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A sacred âsomethingâ: the spiritual odyssey of Sir Alister Hardy
A secret in the heart of Wales
Lampeter â or, to give the town its Welsh name, Llanbedr Pont Stefan â nestles in the hills in the middle of lush, green west Wales, north of the Forest of Brechfa, west of the Cambrian mountains, on the very edge of what is sometimes referred to as the âgreen desertâ. This small, Welsh-speaking market town seems to the casual visitor to be far away from civilization. Yet the popular coastal holiday resort of Aberaeron is only 12 miles away, and less than an hourâs drive leads to the impressive National Library of Wales.
People have lived around Lampeter for thousands of years, the earliest evidence being the prehistoric stone circle at Altgoch and a scattering of Bronze Age and Roman remains. There is something enchanting, almost mystical about the town and its surroundings. There are reports of strangely coloured lights in the surrounding hills, particularly around Tregaron bog. Some locals acknowledge this while others remain tight-lipped, choosing perhaps to keep the areaâs secrets close.
Lampeter escaped the 1904-5 Welsh Religious Revival but is nevertheless crammed with chapels and churches. By far the largest institution in the town, however, is its university. Founded as St Davidâs College in 1822 and known today as the University of Wales, Lampeter, it is the oldest university institution in England and Wales apart from Oxford and Cambridge. Its original building, next to the remains of an old motte and bailey castle, was modelled on the older Oxford colleges, with an enclosed, grassed quadrangle embraced by the founding institution of St Davidâs. Today the University of Wales, Lampeter is the smallest university in Britain, but its size belies its excellent academic reputation. Unsurprisingly, given the rich religious and spiritual heritage of the surrounding area, subjects such as philosophy and theology have also gained a growing and acknowledged academic respect in recent years.
Perhaps this is why in the summer of 2000 it became the home of the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC). Originally housed at Manchester College, Oxford, by the time it arrived in Lampeter the centre held almost 6,000 accounts of spiritual, religious and paranormal experiences, many unexamined and most entirely unpublished. Amongst these 6,000 accounts are a large number of accounts of unusual light, and these are the subject-matter and central focus of this book. As will become clear as this chapter unfolds, these cannot be properly explored or understood without first pausing to consider the history of the RERC and its founder, Sir Alister Hardy.
A sacred âsomethingâ
Who was Hardy? In many ways he was a man ahead of his time: a charismatic, unusual, original and fascinating character whom history seems to have almost entirely overlooked. Yet his achievements were many and varied. Almost a hundred years ago, for example, when many people were arguing that scientific discoveries spelled the end of anything spiritual or âsupernaturalâ, Hardy disagreed. Instead â and he was to argue this throughout his life â he sought a reconciliation between the worlds of science and spirit. Far from disproving a spiritual âsomethingâ to life, he argued, evolution actually required it, for it has enabled us to adapt and survive in ways that would have been impossible without it. It was religion itself, he argued, that often stopped people from appreciating the spiritual dimension to life. It is tempting see Hardy as an early twenty-first-century thinker and writer rather than what he was: a man who was born in the nineteenth century and whose feet were planted firmly in the twentieth.
Born in 1896, from a very early age Hardy was clearly aware of a spiritual âpresenceâ in his life, but he gives repeated indications in his writings that this was not something he saw as the exclusive preserve of any one religion, and not even as something that needed to be looked for in religion at all. His own unpublished autobiography records how he loved to walk in the countryside as a boy, wandering along river banks near his Northamptonshire home âat times almost with a feeling of ecstasyâ. So overwhelming at times were his feelings of gratitude for the beauties of nature that
Hardyâs use of the word âGodâ is interesting here, for he would often attempt to avoid it in his writings because of the sometimes misleading impressions that the word âGodâ carried. Indeed, âGodâ was to remain for Hardy much more a mystical or supernatural presence in life accessible to all rather than Something or Somebody wrapped up in centuries of creed, dogma and tradition. In 1914, having been called up to fight in the First World War, he made a special vow âto what I called Godâ that, if he survived, he would devote his life to the task of reconciling the worlds of biology and the spirit. By 1917, he was writing:
By 1925 â and by the time he had begun to think seriously about his project to reconcile the worlds of science and spirit â he could write: âThere is no fear now of my burying myself in any church â that idea has gone, bust, swept away for ever.â Indeed, his writings are full of little âparablesâ and aphorisms that attest to his complete disillusionment with âconventionalâ religion. Around the same time as he could write of his âswept-awayâ notions of being âburied in churchâ, for example, he was also planning and partly writing a book about a group of men moving from church to church, seeking God, and coming away disgusted each time. In between visits, they go out into the woods and here at last find the very presence they were seeking in the churches â feelings that Hardy himself had powerfully felt when walking the Northamptonshire river banks and ones that he summed up for the BBC in an interview that he gave well into his seventies:
If Hardyâs religious and spiritual âyearningsâ were somewhat unorthodox and unconventional, his scientific concerns were more in keeping with the times. Yet even here he showed himself on numerous occasions to be at odds with the âestablishmentâ: especially regarding his interest in subjects such as telepathy and prayer. In 1914, as a young man of eighteen, he went up to Exeter College, Oxford to take a diploma in forestry. However, the outbreak of war was to disrupt his studies. Having made his âvowâ to God, he was posted to the First Northern Cyclist Battalion whose task was to ensure the Lincolnshire coast was defended against enemy attack. Whilst doing his wartime duties, Hardy became increasingly interested in the still fledgeling field of the paranormal.
Exploring strange seas
During 1916 and 1917 Hardy attended sĂ©ances. In addition, as part of his wartime service, Hardy was posted to a Camouflage School in London and it was whilst he was here that he had an unusual experience that was to fuel a lifelong interest in the possibility of telepathy. During his London posting he became friendly with a medium, a Mrs Wedgewood, widow of Arthur Wedgewood, a leading member of the London Spiritualist movement. Meanwhile, his task at the Camouflage School was to research and develop what came to be known as the âdazzle effectâ, an attempt to confuse the enemy regarding the size and distance of English ships by painting them with strange designs and colours. Recalling a day when he had been experimenting with various âdazzle effectâ designs before meeting Mrs Wedgewood for dinner, Hardy was to recall later:
After the war, Hardy returned to Oxford to take up a place on an honours course in zoology. At the same time he saw and applied for a scholarship in Naples to study marine creatures. Needing some rare worms for his application that had not been seen in Britain for almost forty years, he went to Brightlingsea in Essex, the last place the worms had been spotted. Finding some of the specimens he needed very late in the day, he realized that he could not get back to Oxford and so stayed in the townâs Anchor Hotel. That night, as his biographer John Keeble describes it, Hardy was awoken by revellers:
This was plankton, and Hardyâs fascination with plankton was to continue throughout his life. In the years following the war it was even seriously suggested that plankton â drifting microscopic plants and animals that provide food for much larger marine life â could be harvested to help combat food shortages. In 1957 Hardy would receive a knighthood at Buckingham Palace for services to the fishing industry, including research into the mysterious, luminous field of seaborne food that had so astonished him that night at Brightlingsea.
Already by 1919, with Hardy not yet twenty-five years old, we see the interests that were to dominate his life clearly in place. On the one hand we see the marine biologist, at home in the world of science and seeking to carve out a career there. On the other we see the mystic, open to the presence of the spiritual but alienated from the religious orthodoxies of his day. And somewhere between the two we see the maverick: not afraid to tackle controversial subjects such as telepathy, nor afraid of attempting to build a bridge between the seemingly unbridgeable worlds of science and the spirit. Perhaps in seeking to build such a bridge he was seeking some reconciliation within himself. Or perhaps he was early on seeking to resolve some of the contradictions of the age in which he lived: contradictions that still in many ways remain within our own.
Voyages of discovery
In the immediate post-war years, however, it was the scientist in Hardy that had the upper hand. There were only three students in his zoology class at Oxford and one of those was Sylvia Garstang who would later become his wife. His future father-in-law, Walter Garstang, himself a renowned zoologist, early on warned the young Alister Hardy that if he really wanted to pursue his more unconventional interests he should first set about making his name in more conventional fields â and this he duly did. He won the scholarship to Naples, returned to embark on research in the North Sea and quickly established himself in the field of marine biology. He worked in the Fisheries Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and was appointed chief zoologist on Captain Scottâs old ship Discovery, which set sail for the Antarctic in 1925. Hardy was to be away at sea until 1928, marrying Sylvia Garstang the following year.
Before leaving, however, Hardy did something that showed that he had not forgotten the vow he had made in 1914. Giving his address as RRS Discovery, c/o Foreign Fleet Division, London, he lodged a request with a press-cutting agency to collect and save for his return any newspaper cuttings concerning subjects âdealing with or referring even remotely to: Religion, God, Faith, Prayer, Relations or antagonism of Religion and Science [and] Anything in fact of a religious or spiritual natureâ. Underneath this, Hardy added a list of things he did not want to receive, which included âEcclesiastical or church notices or news, reports of services or sermons (unless arousing public interest or controversy), obituary or other notes on the lives of ministers of any denomination, or dealing with psychic research, spiritualism and kindred subjects (unless in a religious connection)â.
Much later in his life, Hardy would expand on this request, writing that in September 1925, three months before the Discovery expedition finally got under way after lengthy delays, âMy attention had been arrested by a description of a religious experience in the daily press. How often, I wondered, did such reports occur and pass unnoticed?â Clearly Hardy intended to find out, and by lodging the request with the agency he started in motion a series of varied appeals for religious experiences that would eventually yield almost 6,000 accounts. The request not to receive anything âdealing with psychic research, spiritualism and kindred subjectsâ is puzzling, considering how much of his later life would be devoted to the exploration of phenomena such as telepathy. From comments made in later years, however, it is clear that Hardy was attempting to avoid the issue of human survival after death, deeming it to be something that fell outside the field of his already wide inquiry. In the event, he was to receive many accounts bearing directly on this subject, including reports of apparitions and near-death experiences together with a diverse range of other âparanormalâ events. It is to his credit that he replied to and filed away everything he received, even if it was clear that it was not necessarily what he was looking for. Indeed, he would later write that âthe mine of our material awaits a host of researchersâ, and to this day many of the accounts that Hardy collected throughout his life remain largely unexamined and unpublished, including most of those that make up this study.
What Hardy was looking for at this time would become clearer as the years passed, when his method of describing the sorts of religious experiences he was seeking became more refined. As would become evident, he was in a key sense looking for reports from persons who had a continuous, ongoing sense of the presence of Something or Someone else in their lives: rather like his own Northamptonshire experiences, but continuously. In the event, he received much more than this, drawing the observation of one commentator that ultimately he became âlike a fisherman casting his net upon the water, but instead of coming up with a few well-defined fish, [finding] he had caught a great array of glittering creatures that did not seem to fit his preconceived groupingâ (Maxwell and Tschudin 1990: 6).
None of this was evident in 1925, however. In fact, he found the first batch of press cuttings that were sent to him to be wholly unsatisfactory for the purposes of his research. Next, he tried appealing for experiences in thirty religious journals, but received barely 200 replies that were once again unusable. It seemed that people had difficulty understanding what sort of thing he was after. In addition, as he was later to...