Part of the Casswiki article series Books
The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides is a pivotal book by Canadian journalist Joe Fisher, first published in 1990 as Hungry Ghosts in Canada and United Kingdom. The current title is the 2001 edition by Paraview Press, which is the first United States edition with a new foreword by Colin Wilson and an updated Epilogue.
This is a five-year account of the author’s personal experiences with the channeled “spirit”/“guides” during 1980s.
The book can give one an idea of the risks involved and there are subtle ways that these “entities” or “spirits” can feed on and manipulate the channel and those involved. The author, was himself taken in by the trance channelings, investigated a number of channeled entities and he concluded that the majority of them are lying and manipulative. If a person who wants to channel a spirit or a “guide” and did so in a state of ignorance, that person would be no match for these types of entities.
In the book’s foreword, Colin Wilson writes:[1]
Let me sketch out the theme of the book in a few sentences. Briefly, Mr. Fisher attended a séance in Toronto when he heard that he would be able to see “spirit communication” in action. He got rather more than he bargained for when he learned that his own “spirit guide” was a young Greek girl who had been his lover in a previous incarnation. The details she gave were precise and deeply convincing. So were those given by spirits that claimed to be an ex-Royal Air Force pilot named Ernest Scott and an amusing Cockney veteran of World War One named Harry Maddox. I must admit that, under the circumstances, I would have been just as convinced. But I might not have shown Mr. Fisher’s persistence in tracking down the evidence.
His disillusionment began when he returned to England and decided to verify Ernest Scott’s war stories. The airfield under discussion proved to be genuine, so was an enormous amount of geographical and historical information given by Scott. Yet records seemed to indicate that Scott never existed. When Mr. Fisher tried to track down the farm near Harrogate, Yorkshire, where another spirit named Russell claimed to have lived in the 19th century, Russell proved to be just as elusive. So did the charming Cockney, Harry Maddox.
It would be a pity to spoil this marvelous and compelling story by giving any more of it away. Let me just say that, from the point of view of psychical research, the questions it raises are highly disconcerting. Never have the pitfalls of the subject have shown so clearly.
[…]
[T]he author provides as much ammunition for the believers as for the skeptics. The spirits were apparently fakes in the sense that they were not who they claimed to be. Yet it seems equally obvious that they were spirits…
It is evident that Mr. Fisher’s longing for personal contact with a disembodied source of love, wisdom and intelligence was the first trap for which he showed signs in his narrative of never fully recovering. Putting faith and hope on something or someone external to oneself is a step for a grand downfall.
He was ultimately driven to suicide on May 9, 2001 by jumping off a cliff at Elora Gorge, near Fergus, Ontario, Canada, supposedly one of the reasons was that he was deeply troubled by the spirits he claimed to have angered in writing this book.[2]
Notable quotes from the book
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We have an obligation to sift the wheat from the chaff, if only because our immortality is at stake. Immortality must be earned and we are inviting setbacks and confusion if we allow ourselves to be distracted from this task by psychism’s world of glamour and illusion. It is easy, much too easy, to be seduced by hungry ghosts and fall into the snare of dependency, a snare that can prove deadly. As Carl Jung observed, we die to the extent that we fail to discriminate. Or, to quote Virgil: “We make our destinies by our choice of gods.”[3]
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“It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” And therein lies the essence of their skill: they know their victims inside out. They know our strengths, our weaknesses, and what makes us tick. That’s why it’s so easy for them… They are masters of deception; they are articulate and eloquent with vast knowledge of philosophy at their disposal, whether fabricated or otherwise. They are able to cooperate and liaise sufficiently with others of their kind to devise strategies against us and maintain a continuity of information given to us. They have apparently limitless power of precognition and access to any information they choose—past, present or future—enabling them, among other things, to impersonate - whomsoever they wish with ease…
”I feel the answer to the riddle, if an answer is even possible, lies in a study of the history of our race. The plain fact is that mankind has been dogged by bizarre supernatural phenomena since the dawn of time. These phenomena change, to fit changing belief systems and expectations. In other words, if you lived in the Middle Ages, you might be visited by the fairies. If you were an early Christian, you might expect to see angels (and many modern Christians still do!). And now, in the space age, thousands of people have experiences with supposed aliens from other planets. The vast mass of people who have had these experiences are not mad or deluded…
What I am saying — and I am not alone in the conclusions I have reached — has very serious and very sinister implications. Perhaps if we begin to accept that these beings have been present among mankind as far back as our records go, we have to acknowledge a horrifying fact. Our race has been directly shaped by these beings, and not in any beneficial way. The manipulation you and I have experienced is nothing compared to the manipulation inflicted on civilization on a mass scale. Nearly every religion in the world was initially based on psychic manifestations, visions on mountaintops, images of God appearing to prophets, voices in the mind — just as our modern day mediums hear voices, see visions. Indeed, I have heard of certainly more than one medium who claims their contact is Jesus or God himself.
”These beings, in their different guises, have directly formed our very religions. And anyone who has studied the history of organized religion must be aware that [religion] has been responsible for more death and destruction than just about anything else. And yet we all stagger blindly on, oblivious to this manipulation for thousands of years. Perhaps I sound paranoid or overly dramatic in my belief of the magnitude of the situation. I would love to be proved wrong, but doubt I ever can be.”[4]
See also
References
- ↑ Fisher, Joe. The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides, p. 11-13. New York: Paraview Press, 2001.
- ↑ Brief notice on the publisher’s website: http://www.paraview.com/fisher/. Retrieved on 29 December 2014.
- ↑ Fisher, The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, p. 295.
- ↑ Fisher, The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, p. 305-6.