Asking Virgil’s ghost for advice

Over the years, a number of scholars of classics have had an interest in the paranormal. Perhaps the best-known is E. R. Dodds (1893-1979), who is the only person in history to have served simultaneously as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and President of the Society for Psychical Research.

In this piece, we will look at two other classicists who had a serious interest in unusual spiritual phenomena. The first is Theo Haarhoff (1892-1971), a South African who translated Greek and Latin poetry into Afrikaans.* The second is W. F. Jackson Knight (1895-1964), an Englishman who is mainly remembered for his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Because of their interest in strange stuff, both men have tended to be dismissed by other scholars as eccentrics.

[* = To anticipate the obvious question: by the standards of white South Africans at the time, he was less racist than many of the others.]

Haarhoff was a professor at the University of Witwatersrand.* One of the most striking accounts that he left of his experiences with the paranormal relates to the Welsh medium Alec Harris. Harris was well-known for being apparently able to produce physical manifestations of the dead by means of ectoplasm.

[* = Details of his life and career can be found in the book Classics and National Cultures.]

The following account by Haarhoff was published by Harris’s wife Louie. It appears in her 1980 book They Walked Among Us, although it seems that it had originally appeared in Psychic News shortly after the séance in question. The séance took place in 1952. The philosopher who is mentioned appears to be Heraclitus. Oddly enough, the historical Heraclitus believed in an afterlife, although he was critical of conventional Greek religion.

Some ten years ago, in Johannesburg, I was brought into touch with a Greek philosopher, who gave me convincing proof of his identity and entrusted a certain very difficult task to me….

The Harris circle knew nothing of all this.  But at the sitting a week ago, this philosopher materialised….

He spoke to me in ancient Greek, which is certainly unknown to the medium.  He said, “Autos Elelutha” (I have come in person)….

He wanted to encourage me to go on with the work and to say that help would be given in other ways.  Otherwise I should have concluded that the work had come to an end.

George Cranley, a well-known Spiritualist, provided the following further information:

When [Haarhoff] came to Cape Town to sit with Mona van der Watt I had the opportunity to question him about his experiences with Alec Harris and he confirmed to me that he did converse with a spirit in ancient Greek and then continued his conversation through Mona’s trance mediumship.

Another account from Haarhoff was published in 1953 in a Spiritualist book entitled And the Sound of a Voice… by V. Carleton Jones. This time, it related to ancient Egypt. It appears that Haarhoff took part in a ouija board session in 1943 in which he was given the names of an Egyptian princess called Asheyet or Ashayet and a pharaoh called Neb-Hept-Re Mentuhotpe, who reigned “about 4000 years ago”. Classicists are not usually trained in Egyptian history, and neither Haarhoff nor anyone else present was a specialist in the subject.

The matter rested here for some years.  But in the early part of 1950, Major Alan Howgrave-Graham obtained by independent psychic communication the same result. He wrote to the… British Museum… and received a reply dated 16th May 1950 saying that the tomb of the Princess Ashayet was discovered at Deir-el-Bahri in 1920 – and that the date was about 2100 B.C…. More striking, the letter gave the name of the Pharaoh as Neb-Hepet-Re Mentuotep….

So much for Haarhoff. Our second classicist, Jackson Knight, was a scholar of Virgil. He wrote what may still be regarded as the standard translation of the Aeneid in English; it was the one that I encountered as a schoolboy in the 1990s. Jackson Knight was a friend of Haarhoff from the 1930s onwards, and the two men had shared interests in Spiritualism and reincarnation. Haarhoff thought that Jackson Knight had been the Roman poet Cornelius Gallus in one of his past lives.*

[* = The key source on Jackson Knight’s esoteric activities is a chapter in T. P. Wiseman’s Talking to Virgil.]

Haarhoff claimed that he was able to act as an intermediary in conveying communications between Jackson Knight and the spirit of Virgil. Jackson Knight went along with this unusual arrangement. Haarhoff’s acquaintance with Virgil began in the 1950s. The supernatural contact commenced when he got in touch with the Roman poet through one medium in 1951; it then continued with another medium in 1953-54. In 1954, Haarhoff himself ended up engaging in the occult practice of automatic writing in Latin, and ascribed the result to Virgil.

Throughout his acquaintanceship with Haarhoff, Virgil talked shop about the Aeneid and other matters. At least some of Virgil’s statements seem – to my own eye, as a lesser classical scholar than Haarhoff – to be implausible or reflective of the South African’s own personal theories. For what it’s worth, the second medium who put Haarhoff in touch with Virgil said that the first medium had put him in touch with an imposter rather than the real Virgil.

Jackson Knight was sufficiently trusting to take advice from the alleged spirit of Virgil on aspects of his translation of the Aeneid – a fact of which very few modern readers of the work are aware. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he saw fit to reject some of Virgil’s advice…. The first edition of the translation went on sale in 1956, and it remains in print today with Penguin Books.