Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses

Allan Angoff

Description

A biography of the famed psychic Eileen J. Garrett by her long-time colleague and friend. Garrett's status as one of the world's most famous mediums caused her to come in contact with the known and unknown to include those such as Aldous Huxley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, C.B. de Mille, T.S. Elliot to name a few. Skeptical of the psychic world, Angoff came to understand her psychic feats could not be ignored even if an affront to reason.

Sujets

• Spirit guides
• Philosophie et théologie
• Spirit guide
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Parapsychology Foundation Inc
• Date de parution: 03 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781931747370
• Langue: English

Extrait

Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses
by Allan Angoff

Helix Press New York
Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses
Copyright 2009 by Allan Angoff All rights reserved
This book, or any part thereof, must not be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.
Published by Helix Press An imprint of the Parapsychology Foundation, Inc. PO Box 1562 New York, New York, 10021, USA
TEL: [phone] / FAX: [phone]
Printed by BookMasters, Inc. Ashland, Ohio, USA
Cover art designed by Illuminations, Inc. Greenport, New York, USA
ISBN 10: 1-931747-26-1 ISBN 13: 978-1-931747-26-4
For Florence, Jay, and Naomi
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Preface
AS THE GRANDDAUGHTER of Eileen J. Garrett and Executive Director of Parapsychology Foundation the organization she founded, it gives me great pleasure both professionally and personally to bring Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses back into print. Interest in Garrett s life, the people she touched, her psychic abilities and her own work and the work of many that she came into contact within the many facets of her eclectic life s experiences remains high.
Many have attempted to describe her. . .few successfully captured her essence. It fell to Allan Angoff who knew her and worked with her in various capacities to successfully tell her story. Many dropped in and out of Garrett s continually evolving and oft times frenetic orbit with very few surviving for great lengths of time able to keep up with her. Allan Angoff managed for over twenty-five years to survive her mercurial moods and her insatiable curiosity which led her in so many diverse directions. Allan though, always maintaining a life and career outside of Garrett s influence, managed very pragmatically to add greatly to the work and goals of Parapsychology Foundation as its Chairman of Domestic and International Programs and of course his literary background was of invaluable help in many of Garrett s publishing ventures in and out of the psychic world in both Tomorrow Magazine, Creative Age Press and Garrett Publications as well as the Foundation s scholarly monograph and conference series.
Personally I literally grew up around him and owe him a debt as he patiently suffered my growing pains and very much helped to formulate my learning curve with office procedures, business affairs and secretarial and editorial work. Both my parents Robert and Eileen Coly, Parapsychology Foundation s current President and myself have countless fond memories of Allan during our varied meetings and conferences as we were all drawn by Eileen Garrett into the support of parapsychology s researchers the world over.
The academic world of parapsychology owes Allan Angoff a debt of gratitude for his efforts in supporting their research through the auspices of the Foundation and the public as well for his support and growth of the magnificent Eileen J. Garrett Research Library specifically addressing the world beyond the senses. Parapsychology Foundation owes gratitude to his family-wife Florence and children Jay and Naomi-who have graciously allowed us to bring back this biography within which he captured with affection the personality of a rather remarkable woman.
Lisette Coly New York City September 2008
Acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR IS grateful to Eileen Coly and the Estate of Eileen J. Garrett for permission to quote material from the published works and other writings of Eileen J. Garrett.
He thanks the following for sharing with him some of their recollections of Mrs. Garrett: Frances P. Bolton, Lester E. Buckland, Bob Brier, Eileen Coly, Robert R. Coly, Eric J. Dingwall, Muriel W. Hankey, Robert W. Laidlaw, Lawrence LeShan, William Martin, Ira Progoff, J. B. Rhine, Emilio Servadio, and Harold D. Vursell.
The librarians of the College of Psychic Studies and of the Society for Psychical Research, London, have been most helpful in permitting free access to their pertinent resources.
Two American librarians have been the author s constant and cooperative companions and guides through so many research thickets, and he must note here his very great debt to them: Florence Angoff, his wife; and Grazina Babusis of the Eileen J. Garrett Library, Parapsychology Foundation, New York.
Introduction
EILEEN GARRETT TALKED with the dead, healed the sick, predicted the future. She performed miracles for fifty years with undiminished and frightening accuracy. She made no claims to having supernatural powers, and said that she was not a miracle worker but merely had a sensitivity, very highly developed perhaps, which enabled her to see and do things impossible for most people. That was all. She also said that most people could, with training, become equally sensitive. There was no magic to it, and those who claimed magic for similar gifts in themselves were frauds or just too gullible about the whole matter.
She wasn t even so sure that her gifts-clairvoyance, telepathy, psychometry, trance mediumship-were good gifts. She often said to me, These could be dangerous when controlled by people without compassion. These gifts are dangerous unless they are used to help people.
At other times she told me, I don t even know if these are gifts. All our investigations have been inconclusive. I ve taken part in so many experiments and have worked with so many investigators. I really wonder if they have just been footling around and getting nowhere. All the scientists may have discovered nothing about mediumship and extrasensory perception. And maybe there was nothing to discover, absolutely nothing.
After thousands of seances and the extraordinary results which made her one of the most celebrated mediums of the century, she remained dubious to the end about the nature of her powers. The admiration and gratitude of her sitters left her unmoved. But she had a vague feeling that good scientists might find some answers. If the whole, strange, mystifying psychic gift could be snatched out of the darkness of seance rooms and put into the capable probing hands of science, she said, everybody would feel much better about the subject and the world of science and philosophy could be enriched.
That is why, in 1951, she established the Parapsychology Foundation. Up to that time there had been only the sparsest scientific investigation of psychic phenomena. Parapsychology was a field cluttered with researchers who were clearly biased, either looking for answers to personal problems, or committed spiritualists, survivalists, or reincarnationists. Her Foundation would encourage, with funds, with conferences, with its library and its publications, the most promising work of the most promising scientists studying the paranormal everywhere in the world.
She saw many scientists fail, she watched many wander off into cults, she became familiar with those who, enveloped by the psychic and occult boom of recent years, found popularity more stimulating than research and experiment and study. But she was not disillusioned. She laughed them off as weaklings or as rogues who had amused her. But it had been worth taking a chance on them.
Not only did she question her psychic powers, she was also quite irreverent about them. Too much parapsychology was a bore, she said, and sought relief in running a restaurant, a hostel, a book publishing firm, a literary magazine.
And yet Eileen Garrett s psychic feats always overwhelmed those who worked with her in any enterprise. To most people, she remained always the miracle worker, and among these were not only the secretaries and editors who worked for her in New York and London and St. Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, but also T. S. Eliot, who questioned her very closely when she talked with him in London years before.
When she died in September 1970 it was obvious that some record had to be made of this extraordinary life. Eileen used to tell me to write the story of her life after she was gone. I ll be around, she used to chuckle. I ll be back. I ll be popping in on you from time to time, and I ll help.
I worked with Eileen Garrett for twenty-five years, a skeptic like herself about psychic people. But I know her psychic feats cannot be ignored even if they are an affront to reason. I have tried to tell her story objectively. I have gone back to her earliest years, presenting her own words about her psychic experiences when she was five and a sinful child, and those that occurred when she was older and famous as an awesome seer.
My thanks for help on this book are due many people, but most of all to that astonishing Eileen Garrett who gave to so many lives a new and startling dimension.
A LLAN A NGOFF
CHAPTER ONE
THEY TOLD ME to watch my step with Eileen Garrett when, just out of the Army in 1945, I went to work for her. She owned the book publishing firm of Creative Age Press and the monthly magazine Tomorrow , and I was to be one of her editors. She was thought of as much more than just a rich Anglo-Irish migr who insisted on dabbling in New York publishing during the war and the postwar period when so many manufacturing restrictions made it tough for the oldest American publishers to survive. She was also known as an eccentric and temperamental woman who fired people ruthlessly, and all over New York, even in her earliest days as a publisher, there was already a good sprinkling of Garrett veterans who had never made it with her for more than a few months or a year at most. And that s the way it has to be, they said, for the woman is a psychic, a witch, a medium, and she functions very