The Kingdom of Shivas Irons by Michael Murphy

Author:Michael Murphy [Murphy, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56782-6
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2011-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GOLF: ITS ROOTS in God and Nature, with Appendices, Supplements, Index, and Notes. Professor Crail’s well-worn but handsome tome, all 733 pages of it, was a reassuring presence. I laid it on the desk of my hotel room and admired its embossed leather cover. It was good to know that as early as 1893 a learned professor of Greek philosophy had entertained the possibilities represented by such chapter titles as “Clairvoyance on the Links of East Lothian” and “The Unmasking of Atheists in Golf.” Hannigan and I were not alone in our openness to golf’s spiritual anomalies. Turning to the appendix describing the apparent demonic possession at Muirfield, I read:

After the infamous match, upon the entreaty of several friends, the unfortunate Garrick, with Mrs. Garrick, turned for help to the Society for Psychical Research, and were interviewed by Frederic Myers himself as well as his colleague Frank Podmore. Besides providing evidence of golf’s ability to evoke supernormal events, these conversations comprised a form of “metatherapy,” to use a term now favored by certain clergy associated with the Society. By all accounts, the Myers-Podmore ministration was successful, relieving both husband and wife of various psychic afflictions, including their murderous impulses toward one another. It also led to notable improvements of Mr. Garrick’s golf. The eminent gentleman, it seems, has since been able to play the game without a curious disability he had suffered for several years, namely, the illusory perception of a loathsome toad squatting obscenely upon each hole into which he would putt.

But most important for my general thesis here, the material uncovered by Podmore and Myers prompted the Society chapter in Edinburgh, of which I am a member, in collaboration with the American Society for Psychical Research and its Boston chapter, to collect other incidents in sport involving phantom figures and related phenomena. During activities as diverse as mountain climbing, long sea voyages, and ballooning, disembodied figures have appeared, either to console, terrify, guide, or inspire the persons involved. This is especially true for golf. As of this writing, several dozen firsthand reports have been drawn from reputable witnesses of apparitions on golf courses in Scotland, England, Ireland, and America, and these have been supplemented by several dozen more in the general literature of adventure and sport. These incidents have usually involved a single witness, but on several occasions, as in the Muirfield case, a fairly large group has witnessed the ghostly entity.

The material we have collected comprises a “census of phantom figures in golf” analogous to the much larger “Census of Hallucinations” lately conducted by the Society under the leadership of Mrs. Henry Sidgwick. From this material, it is possible to draw the following conclusions:

• Most of the percipients involved have been brought to a state of hypervigilance, either by strenuous physical exertion, extreme danger, or, as in golf played by its truest devotees, unremitting mental frustration and continuous psychic trauma. Such vigilance resembles the condition sought by Hindoo yogis, whirling dervishes of the Middle East, and tower-dwelling Christian ascetics such as St.

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