SB: What prompted you to begin working on the research that has culminated in your most recent book, Reunions?
RM: Well, from the very beginning of my work with the Near Death Experiences, I realized that one of the things that is the biggest difficulty with studying this phenomenon of the Near Death Experience systematically is that you can't reproduce it under controlled circumstances of observation.
And so that was a major difficulty for a long time and was one of the reasons why I kept thinking this Near Death thing is very fun and very interesting to research and perhaps we can learn something about psychology from it and so on, but it's going to reach a point where you just can't do anything else with it.
And then as it evolved, a friend of mine pointed out to me back it's entirely possible to look at it not as a global experience, but in terms of its elements and components, where each one may have its separate kind of cause. Like the going through the tunnel, being out of the body, seeing the light, and so on and you can divide it that way.
Well, then it occurred to me that you might be able to study the Near Death Experience by studying its components, each separately and maybe you could reproduce one or more of those. But, also I was stuck on that, because how do you do that? So, over the last few years I gradually became aware of all those studies there's a great deal of evidence of a demographic nature that a high percentage of the bereaved will see apparitions of the deceased. So, with all of this in my mind, I was sitting downstairs one night about three years ago, and I had been working at that point for about four years on mirror visions and I had found that a high percentage of the normal population can be shown how to see extraordinary visionary phenomena in a mirror or other optical clear depth. Like three dimensional, moving, holographic figures. And so as I was sitting down one night, just sort of mulling all this over and all of these things just came into my mind at once.
Herodotus is one of my favorite writers, the first historian. And so I remembered that Herodotus wrote about a place called the Oracle of the Dead. I didn't remember that they called it the Oracle of the Dead, all I remembered was that Herodotus described the place where somebody sent a delegation and that they saw a ghost there. And so I shuffled through that that night. It took me quite a while, but when I found it, there it was the Oracle of the Dead on the river Acheron. The tyrant Periander had sent a delegation there to conjure up the spirit of his departed wife, Melissa. And Herodotus says in so many words that the ghost of Melissa appeared and told them the information they wanted.
Well, what was that all about? And I remember thinking at the time I read that, that couldn't be, that poor old Herodotus, too bad that this guy didn't have any judgment when it came to that kind of thing. And then I remembered a similar thing in The Odyssey, where Circe sends Odysseus to a place to conjure up the spirits, so rapidly I looked through my Odyssey and found that. And as I was reading it, it says that Circe sent Odysseus to the moldering house of Hades, I love that term, on the river Acheron, and at that point, whammy! Uh, oh, I'm getting closer! And he digs a hole in the ground two feet by two feet and he sacrifices a ram and a ewe and then the spirits start coming up.
Well, what does that mean? That's just baffling and scholars by and large have just dismissed that as a fantasy that he came up with because we know that that can't be. But then the moment I read that I knew what it was. Because I had read a story about the Pawnee Indians of the Western part of the United States, they would sacrifice a badger which they would eat, but they would drain the badger's blood into a bowl and there in the reflective surface of the blood they would see mirror visions. So that was it. I figured at the Oracle of the Dead they went and they saw the spirits in mirrors.
And, incredibly I looked at everything I could about the Oracle of the Dead and one of the books I found said indeed that what they found in the central apparition hallway was a huge bronze cauldron. So I knew it would work.
SB: Can you tell us about the psychomanteum?
RM: The Greeks called their facilities for doing this psychomanteums, which were Oracles of the Dead, in effect. So I decided to make my own psychomanteum. As far as I could tell from the Oracle of the Dead, the way it works was that it brought together a huge number of distinct modalities into one spot, natural beauty, since this was one of the most beautiful places you've ever seen; an underground facility, caves have always been associated with the spiritual quest; chemical alteration with hashish; mirror gazing, a bunch of things brought together in this one place.
And so I decided to bring all those things together and to combine it with my ideas of play and the paranormal. And to build a place where people could come and see their deceased relatives, and have visitations with them. I hadn't thought of using mirrors to conjure up the dead and I use that term kind of jokingly, I just think it's so outrageous to think of that, but really that's what I'm doing, I guess. And so you put it all together and imagine my surprise when the very first person I conducted through here, it worked. It was really quite astounding.
You put it all together, he says.
