Alfred Russel Wallace and the Spirit World with Michael Cremo

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we're going to explore the life and work of Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution. Wallace was a spiritualist and deeply involved in scientific investigations of 19th century spiritualism. With me is Michael Cremo, who is the co-author of Forbidden Archaeology, the Hidden History of the Human Race, and also author of Human Devolution, an alternative to Darwin's theory, a Vedic alternative to Darwin's theory. Welcome, Michael. Good to be here. It's good to be with you once again as well, and I'm so delighted that you took an interest in your book Human Devolution and the work of Alfred Russell Wallace, because he's a very important person in the history of science and particularly important in the history of psychical research in parapsychology. It's an important chapter in that history that's usually overlooked. Yes, the history of Wallace, his actual history, is generally overlooked in biology textbooks as well. It's sometimes mentioned that he was, along with Darwin, the co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin had gone on the voyage of the Beagle. He was a naturalist on this ship that journeyed around the world, and it was many of his observations, such as those he made of the tortoises and the finches on the Galapagos Island, that originally suggested to him his theory of evolution, the idea that species are not immutable types, but merge one into the other. So he had, after that voyage, gone to reside in the countryside in England, and he began to formulate his theory and write a book about it, the book that was later published as The Origin of Species, but it was taking him a long time to do it, actually a couple of decades at least. And then one day he received in the mail a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace, who was a younger, at that time, English biologist or naturalist, who had gone out to Southeast Asia, and in his communication to Darwin, Wallace revealed he had come up with the exact same theory that Darwin was working on, a theory of evolution by natural selection. And he enclosed in his letter a paper that he said was going to be read at a meeting of the Linnaean Society of Biological Scientific Society in London. So this was somewhat shocking for Darwin, because the etiquette in the scientific world is the first person who presents a theory gets their name on it. Gets the credit, yeah. Gets the credit, so Darwin consulted with his scientific friends and asked them what he could do about this, and he said the only thing they advised him, the proper thing for you to do would be to ask Wallace if he would agree that a paper by you, Charles Darwin, would be read at the same time at the Linnaean Society in London, and that way you will both get credit for the theory. So that was agreed upon, and for a long time, the theory was called the Wallace-Darwin theory. You don't hear that very much anymore. Well, you know a couple of years ago, I was in London at the London Museum of Natural History, and they had a special exhibit just on the work of Wallace. So, I think there's some effort amongst mainstream biologists to revive his memory. I think he probably tarnished his reputation because he became an advocate of spiritualism. But, it's important to note, as you write, that he didn't start out as a spiritualist. He was like Darwin, a materialistic, 19th century Victorian, who had no particular interest in spiritualism at all. Absolutely. When Wallace was out in Southeast Asia, you know, he'd gotten sick and he was laid up in a hospital for some time, and he was recuperating, and reports began to come from Europe about mesmerism, hypnotism, paranormal research, and things like that. And he was initially very skeptical about these things, but when he returned to England, he began to look into the matter himself, and he became convinced that there was something to it, you know, from the scientific point of view. And he actually published a report directed towards his scientific colleagues about what he regarded as the scientific evidence for the supernatural. He attended many seances. Yes, he attended seances, for example, seances of Mrs. Marshall, Mrs. Nichols. These were mediums, people with reputed paranormal powers that were providing demonstrations of them in private circles in England, and he went to spend some time in these circles, and his result of that was he concluded that there was something real going on here. He witnessed what he regarded as true examples of psychokinetic effects and levitations among other things, and he became personally involved in this research, and this prompted Darwin to write him a letter, a very critical letter, saying, by getting into these things, you're murdering our child, which only made sense to Darwin in terms of a strictly materialist ontology. Well, I think it's fair to say that the phenomenon that most intrigued Wallace were some of the most bizarre, inexplicable things, what we would call today macro psychokinesis, which is still extremely controversial, even amongst parapsychologists now, because the sorts of things, materialization of spirit beings in ectoplasmic form, for example, levitation of mediums themselves, these things today are extremely rare, not reported very often. So, modern researchers think, well, there must be something wrong with the accounts from the 19th century. Yes, there can be. That's a common reaction. There can be reactions like that. But, I found it significant that Wallace didn't work alone. He worked in cooperation with other prominent scientists, such as Sir William Crookes, who was later a president of the Royal Society, England's topmost scientific organization. He was a physicist. He was involved in some of the work related to the discovery of the cathode ray tube, things like that. So, he was a prominent physicist, later a president of the Royal Society, and he and Wallace were conducting experiments into the phenomenon connected with mediums. One of the mediums they investigated was Daniel Dunglass Hume, who had some interesting abilities. So, one thing Hume could do is he could take an accordion, a musical instrument, and hold it with one hand opposite the keys and cause it to play elaborate tunes in that condition. So, Crookes... Yeah, Crookes placed the accordion in a cage to make it impossible for any sort of fraud to go on. Right, and under those conditions, he was still able to cause the accordion to play. And even more interestingly, he would withdraw his hand from the cage and, according to Wallace and Crookes, the accordion would float in the cage, playing a tune. It sounds quite astonishing. Another thing that was witnessed by both Wallace and Crookes were levitations by Hume, and yeah, we know that it's possible to manufacture the illusion of a levitation. Magicians do this. But, these events took place under circumstances that really completely ruled out those kinds of explanations. Magicians, stage magicians, can do it when they're in control of the stage. Yes. But, to do it under scientific conditions with multiple observers who have strip-searched the magician and searched the room thoroughly is another matter altogether. Yeah, so you have to wonder, well, why did Wallace, you know, the co-founder of the theory of evolution by Natural Selection and Crookes, a president of the Royal Society, publicize these things to their scientific colleagues? You know, did they have some kind of psychological death wish that they wanted all their colleagues to think they've gone completely off the deep end, or did they publish these things because that is what, as scientists, they actually observed and they thought other scientists deserve to have this information available to them? I choose the latter among those possibilities. And, you know, it's also important to point out that it wasn't just the two of them either. There was a coterie, a clique, of many prominent scientists from that era who were actively involved in the Society for Psychical Research. Another one you mention in your book, who was a colleague of Wallace, was William James, the founder of American psychology. Yeah, William James was a very interesting person, because he was open to a whole variety of facts that would be looked upon quite negatively today. One case he investigated was what he regarded as a genuine case of spirit possession. You know, the case is called the Watseka Wonder. Oh, yes, indeed. And Watseka is a little town in, I believe, Illinois, and it also happens to be the name of the street I live on in Los Angeles, which is Watseka Avenue, which is named after one of the most famous cases in the history of psychical research. So, that was an interesting case involving a young girl named Laurency Venom, who was a member of the Venom family. She lived a quite ordinary life until, at a certain point in time, she went into trance states, what she called trance states. And in these trance states, she claimed to be encountering the spirits of departed personalities, and one of the spirits she encountered was that of a girl named Mary Roth, who had died previously in that same geographical locality. So, she reported that to her family members, to her parents, and they went and searched out this Roth family, and they brought her family to the Venom house. Now, Laurency had reported that, in her encounter with the spirit of Mary Roth, this spirit being had told her, I would like to visit my parents. So, more or less, I'd like to take possession of your body for a little while. And, when that happened, Laurency Venom began manifesting the personality of this girl, Mary Roth. And when the family approached, they were brought to her house, she looked and was able to identify immediately, without ever having seen them before, her mother, other relatives, and she, by the agreement of both family members, went to live with the Roth family and perfectly manifested the personality of their daughter, manifested all kinds of detailed knowledge about the family affairs that would have only been known to Mary Roth. And this went on for some time, for some days, until, at a certain point... As I recall, it was a few months. Actually, yeah, for some time. And then, at a certain point, she went back into the trance states and the spirit departed, and she resumed her normal personality, felt like a stranger, and the Roth house was returned to her family, where she lived out the rest of her life in a fairly normal way, as far as I can remember from the reports. But, I did find it extremely interesting that William James included this case in his textbook, Principles of Psychology, as what he regarded as a genuine case of spirit possession. I think it was removed from a later edition, probably, but you're absolutely correct. The case was investigated by James' colleague, Richard Hodgson, who traveled to Watsika, Illinois and interviewed the families some years later. It stands as one of the most well-attested and dramatic cases of possession, and not in the negative sense, either, because, as I recall, Laurency Venom was ill at the time, and when Mary Roth came, she said, this will help heal her, which apparently it did. But, the interesting point, I think, Michael, is that in this case, it says a lot about your notion of human devolution, that humans from within what we could call the spirit world, or I could call it hyperspace, or some other dimension of reality, not conventionally what we think of as three-dimensional physical reality, are able to influence events in this world. Yes, and that depends upon understanding the actual structure of what a human being is, ontologically. I think there are three things involved. There's a gross physical body made of the chemical elements. There is a subtle mental and intellectual body, and then beyond that, there is the actual conscious self. So, I think what happens in the cases of possession is that you have a person, a conscious self, who has separated from their gross physical body, but retains the subtle mental and intellectual body on some level of existence. They are able to use their mental and intellectual form to take possession of the mental and intellectual body of a terrestrial human who is still embodied in a gross physical form, and this may be done coercively or by consent. It would appear that, in this case, the possession was by consent, and that the person, personality doing the possessing, was benign. Yeah, and that said, there could be other cases. They're not always benign. But the Alfred Russell Wallace documented many, many dozens of different kinds of manifestations. For example, ectoplasmic materialization, where a spirit being seems to create a temporary body out of some mysterious substance called ectoplasm that it seems to be exuded from the body of the medium. I think that is, he did observe things like that, and I think that ultimately, he considered that if there are beings, if there are mediums that can do that, that can manifest those ectoplasmic forms, then there might be higher beings in the cosmos that originally manifested what we call species, you know, the various forms that organize, that organisms take. He, I think it was part of his ultimate conclusion about evolution that things like that might also be involved, which I think is why Darwin became very upset with him. Yeah. Well, I gather that Wallace didn't really try to make that connection explicitly to modify the theory of evolution to incorporate the observations he had made working with spiritualists. But you seem to be, in your own thinking, pointing in that direction. Yeah. Well, I think if we look carefully at Wallace's writings in the last part of, you know, my chapter about Wallace, you know, I look at how his parapsychological research influenced his thinking about evolution, especially the evolution of the human form. You know, he began to think there was something special about it that really couldn't be explained by the mechanisms that were involved in the production of other species. So, I think at least in that particular case, he was somewhat willing to modify the mechanisms of the theory. Mm-hmm. But I gather, if I push you on your notion of human devolution, the idea might well be something like that at one time, maybe billions of years ago, spiritual beings in a spiritual realm, highly evolved spiritual beings were capable of manifesting physical bodies that suited their needs. And that may be how the human, first modern humans, came into existence. Well, I ultimately, I do think something like that. When I speak of devolution, I use the word in a few different ways. But the primary way that I use it is that what we really are, in essence, is conscious personalities. And that conscious personal self is not reducible to chemistry or physics. It has its own independent existence. And I would say we all originally exist on a platform where we manifest a form of pure consciousness or spirit, if you want to put it in a religious terminology. But I prefer the term pure consciousness. I prefer that terminology. So, in that sense, none of us are from the world of matter. We're from some higher realm. And if we remained in that realm, there wouldn't be any necessity for gross physical forms. It's only when we come to the world of matter that we require a vehicle that will allow us to function in this alien element. You know, just, am I making any sense here? You're making perfect sense to me. And I guess our viewers will have to decide for themselves. But I can't say whether I agree or disagree with you, but I think I understand clearly what you're saying. Yeah, it's like, as humans, we're normally meant to live on the land. Mm-hmm. But if we want to exist under the water for more than a few seconds, we're going to need some kind of vehicle that will allow us to function in that alien element. We'll need a diving suit or a submarine. And then we have to ask, well, where do those diving suits or submarines come from? Well, I would say they come from engineers who understand that if a human being is going to exist under the water, they need some type of vehicle that will allow them to do that. So the engineers design and build those things. So, but I would say on the level of consciousness, there are beings that have the intelligence to manifest from their forms in a kind of biological process, but not the one that we're familiar with. It's more like what Wallace observed, mediums manifesting ectoplasmic forms that take on their own identities. So those forms are, I would say, are manifested by these higher beings in the cosmos and conscious selves that want to exist on the level of matter are placed in those forms, which then go on to reproduce themselves. Now, I know you point out in your book that Wallace himself didn't really explore the phenomenon of reincarnation, but subsequent researchers such as Ian Stevenson have accumulated massive documentation about cases where young children remember past lives, and very often there are biological concomitants to that, birthmarks, and for example, that seem to be reflecting, for example, the death wounds of a previous personality show up as a birthmark, and the present personality also suggesting this ability of pure consciousness to influence a biological vehicle. Yes, yeah, there are some very interesting cases that Ian Stevenson and his colleagues investigated where they have shown that a personality may have died by a gunshot wound, for example, and it's known where the entry and exit wounds are, and the person who manifests the personality, the reincarnated personality of that person, their body will have a birthmark in the appropriate place of the wound and the exit wound, you know, kind of indicating that the mental body that's accompanied that unconscious self from one form to the next has retained that impression, and then that subtle mental body will influence the gross physical body, configure it in such a way that it manifests those, it will manifest birthmarks reminiscent of those wounds suffered in a previous life. So, as you were saying, I would take that as evidence that conscious self, through its mental body, can influence the form of the gross physical body, and if that's true, conscious selves could also possibly manifest these gross physical forms on the first instance of their appearance on this level of reality. I should think that if Alfred Russell Wallace had lived long enough to be aware of that research, he would have found it very interesting. Well, Michael Cremo, once again, a fascinating discussion. I'm so glad that we were able to both explore the history of Alfred Russell Wallace and also your own thinking about the devolution of the human species. Thank you for being with me, and thank you for being with us.