As the “media blitz” involving radio and other appearances in support of my new book, Magic, Mysticism and the Molecule continues, I thought I would make available here for readers of the Gralien Report an excerpt from the book’s second chapter.

The following snippet from my book details my introduction to Dr. Raymond Moody, whose unique variety of grief counseling involves the use of an ancient magical tool called the “psychomanteum.” My own experiences with this ancient practice, as well as those close to me at the time, began to get increasingly strange and unsettling as we proceeded with using it to unravel bizarre mysteries of the mind. You’ll get an idea of what I’m referring to in the excerpt below. Enjoy!

LABYRINTHS OF THE MIND: THE ANCIENT GREEK “ORACLE OF THE DEAD” REVISITED

Psychics and others who travel in other nonphysical realms like the astral world report that polarities are switched. Left becomes right. Future becomes past. Mirrors represent these shifts.Labyrinths help the individual make them.

-Sig Lonegren, Labyrinths: Ancient Myths and Modern Uses

In February of 2008, I had the pleasure of spending a snowy evening with Dr. Raymond Moody M.D. at a small conference in Ridgecrest, North Carolina. As I hinted earlier, Moody is a leading authority on the near death experience, a term he is credited with coining in the late 1970s, as well as being one of the world’s most-respected grief counselors. His preferred therapeutic methods involve a most interesting meditative technique, first developed by the ancient Greeks and later adopted and refined by Moody to be “a therapeutic tool to heal grief and bring insight.” Here an intimate crowd of fewer than thirty attendees had gathered together with hope of learning his technique, huddled around fancy tables in a small dining area in the lower portion of the rustic Madison Inn. As I stood in the doorway to the room that held our seminar, called “the library” by the owners due to its scholarly décor, a short man with an accent stepped through and politely greeted me. To my surprise, he introduced himself as Ray Buckland, a name I knew very well from reading his books detailing the modern practice of magical arts for healing and good fortune. Standing here with Buckland, our attention shifted to the various old rare books and other trinkets that lined the walls; the library seemed quite appropriate for a man of Moody’s intellect and stature, and would prove to be a stimulating environment for the knowledge he would pass along to us throughout the course of the weekend.

Raymond Moody sat across the room at a table where several people had gathered, shaking hands and chatting with those eager to discuss their own experiences with him. To his right sat Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of The Encyclopedia and Alchemy, as well as several volumes on Witchcraft (some of which I would use as resources for this book). Before the two of them stood Joshua P. Warren, my friend and associate of several years, who glanced around and, with a happy, excited gesture, motioned for Buckland and I to come over for an introduction.

Moody was sincere and approachable, and received the two latest arrivals warmly. We shook hands, and his pronounced grip seemed to fit snugly along with his smooth southern dialect.

“Micah, it’s great to meet you, and I’ve heard so many wonderful things from Joshua,” he said as we greeted each another.

“Well Dr. Moody, don’t believe everything you’ve heard,” I joked with him. The character that radiated through his words made it easy to see why people loved him so much; he was perhaps one of the sincerest people I’ve ever met. After a little more casual conversation, things began to congeal and formalize somewhat. Just before dinner, waitresses appeared carting glasses of wine and expensive, ice-cold Belgian beers into the room on decorated metal carts. As drinks were poured, Moody began to lapse into discussion with the group, explaining how some of his classical leanings and early education led to the discovery of his “secret weapon”—the psychomanteum—and how he uses this in his own unique brand of grief counseling.

Classical Musings: A Life in the Practice

As a young man studying philosophy at the University of Virginia, Moody had been fascinated with the works of the Classical Greek philosophers, and felt right at home reading the musings of Socrates, Plato and others. It was during his time in Virginia that he first learned of people’s encounters with what Moody would later call “near-death experiences.” He had learned about a psychiatry professor there at the University named George Ritchie who, several years earlier during a life-threatening experience had been pronounced clinically dead. Ritchie was revived in nothing short of a miraculous medical recovery, and to Moody’s great interest, had described having “an astonishing experience” while lingering between death and the afterlife.

“I had heard about experiences of this sort, and was interested in it from the perspective of consciousness,” Moody said. Later, once he had become a philosophy teacher himself, one of Moody’s own students approach him with a similar story, who also described having been pronounced dead after a car accident and having a remarkable experience. Moody was stunned to learn that his student had described an experience nearly identical in every way to that of Professor George Ritchie.

Over the years, instances like this began to change Moody’s feelings about the nature of life after death. Claiming such phrases deal only with temporal or spatial relationships, he expresses, “what people who have near-death experiences tell me is that what they experienced wasn’t even temporal or spatial in the sense that you and I appreciate it. So, what I’m interested in is altered states of consciousness and I think that the old questions of whether there is a life after death or the beyond… have to be revised.”

It was also through his study of Greek philosophy that Moody first discovered references to the psychomanteum, a bizarre mirrored room designed as a conduit for communications with the spirit realm. Since the 1960s, Moody had been brainstorming on ways near-death experiences could be reproduced or “triggered” in a clinical setting. This would allow researchers the benefit of studying these experiences in real-time as they occurred, without having “to fall back on anecdotes told after the fact.” Moody, always the optimist, had also hoped to be able to harness some of the positive effects described by those who had these experiences. One evening around 1990, he had been pondering how one might separate the common elements reported during near-death experiences, when he came to a realization: if apparitions of the deceased are as common as they appear in the demographic studies he had conducted, then humans must be highly predisposed to them. “Why not rearrange circumstances in such a way as to heighten the likelihood that (encounters with apparitions) would occur under a given circumstance so that we could be there to monitor the person with electroencephalograms, and get a fresh account before the mind might have had time subconsciously to distort or elaborate it?” It was then that Moody says he recalled a moment in 1962 at the University of Virginia, during a session in his liberal arts seminar class. Moody remembered how Herodotus, the first historian, told a story about a place where the ancient Greeks would go to visit departed relatives. Whatever the circumstances were that allowed it, Herodotus described that people who went to this place somehow had first-hand experiences with the spirit realm.

Moody found this to be in stark contrast to the indirect nature of contact through mediumship. Legends involving similar circumstances, namely the Oracle at Delphi, described the Pythia—a sort of medium acting as a seer and interpreter—being lowered into a pit to converse with spirits rather than those individuals who actually sought to make contact. Emerging from the pit, which some anthropologists have suggested contained hallucinatory gases, she would then bring “messages” back to those meant to receive them.

Moody was fascinated by Herodotus’ descriptions of direct spirit communications, and even found references to similar circumstances described in the Odyssey. To his excitement, Moody discovered that the hero Odysseus actually travels to the same location described by Herodotus; the Oracle of the Dead, or the Nekyomanteion at Thesprotia in a region of Greece to the Northwestern called Epirus. What in the name of God were they doing there, Moody had boldly asked, while other scholars had long assumed that the writings of Herodotus and Homer, as well as similar references to the Oracle of the Dead made by the Greek geographer Strabo, were all based on mere legends.

However, further back in 1958 at least one other scholar had found people’s dismissal of esoteric elements found in Classical Greek documents to be in bad taste. Greek archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris had decided he would literally try and find the location described by both Homer and Herodotus. If he succeeded, he hoped to see once and for all if there was a remnant of Homer’s “Halls of Hades and Dread Persephone”, where Odysseus went to consult the prophet Tiresias about how to find his way home to Ithaca. Incidentally, in Homer’s Odyssey, the location is described as being “near the city of the Cimmerian people wrapped in mist and cloud.” Moody argues that scholars have misread this for generations, and that Herodotus had meant Cheimerians, a group of people who lived near Thesprotia, exactly the location of Herodotus’ Nekyomanteion. Upon going to the area and following clues in the landscape included by Homer in the Odyssey, Dakaris discovered a remarkable complex on the hill of St. John the Baptist, overlooking the Acheron River. Beneath this building, Dakaris also discovered an enormous subterranean chamber, complete with a vast corridor and what he believed were dormitory rooms where people would stay while waiting their turn to visit whom, without a doubt, must have been the Oracle of the Dead. Dakaris found that one end of the long corridor emptied into a complex maze, which ultimately lead to a fifty-foot long “apparition hallway”. Here rested an enormous bronze cauldron surrounded by a banister, which Dakaris believed was evidence that people who came to see the apparitions had been staring in the direction of the cauldron.

Though Dakaris had discovered the real-life counterpart to an enduring Greek legend, his interpretation of the role the cauldron played was rather simplistic, guessing the Oracle would merely hide within, springing forth and acting out the role of deceased entities before people who visited. Relying on knowledge of ancient Greek scrolls discovered in distant locales like Egypt that divulged magical practices, Moody’s interpretations were different. He believed the cauldron had instead been filled with liquid, providing a reflective surface and used in a fashion similar to mirror gazing. “I decided that this must have been what they were doing at Epirus, the Oracle of the Dead on the Acheron. I set up a situation in my own research facility; I built a chamber, not using a cauldron but a mirror surrounded by a black velvet curtain and arranged in such a way so that a person sitting in the booth does not see their own reflection, but a clear optical depth.” Then, Moody began allowing people to enter the room and gaze into the mirror, dimly lit with indirect lighting, to see if indeed any strange experiences might occur. What he found surprised him more than he could have imagined.

“I thought it was going to be at least ten percent,” he guessed, hoping at least some of his participants might report odd experiences. “It ended up being closer to fifty!” Even more astonishing, a portion of the test subjects that were having experiences described full-body apparitions appearing in the mirror, and slowly emerging from it to interact with them three-dimensionally. According to Moody, thirty percent of the subjects even described hearing the audible voices of deceased loved ones who appeared before them, some even describing elaborate conversations they had with the apparitions. “And very nicely,” Moody adds, “the subjects who have been going through this have reported that it helped them with the grief. It helped them tidy up the unfinished business.” Moody feels that his experiments using the mirror to re-create the psychomanteum environment coincides with reports dating as far back as over a century ago, where apparitional forms have commonly been witnessed first in mirrors or reflective surfaces. “The accounts that subjects give in the psychomanteum,” Moody says, “are identical to the accounts we hear from people who have (witnessed) spontaneous apparitions. So, I think we’ve done it!”

“I’m Looking at the Man in the Mirror”

Surprisingly, this notion that reflective surfaces might be conducive to apparitional appearances isn’t quite as esoteric as it may seem. As far back as 1863, English novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins wrote of his experiences with mirror gazing, inspired by John Dee’s experiments, that sound remarkably similar to what Moody describes in a typical psychomanteum session:

I retire to my private sitting-room, take up my black mirror, mention what I want—and behold! On the surface of the cannel coal the image of my former travels passes before me, in a succession of dream-scenes. I revive my past experiences, and I make my present choice out of them, by the evidence of my own eyes; and, I may add, by that of my own ears also—for the figures in my magic landscape move and speak!

Similarly, the late “King of Pop” Michael Jackson described a room in his home at Neverland Ranch that had walls covered with mirrors. Within this room, Jackson said he had on many occasions spoken with the ghost of famous flamboyant pianist Liberace, who died in 1987. “I have my own secret room, with a moving wall and mirrors,” Jackson once said. “That’s where I talk to Lee. His is the voice I hear in there. I feel his presence so very close to me. (Liberace) is like my guardian angel. He’s even given me permission to record his theme song ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’.” In the field of psychic phenomenon and purported hauntings, it is commonly accepted that mirrors bear some kind of energy that is conducive to the appearances of ghosts. Various methods of “spirit photography” involve aiming the lens of a camera into a mirror to capture its field of vision, which some believe will reveal the presence of ghosts in a location alleged to be haunted.

During our retreat in Ridgecrest, many participants described strange things that occurred while staring into Moody’s mirror. Ray Buckland mentioned feeling a dark, disturbing presence in the room with him at one point. Another time, Buckland also described sensing a presence that reminded him of his father. Mike Nesbitt, a Civil War historian with a penchant for ghost hunting, carried a digital camera with him, as well as an audio recorder in case an apparition decided to speak. Though nothing strange happened while in the psychomanteum itself, upon reviewing the audio Nesbitt was startled to find a strange, dark rumbling present on the recording, which at times sounded almost like a low growl. Still others would describe shadowy silhouettes and cloudy “forms” that would drift in-and-out of their field of view while staring into the mirror.

Unfortunately, the snowy clouds of February were the only similar apparitions I managed to witness; this, along with several scheduling conflicts, prevented me from being able to stay the entire weekend with Moody and the others. Still, I was glad to hear that during the seminar many fascinating accounts were shared and discussed, and several of those attending went home with certification to practice legitimate “psychomanteum grief counseling” on their own. One of these individuals was Joshua Warren, and several days later at his home in Asheville, he described for me with great excitement the process outlined by Moody that lead to these profound interactions with the spirit realm.

“Moody says that you need to combine sessions where you speak with the person who wants to make contact,” Josh told me, “along with sessions within the psychomanteum itself. Each successive visit into the psychomanteum gets a little longer… a little longer.” Josh’s voice began to fade to a whisper as he said this. “Finally, after several discussions and subsequent visits to the psychomanteum, you leave them in there for two, maybe even three hours. The idea is to not tell them how long they’re staying, but let them know that you’re just going right down the hall, and that they should take all the time they need. That’s when they really start to see shit.”

Josh began to backtrack, and discussed something of particular interest to me; the precise moment when the councilor would know the grieving person is ready to enter the psychomanteum. “It happens very instantly. You begin the first session by asking a series of questions like, ‘who do you want to contact? Tell me your fondest memory of them. What is your least pleasant memory of this person? Did this person ever make you feel uncomfortable? What, if you could speak to the deceased person one last time, would you ask them?’ After a while, there is an exact instant, and you’ll know it when you see it, that the energy just shifts.” Josh sort of made a gesture with his arms and upper body as he described this, dropping his hands and allowing his shoulders to droop as though he were tired or exasperated. “This is the moment where, sometimes along with a brief pause, they will tell you, or maybe only express to you without words that ‘this is it, that’s all’. It’s as though there’s nothing more to say, and they are completely overcome with emotion, or have maybe reached some sort of mental or emotional barrier. At that moment, they are ready to enter the psychomanteum.”

Josh, ever since leaving the seminar, had planned to convert his guest bedroom into a fully functional psychomanteum, complete with a few additions that he felt would make it more conducive to activity. Along with a black light he placed behind the comfortable armchair that faced the mirror he purchased for his setup, he also included a small radio that he kept tuned to the white noise between stations. The mild hiss it provided would create a wall of ambient sound, blanketing one’s ears from noise coming from outside the psychomanteum. I also found that Josh would sometimes introduce other subtle variables—often of a more sinister nature—which I would learn about much later on.

Finders Keepers

There was one final twist to this story, and a remarkable one, to say the least. As Dr. Moody and his wife had been leaving Ridgecrest in February, they asked Josh for a favor: The Moodys had planned to leave early on Sunday morning, though many of those attending the seminar had planned to stay through lunch time, hoping to be able to experiment within the psychomanteum a little longer. Since the Moodys had brought the good doctor’s personal mirror from their home in Georgia, the same that hundreds of individuals had used to access the spirit realm over the last several decades, Josh began to inquire about using a different mirror. To his surprise, Dr. Moody’s wife told him, “Don’t worry about it. Just keep that one for now and ship it back to us.” On that note, Moody and his wife departed, and several of the attendees continued to experiment. Once things finally drew to a close Josh gathered the mirror and, after being wrapped carefully in cloth and bubble wrap, it was placed in the trunk of his car.

That’s when the strangeness began to occur.

Ridgecrest sits on the lower slopes of Old Fort Mountain, which lay on the outermost edges of the small town of Black Mountain, where Josh and his wife Lauren stopped to have brunch before heading back into Asheville. As they locked their car and headed into the restaurant, Josh and Lauren both heard a distinct knocking sound coming from their car.

“I think Lauren actually noticed it first,” Josh recalled. “We began walking back in the direction of my car, and as we got closer to where we were parked, it sounded like the knocking was coming from inside the trunk of my car.” Josh glanced at Lauren, and bracing himself, unlocked the vehicle and threw open the trunk, thinking some small animal had been trapped inside at some point during their weekend in the remote wilds of Ridgecrest. Inside, there were no signs of the knocking, nor anything which might have caused the noise; only Dr Moody’s mirror, still wrapped in cloth as Josh had left it.

“When we got back to Asheville, I was dreading having to go to the hassle of sending the mirror back in the mail,” Josh admitted. “That’s when it occurred to me that maybe he’d allow me to take it off his hands.” After a brief email exchange and a bit of haggling, Josh convinced Dr Moody’s wife to sell him the mirror. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at Josh’s house for my own first experience in the psychomanteum, and there on the wall hung Raymond Moody’s mirror personal mirror—the very same used by the likes of Diane Sawyer and other famous guests to Moody’s “Theater of the Mind.” Josh had decided upon obtaining the mirror that it was time to retire it, and instead of acting as a portal that would take my mind into the bowels of another dimension later that evening, it seemed destined to remain on the wall in his living room as a centerpiece. It remains there to this day, resting peacefully as though having found its way to him. Perhaps this was for the better anyway; based on what he had told me already, the mirror seemed to have a good bit of “juju” in it, to borrow the term I had heard Moody’s wife use in this regard.

My initial experiences with the psychomanteum were uneventful at best, though I remember feeling an urge to “hold back” during my early sessions. I had envisioned entering the psychomanteum and placing myself before a formidable “gateway” of sorts; perhaps not just a portal to alien worlds and alternate dimensions, but maybe to even more remote places; if nothing else, perhaps the horrors hidden deepest among my own darkest thoughts. Spiritual dimensions where only the extremities of good and evil existed as embodied specters, things I didn’t particularly care to have leaping out of a mirror into the room with me. I figured that, whether these were “specters of the mind” as I liked to call them, or something else; if my own mind was the limit, I could expect just about anything.

As I sat down in the darkened room for the first time, my eyes just beginning to adjust to the light (or lack thereof), Josh remained with me for several minutes and described the setting, what I might expect to see, and finally, how to get “there”. During those few minutes, I was far more relaxed, having Josh only a few feet away, and found myself instantly able to perceive strange visual distortions. As he spoke, and as my eyes became slowly capable of distinguishing shadows and other features in the room around me, I would notice that gazing into the mirror instantly created a strange, “negative” sort of perception of the room; not in the sense of a negative energy, but literally an exchange between light and dark attributes. Watching the mirror intently, the lightened walls, illuminated only by the black light behind me, began to darken. The strange effect of an apparitional glow began to manifest on the surface of the mirror, as though it insisted on being the only visible presence in the room. By this time, Josh was announcing that he would be back soon, and that I would only remain alone in the psychomanteum for ten minutes, after which he would come retrieve me. I closed my eyes, so that the light from the hallway wouldn’t compromise my vision after getting accustomed to the dark, and once I heard the door close, I opened my eyes and kept them fixed on the mirror.

Again, I began to see this negative-space effect take place, something I would later hear another describe as the point where “the mirror exits.” This would come and go, and I found it frustrating that blinking seemed to cause the effect to regress somewhat. Beyond the coming and going of the light and dark areas surrounding the mirror in this way, what I’ve described thus far comprises all I saw during my first couple of sessions. I was aware that all this was nothing more than a bizarre optical illusion, but supposed that perhaps the strange sensations that occurred from stimulating one’s vision in this way could possibly induce an altered state of consciousness. Or, could it be that the often intense, emotional questioning that Moody prescribed prior to entering served as a sort of preparation for the experience in the psychomanteum itself? Did the key to making these “apparitions” appear actually lay in the series of questions Moody had told us the counselor was to ask the grieving prior to the experience?

Later, I found that this might not be the case either. Having been somewhat disappointed after my third visit inside the psychomanteum (during which I actually fell asleep for a short period), I decided I would wait and see what experiences others were having. Perhaps, I had reckoned, I was in the “other fifty-percent” of Moody’s demographic, comprised of those who didn’t perceive any apparitions, visions, or voices. Only a few weeks later, an opportunity soon presented itself to gather an outside perspective, during a visit Josh had with a couple of friends from out of town. The two gentlemen brought with them a young lady nicknamed “Tigger”, who conveniently had never heard of a psychomanteum. Rising to the occasion, Josh suggested that Tigger enter for a short session, lasting maybe thirty minutes, which she agreed to do, giving her no background information as to what might occur within. Surprisingly, after her session she emerged weeping, claiming that her deceased grandmother had emerged from the mirror and spoke to her! Much of the remainder of the visit was spent consoling the young lady, as well as explaining to her the nature of what she had experienced.

Around this same time, during a telephone discussion with my friend Vance Pollock, he revealed to me that Josh had also scheduled a session for him on the evening of Wednesday, July 2, 2008. I was particularly interested in hearing what kind of an experience he would have after learning of Tigger’s “encounter”, as Vance remains one of the most intelligent, discerning, and reasoning people I know.

Josh and I were introduced to him at an investigation we did at a restaurant in the area that, during the 1930s, had been one of the publishing headquarters of none other than William Dudley Pelley. A Nazi sympathizer and World War II political activist, it was Pelley who wrote about the striking manifestations produced by spirit medium Bertie Lilly Candler on a number of occasions (as described in Chapter one). Pelley had lived at various locations in and around the Asheville area prior to the war, and had published a variety of strange propaganda and occult material, including a rare book titled Why I Believe the Dead Are Alive. Also of particular interest was a pamphlet Pelley wrote called Seven Minutes in Eternity, detailing an out-of-body experience he claimed to have had around 1928.

For several years, Vance had been contacting Josh, urging him to “investigate” many of these areas Pelley had been associated with in his lifetime, since his fascination with the spirit world might have some bearing on hauntings associated with the locations in the present day. Once we finally met and discussed such prospects with him in person, Vance became an instant friend and regular associate of ours.

“Yeah, if you’re not doing anything that evening, you should definitely come out with us. I’ll be bringing Lee along as well.” This also inspired me, since Lee Brooks, a high school friend of Vance’s from Florida who had also relocated to Asheville, shared our bizarre interests in mysticism and esoteric mysteries.

“Count me in,” I told him. “I’ll be there with bells on, scribbling notes about all this.” Though I expected Vance would probably have an experience not unlike those I’d already had myself, I secretly hoped something extraordinary would take place the following Wednesday. Indeed, I would later notice many similarities between our experiences; but to my surprise, what actually transpired for him ended up being far stranger. In fact, I doubt I could never have prepared myself for just how dark things would end up getting.

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