Raynor Johnson

Raynor Carey Johnson (1901–1987) was an English parapsychologist, physicist and author.

Life and career

Johnson was born in Leeds, England. He earned an MA at the University of Oxford and a PhD in physics at the University of London. He published scientific works on spectroscopy.[1]

He became increasingly interested in parapsychology and became connected with the Society for Psychical Research in London.[2]

Johnson's religious background led to work in Australia, where he was master of the Methodist Queen's College at the University of Melbourne from 1934 to 1964.[3]

Johnson published several books on mysticism and psychical research during the 1950s and 1960s. His beliefs and writings eventually created concern within the Methodist Church and he retired from his university position in 1964. In the early 1960s Johnson visited India, where he met Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and lectured on spirituality. He also met the Indian mystics Vinoba Bhave and Swami Pratyagatmananda.[1]

Johnson was an advocate of Douglas Fawcett's philosophy of Imaginism which he believed could explain God and the purpose of human life.[4]

He owned a property called "Santiniketan" ("abode of peace") at Ferny Creek in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne. There he hosted regular meetings of a religious and philosophical discussion group led by the yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne. This group became known as "The Family",[5] a cult that adopted a large number of children and treated them cruelly until Victorian police rescued them on 14 August 1987. Hamilton-Byrne and her husband Bill were extradited from the United States six years later and faced criminal charges.

Johnson died in 1987.[6]

Twenty years after his death, an authorised biography was published, Raynor Johnson – A Biographical Memoir (2007). Two further books authored by Johnson were published after his death – Mysticism and Life (2010) and a collection of miscellaneous writings, A Late Lark Singing (2012).

Reception

Johnson in his book Psychical Research endorsed psychical and spiritualist phenomena and cited reports by the Society for Psychical Research. In a review, M. Steinbach for The Quarterly Review of Biology wrote that although Johnson was "quite earnest and certainly sincere in completely accepting the whole range of spiritualist phenomena", many of the cases he described could be easily be explained by coincidence, delusion, hallucination, suggestion and that most of the mediums were exposed as fraudulent.[7] Johnson believed that the material world was a creation of the mind, in the book he claimed paranormal phenomena such as discarnate minds, mediumship, psi and telepathy could be explained by a "psychic ether". On this, Steinbach wrote "but to do that is to leave this world of reality and the firm basis of scientific thought for a speculative journey in an imaginary vehicle to a never-never-land."[7]

Johnson's Nurslings of Immortality received a mixed review in the The Journal of Religion, William Hamilton wrote that the book endorsed a "pretentious philosophical quasi-idealism" called Imaginism but contained some interesting material about automatic writing and psychic phenomena.[8]

Publications

References

  1. 1 2 Owen Parnaby. (2007). "Johnson, Raynor Carey (1901–1987)". Australian Dictionary of Biography.
  2. ↑ "Raynor Carey Johnson", Gale Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology.
  3. ↑ "Former Heads of Colleges". The University of Melbourne.
  4. ↑ Robert Ashby. (1972). The Guidebook for the Study of Psychical Research. p. 83. ISBN 0-09-113901-5
  5. ↑ Supreme Court of Victoria 1999 Judgement in Kibby v. Registrar of Titles and Another.
  6. ↑ "Raynor Johnson Dies". The Age. 18 May 1987.
  7. 1 2 M. Steinbach. (1957). Psychical Research. by R. C. Johnson. The Quarterly Review of Biology. Vol. 32, No. 3. pp. 318-319.
  8. ↑ William Hamilton. (1959). Nurslings of Immortality by Raynor C. Johnson. The Journal of Religion. Vol. 39, No. 4. p. 293.
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