medicine man, or priest both attracted and repelled the group with whom he or she worked. When the human mind is confronted by such ambivalent objects, it experiences severe stress and tension.
One of the most deleterious things that can happen to any of us mentally is to have ambivalent feelings about the same object, person, or set of ideas. In Iris Murdochs brilliant novel A Severed Head, the title was chosen to indicate just such ambivalent feelings. The cryptic meaning was that the severed head hanging from the belt of a traditional witch doctor, medicine man, or priest both attracted and repelled the group with whom he or she worked. When the human mind is confronted by such ambivalent objects, it experiences severe stress and tension.
Belinda, the subject of the encounter with the Yemanja statuette, was, in a sense, a woman of two cultures — two sets of ideas that were almost diametrically opposed. The modern university education from which she had benefitted had made her open minded, investigative, and rational. The deeper cultural strains of her people and the spirit-beliefs of her ancestors went back for centuries prior to their being brought to the Portuguese colonies in South America. Although the conflict in Belinda’s mind lay far below the surface, her logical, scientific university paradigm and the old Yoruba belief that spirits inhabited everything were in serious conflict.
Her insistence — despite the warnings of her family — on taking the strange Yemanja statuette back to her apartment may have been the work of her rational, scientific, collegeeducated component, whereas her final acceptance of the Umbanda counsellor’s advice to return the statuette to the sea represented a resurgence of a much older mental substratum that still lingered vestigially within her: the spirit-culture of her Yoruba ancestors.
Much is reported in medical literature of problems arising from so-called psychosomatic illness. From the earliest centuries A.D., devout, mystical saints contemplating the wounds and sufferings of Christ have been able to produce in their own bodies the stigmata — marks that look very much like the injuries to hands and feet resulting from crucifixion. There are many recorded cases of phantom pregnancies, in which the abdomen swells and other physiological symptoms of pregnancy, like lactation, are presented by the patient. Husbands have also been known to experience “sympathy pains” with their pregnant wives. Some back pains and certain forms of paralysis seem to be psychosomatic in origin rather than to have any strictly physiological cause.
Belinda had noticed very particularly where the pigment was still visible on the Yemanja statuette. It is, therefore, conceivable that she subconsciously “arranged” the series of accidents and the apparent tubercular lung lesions to correspond with the pigment still adhering to the figurine.
We all have friends and acquaintances who could well be described as “accident prone,” but their clumsiness, carelessness, and apparent inability to relate cause and effect accurately and rationally may be more than a simple behavioural characteristic. A clinical psychologist might suppose that the accident-prone patient was working against him- or herself at a very deep and powerful subconscious level. The accident-prone subject may, however, be trying to attract attention, in which case the pain of the injury caused by the accident, or the pain or discomfort from the psychosomatic illness, may be regarded by the subject as a price which he or she is perfectly willing to pay in exchange for the much craved attention. Another theory is that the subject believes him- or herself to have committed some fault or sin that needs to be punished, and the series of accidents or psychosomatically induced illnesses, disabilities, and discomforts may be understood at a level beyond the patient’s conscious control as the “appropriate punishments” for what he or she believes has been done amiss.
The jury has four apparent options in this case study. The first is to accept the possibility that some strange, conscious, and purposeful psychic forces caused the accidents and illnesses that Belinda suffered. This need not necessarily be an external spirit force, but could be the product of many minds believing in such a force and — by their belief — actually producing it. The experience of the Toronto psychical researchers who managed to produce psychic phenomena from a “ghost” that they knew perfectly well existed only in their own minds may shed some light upon this possibility. The Tibetan idea of tulpas of the kind that Alexandra David-Neel thought that she had manufactured is also worth bringing into the discussion. At a better known and more popular level there is the phenomenon of a football or baseball team winning more often on its home ground, where it is surrounded by the goodwill and enthusiasm of thousands of fans and supporters who are willing their team to win.
If it was not a genuine disembodied spirit force focusing through the Yemanja image, and if it was not the power of external minds over matter, then was it something that had its origins and found its dynamism exclusively inside Belinda’s own mind?, Was it her ambivalent feelings and the culture clash that brought about her accident proneness, her illness, and her feelings of suicidal despair?
The fourth possibility is that the whole thing was no more than a series of remarkable coincidences, but this theory, of course, raises the far larger question of just what coincidence (or synchronicity) really is.
CHAPTER SEVEN:The Relics of Saint Anthony of Padua
Born in Lisbon towards the end of the twelfth century, Anthony spent most of the last years of his life in the Italian city of Padua. Portuguese by birth, Anthony became one of the canons of St. Augustine at Coimbra when he was barely twenty-five years old. While he was there, the relics of five Franciscan martyrs were brought across from Morocco. In an emotional surge of dangerous and irrational religious enthusiasm, Anthony was filled with a desire to follow the example of the five dead Franciscans.
Not long afterwards, a group of travelling Franciscans visited the Augustinian canons at Coimbra. Anthony expressed his deep desire for martyrdom to these Franciscan visitors and was so impressed by them that he decided to join their order instead of the Augustinians. There was a little difficulty over this to begin with, but after a while Anthony overcame it and began his new life as a Franciscan.
He had been baptized originally as Ferdinand, but now took on the new name of Anthony in order to venerate the memory of Saint Anthony of Egypt, who was the hero of the Franciscans whom he had just joined. This Anthony of Egypt was born in A.D. 251 and died in A.D. 356 at the advanced age of 105. He had been born in Coma, which was part of Upper Egypt, and, when only twenty years of age, had sold everything he possessed and gone to live among a local religious community. From A.D. 286 until 306, he lived in a deserted fortress at Pispir. While he was there, he underwent a series of well-publicized temptations. Curiously enough, similar temptations, associated with one of the multiple Saint Anthonys, featured prominently in the mystery of the priest’s treasure of Rennes-le-Château. One theory of this Rennes-le-Château mystery was that Bérenger Saunière, the priest of Rennes who became immensely, but inexplicably, rich towards the end of the nineteenth century, had discovered some ancient coded manuscripts that led him to the treasure. According to this particular Rennes theory, which may well prove to be totally inaccurate, when these mysterious manuscripts were allegedly decoded, part of the message that came from them concerned one of the Saint Anthonys.
The first part of that cryptic Rennes record referred to a painting by Nicholas Poussin showing a shepherdess, three shepherds, and a tomb. The reference to Saint Anthony is simply “No temptation.” The message then goes on to mention the names of three painters — the two Teniers and Poussin — who were said in the coded manuscript to collectively “hold the key” to the Rennes treasure mystery.
If the Poussin painting referred to the shepherdess and the shepherds of Arcadia with their sinister, inscribed table-top tomb, then the “no temptation” message was believed by these researchers to apply to one of the many versions of Saint Anthony painted by one of the Teniers.
It was alleged in quaint medieval phrasing that many of Saint Anthony’s temptations consisted of “demons who came to torment him in the guise of lewd wenches.” Several early painters found that it was rather easier to sell their “religious” paintings if there was an attractive “lewd wench” or two somewhere on the canvas! In several pictures