Extended analysis

Introduction

That Joan Grant really believed that she had 'Far Memory' I do not doubt for a moment.
Furthermore there is evidence in the letter she and Charles Beatty wrote to Dennis Wheatley's stepson Jack Younger on 17th January 1943 exhibited in the Special Exhibition on this site, and elsewhere in her writings, that she tried to test the validity of what she retrieved as best she could. This she did by trying to alter what she remembered. If she could it was 'unreal'; if she couldn't it was 'real'.

That is not however quite the same as having an impartial look at the evidence, and comparing what she (or any other seer) recalled and what we know by conventional means.

The imbalance between the claims made by seers and their followers and the number of critical analyses by skilled persons, the reasons for this and some examples of poor journalism

It is important to form a judgement of how reliable the work of any 'seer' is, but it is not often done. This is for a variety of reasons:

Academics are above all interested in facts and prove-ables, and there is no appeal to them in publicly analysing the work of seers; particularly where a quick glance shows (as it does in many cases) that the results are mere fantasy
If they were to formally analyse what they and their colleagues know to be false, they would be using up time which they could use more productively
Their colleagues (and supervisors !) might think they were not using their time productively, and
They might well think that the believers would ignore what they said anyway.

One does however occasionally find an academic appearing in a 'documentary' on some such subject, but when they do, they often soften what they say and leave 'wriggle room' for argument because (a) they do not wish to be rude, and (b) because perhaps they take the view that some believers are in dire straits, and that hope is all they have left. In which case who are they to deny it.

This leaves the field open for those who - even if the original seer was sincere - follow it all up for with claims about how 'what the seer saw' stacks up against the evidence that is gathered from conventional means that are simply not rooted in reality.

To give an example, a journalist - I shall not name him here, but in the article he was named and apparently he was accredited with United Press International - writing an article about Joan in a magazine called 'FATE: True stories of the strange and unknown' in their July 1968 edition went as far as to say in his headline :

"Archaeologists and historians have been unable to undermine facts she gleans not from research but from memory"

And he continued :

"None of the material in these books of Joan Grant's has been successfully challenged by archaeologists or historians. And much of it has been new information at the time of its publication which only later was verified by further findings of the scholars in the field."

To the best of my knowledge this is and was pure innuendo and fabrication. None of the material was successfully challenged simply because no-one was challenging it, for the reasons stated above; and new information, even when the article was written, painted a picture exactly the opposite of that which this journalist suggested.

Even as I write the information flow is very one sided.

For example in Joan Grant's current Wikipedia entry one only reads:

"Winged Pharaoh was initially accepted as a novel. Grant was consciously aware of many details of Egyptian history, having accompanied her first husband on his Egyptian expeditions. Occultists embraced it as an autobiography of a previous existence. Historians claimed that the calendar used in the book had never existed and also that there was no evidence whatsoever for the existence of an "avenue of trees" referred to in the book. Supposedly, after World War II a text was found[citation needed] which, when translated, proved to be the calendar referred to by Grant in the 1937 book.[citation needed]"

The tree story is simply taken from Joan's account of events, and the order of events, in 'Time Out of Mind' (see pages 208-9). Not enough detail is given on the second, chronology, point to be sure precisely what is claimed, but if it is that an additional 'Sothic cycle' should be added to Ancient Egyptian chronology so that events took place much longer ago than archaeologists believed, we now have carbon dating, and Joan was wrong.

A framework for critically assessing a seer's claims

So, if we are doing the job properly, what criteria ought we to apply? They are perhaps a little more complicated than one might at first think, but I propose to use three.

Test 1 :: How does what the seer has written compare to what was known at that time ?; This is not the 'black and white' test that one might imagine. If the author gets everything wrong, then it is obviously problematic, unless the state of academic knowledge is so rudimentary that everything wrong may one-day be proved right. Normally an unlikely scenario. Little things that are wrong may or may not be significant according to context, because even seers interpret. Curiously though getting individual areas completely right when others are so-so can be a give-away that all is not well; it may indicate selective reading done in advance to give the writings verisimilitude - particularly if the book in question can be found and the passages were lifted out verbatim !
Test 2 :: Have major discoveries been made since the book was published ? And if there have been, did the seer forsee them ? If they are very major discoveries which colour one's whole understanding of the period and they are missed, this is, shall we say, highly problematic.; This is, as we shall see, in at least one instance, crucial in assessing Joan Grant's work.
Test 3 :: This is the converse of the previous test, insofar as it looks from book to real world, rather than from real world to book :; Are they are important and 'un-obvious' things 'predicted' by the book which are later factually corroborated by discoveries in the real world?; One must of course make allowance in assessing here for guesses, and for the possibility of 'inside information'; i.e. of the seer knowing a fact which has not yet been announced, and adding it to the book to give false verisimilitude.

Although not part of my formal tests, there are two secondary factors which I think can help with an assessment, particularly where claims of reincarnation are concerned:

A. The nature of the individuals whose lives the seer recalled

The first of these is to look at the kind of people a seer apparently was, or apparently met in previous lives. While it does not have any bearing in the accuracy of the 'recalls', which is the job of the tests' it could give some measure of whether the seer was subconsciously seeking attention or consciously seeking commercial success, because rebirth as a string of prominent figures would attract far more publicity than rebirth as a string of non-entities, even if those non-entities lived in ancient times.

B. The seer's external knowledge of the subject matter

There is nothing necessarily wrong in a seer having a knowledge of their subject by conventional means, but it can make an assessment more difficult.

If the seer gains the knowledge 'after they put their seer pen down', then that is not problematic. If they gain it before or during writing, it can make the assessment more complicated insofar as the knowledge may leak from their conscious mind to their sub-conscious mind to infuse their second sight with conventional facts.

Again one must interpret with care. If a seer showed was shown to have 'lifted' information from an obscure book, it would be pretty conclusive that they did not have second sight; but if they had read the 'factual' books and then saw things that contradicted them, that would make life far more interesting - and make their maintaining their own credibility possible equally difficult.

The easiest situation to critique would naturally be the seer who demonstrably knew nothing conventionally of what they were 'seeing', but that is a rarity, and it is always hard to 'prove a negative'.

Using these tests and secondary factors to assess Joan Grant

I will turn to the secondary factors first, because these can be dealt with at shorter length than the formal 'tests', and because these can help to interpret the results of the tests:

A. The nature of the individuals whose lives Joan recalled

In Joan's case, while she acknowledged that many of her 31 lives (if the 1960s magazine article is correct) were uninteresting in the extreme, of the six that she published one was as a Pharaoh, one was as a high ranking provincial official who help overthrow a Pharaoh, one was as an influential figures in a Red Indian tribe, and one was as someone who knew Ramesses II and Moses. Personally, when I read the latter I found my credulity was stretched, and it would appear Jean Overton Fuller felt the same. Possibly Dennis Wheatley too as in the final volume of his autobiography he described how Charles Beatty's obsession with traditional occult symbols and ceremonies caused, in DW's view, 'a decline in her (i.e. Joan's) direct communication with the Powers of Light.'.

For me however the revelation in 'Speaking from the Heart' that she had also been a close associate of Jesus of Nazareth, and possibly even Mary Magdalen herself, in a hitherto unpublished set of recalls, even apart from my tests, stretched my own credulity too far.

But even if my credulity was stretched too far, my tests are the main thing. It may be that my credulity should properly be stretched !

B. Joan's external knowledge of the subject matter

Here it important to point out that Joan paraded herself both as an expert and a non-expert on Egyptological matters. On the one hand she pointed out that she had only spent twenty five days on the ground in Egypt (Time Out Of Mind pages 201-2) but on the other hand during that time she lectured the archaeologists on how cylinder seals were worn and discussed other technical things with them, as well as drawing pots.

Furthermore, in her 'Author's Note' which prefaces 'Winged Pharaoh' she acknowledged that although they appeared in her book, traces of horses have not been found before the 18th Dynasty (that remains the case - C.B.), and in her 'Author's Note' which prefaces 'Eyes of Horus' she explains to readers that the tombs of Ra-ab's family, the Nomarchs of the Oryx (see later … there is an issue with the names here - C.B.) can still be seen at seen at Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt. She then goes on to discuss the issues of dating Ancient Egypt, and how the addition of an extra 'Sothic cycle' would affect the length of time between the events described in 'Winged Pharaoh' and the events described in the new book. Irrespective of whether she was right or wrong on the dating (see below- she was wrong) this was pretty heady stuff for a non-professional to be discussing in the preface to her book !

Finally in her sequel to 'Eyes of Horus' 'Lord of the Horizon', in her 'Author's Note' she discussed the location of the capital of-the-day, Ith-tawy, and stated that it was probably situated twenty miles north of Cairo - with the north in italics. This because she knew that the received wisdom of the Egyptologists of the day was that Ith-tawy was located south of Memphis (again, the Egyptologists of the day seem to be right - satellite imagery and coring tests seem to suggest a southerly location - C.B.).

I think these notes are important, and that they had a function somewhat akin to the function of DW's 'Author's Note' prefacing 'The Devil Rides Out'. DW's Author's Note was designed to persuade his public in the reality of magic ceremonies in the twentieth century lest they found his tale too fanciful. Similarly, Joan's Author's Notes, by pointing out small discrepancies (and abstruse discrepancies at that) between what she wrote and the archaeological record will have given her audience the impression that all the rest must be correct - which it wasn't !

Moving on to the formal 'tests', as noted in my shorter piece, I have primarily critiqued 'Winged Pharaoh', although I have also touched at the end on Joan's other Far Memory books about Egypt. I have restricted myself to these books because while I have a degree in Egyptology, I have no specialist knowledge of the other periods. This probably doesn't matter because most of the specific information that one would use to prove or disprove the thesis of Far Memory is contained in Winged Pharaoh.