are of course many names and descriptions of the afterlife: the ancient Egyptian, Kingdom of the Dead; Hel and Niflhel of Norse belief; the Talmudic, Olam Haba; the Islamic Jannah and Jahannam; in Hinduism one resides in naraka or svarga to await reincarnation; the buddhakṣetra or ‘Pure Land’ of Mahāyāna Buddhism; the Summerland of contemporary Wiccan belief; and the 黄泉, or Yomi of Japanese Shinto. Some of these realms are judgemental, others not; their natures may be paradisiacal or Hadean; the dead may remain for eternity, or only while awaiting reincarnation. A rare variant is the “warriors’ hall”, the most famous of which is the Norse Valhalla, which is reserved for a select few.

Although fascinating to the modern parapsychologist, none of these realms of the dead unduly influenced MacGregor who, recognising the paucity of Scotland’s ancient mythos compared to that of Eireland and other Celtic lands, created a native, uniquely Scottish afterlife from the fragments surviving in pre-Christian folklore: he called it The Well of Shadows.

I shall leave discussion of MacGregor’s inspiration for the Well of Shadows to your editor; along with the role it plays in This Iron Race. Mr Warbrook will not thank me for spoiling MacGregor’s tale! Instead, I will compare the Well of Shadows with those forms of the afterlife we have discussed.

Firstly, the Well of Shadows does not reward the good or punish the bad, at least not directly; nor is it wholly paradisiacal or hellish. Indeed, it is not one place but many, perhaps inspired by John 14:2.

In my Father’s house are many mansions,

with each individual having their own unique place in the afterlife. Within the Well of Shadows the dead relive their lives endlessly: perhaps across only one day or as much as several years—the exact limits are never set—but crucially do so without previous memory: each day and each hour of each day always new. How this particular day or period of years is chosen is never explained, but one can infer that it is always fitting to the individual.

By this expedience, MacGregor solves the conundrum of the hellish and paradisiacal afterlives: namely, that that which pleases us eventually jades and all torments become bearable with time. We can also see that although there is no direct judgement, each individual brings judgement upon them.

The soul, as we have seen, is quite separate. It dwells in the Far Country, a celestial plane comparable with the habitat of the soul’s animal form when it not called upon to usher its charge into the afterlife. One soul will have care of many during its existence and claims for reincarnation and past-life experiences may be an echo of those people previously in the soul’s charge. There have even been cases of past-life experiences appearing to come from the far future, which may suggest the individual has a fertile imagination or that the chronology of the Far Country is not parallel to that of our world.

Carl Jung, the Austrian psychologist, never read MacGregor’s work, but there are similarities to the Well of Shadows in his 1916 essay, The Structure of the Unconscious which described a common currency of archetypes found in all humans, which he termed the Collective Unconscious. This was inherited, not acculturated, and was the source of phobias, such as arachnophobia and xenophobia. In addition, it provides the building blocks of narratives, both in the sense of story-telling and our rationalisation of experience.

In an appendix to The Structure of the Unconscious, Jung elaborated on his ideas and described the concept of a Universal Memory. This, apparently inspired by Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity postulating that time was not constant, existed outside of observable time and encompassed the dawn of humanity and humanity’s end. Universal Memory, Jung reasoned, provided a rational basis for the phenomena of past-life recollections and premonitions of the future, as he described here:

…in the single human mind there is no conception of time, other than the limit set by memory itself: this we see in the flickering of thought from our earliest moments to the most recent; therefore, in the Universal Memory time is only limited by the endurance, both into the past and into the future, of humanity itself.

Thus, while we cannot transport ourselves through time, Universal Memory connects us to what has been and what is to come through our shared soul. All who our soul has borne, both in humanity’s past and in its future, are accessible to those willing to explore, just as our memory is accessible to they.

In the Well of Shadows the dead relive their lives endlessly. Through Universal Memory adepts can access the memories of the dead and those not yet born. Our souls, dwelling in the Far Country, are truly the windows to perception.

Professor Hans Frum, Mesopotamia Cottage, Oxford.