Zoar, or the Evidence of Psychical Research Concerning Survival
W. H. Salter
Publisher: Sidgwick and Jackson, London
Published: 1961
Pages: 238
Availability: Out of Print
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Scope of Psychical Research and the Nature of the Evidence
Chapter 3: Apparitions
Chapter 4: Apparitions: Some Special Types
Chapter 5: Haunts and Poltergeists
Chapter 6: Materialisations
Chapter 7: Ecstasy and Inspiration
Chapter 8: Dissociation
Chapter 9: The Controls of Mediums
Chapter 10: Communications through Mediums. I: As affected by Normal Causes
Chapter 11: Communications through Mediums. II: As affected by Paranormal Faculties of the Living
Chapter 12: Communications through Mediums. III: Limited Scope of these Causes and Faculties
Chapter 13: Cross-correspondences
Chapter 14: Cross-correspondences: New Evidence
Chapter 15: To What does the Evidence Point?
Chapter 16: Zoar: "Is it not a Little One?"
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Chapter 5: Haunts and Poltergeists
- W. H. Salter -
Chapter 6: Materialisations
- W. H. Salter -
THE REST of this book will deal with mediumship, that is the real or supposed possession and exercise by specially endowed persons of paranormal faculties not shared by mankind at large. The psychology of mediumship is curious and an attempt will be made in the two chapters following this to illustrate it by parallels to be found among persons who could not be classed as mediums. This I have postponed in order to introduce here the discussion of a particular variety of mediumship, that productive of the "physical phenomena" of the séance-room, and so to round off the consideration of the evidence put forward to support the conception of survival in a quasi-material form.
The variety of "physical" phenomena which have at one time or another been reported is enormous. If the occurrences reported have been accurately described, they all of them imply some deviation from the familiar course of events in the physical world and from the so-called "laws" generally accepted as governing that world. In few other respects do these heterogeneous occurrences appear to be connected with each other. One common characteristic is indeed the difficulty which the investigator encounters in attempting to examine any of them under conditions that will exclude sources of error shown by experience to be prevalent in this branch of psychical research. Another feature common to the "physical" phenomena of mediumship and differentiating them from the "mental" phenomena of psychical research, is that they belong to the séance-room and not to the world of everyday life. The ordinary citizen has no cause to be surprised if he has a veridical dream, or even if he sees a crisis-apparition of the kind discussed in Chapter III. But that, when he is by himself in his sitting-room, the table should be raised off the floor without his touching it, or that his hairbrush should suddenly and invisibly be transported from his bedroom, is a very remote contingency. These things are reported to happen in poltergeist cases and in the psychological setting typical of them. Apart from such cases, it is in the séance-room they are to be sought. The study of them is highly technical, and of experts alive at any one time there has never been more than a handful whose opinion as to the genuineness or otherwise of what happens in a "physical" séance deserves to carry weight. Without any claim to be an expert myself, I have had the good fortune to know some who were, and to have discussed the position with them, as well, of course as to have read many reports of varying degrees of value. Many forms of "physical" phenomena are not in themselves suggestive of the activity of an entity that has survived bodily death: raps, the movement of objects without apparent muscular or mechanical force, "apports", and so on. They are sometimes claimed at séances to be the work of spirits, but it is for the spirit first to prove his existence and, if need be, his identity, and if he can do that by other evidence, such as a convincing communication, "physical" phenomena of these kinds are, as evidence, superfluous. Other kinds however, if they can he shown to be genuinely paranormal, suggest by their nature the activity of a surviving entity having, or being capable of assuming, a material or quasi-material form. Such are materialised phantoms, whether of the whole figure or of part, capable of being seen and occasionally touched by the sitters; impressions in wax of parts of the body; "spirit" photographs, and the production of a voice claiming to come from the mouth neither of the medium nor of any other living person present. All these phenomena seem intended to suggest that some being other than the persons present in the flesh was present in the séance-room in a form sufficiently material to be seen, touched or photographed, or to make impressions on wax similar to those a body of flesh and blood would make, or to emit sounds such as come from the mouths of living persons. This prima facie suggestion is often supported by statements made through the medium that a "spirit" has been present and has caused the occurrence of the phenomena, which, it is claimed, may prove not only his presence but his identity. If both the "physical" phenomena and the statements regarding them made through the medium are accepted as genuine, there is an end of the matter: the survival of spirits in a material or quasi-material form has been proved. There have however been many psychical researchers, including the eminent French physiologist, Charles Richet, who have believed in the genuineness of "Physical" phenomena of this kind while rejecting the view that spirits were concerned in their production. They developed as an alternative explanation the hypothesis of "ideoplasmy", that is to say, the view that materialisations are produced from the medium's energy and a substance ("ectoplasm") supplied by him with the assistance perhaps of the sitters, and that they take form in accordance with the thoughts of those present. The basic question is the genuineness of the physical phenomena; unless this can be answered in the affirmative, it is idle to discuss the rival merits of the spiritistic and ideoplasmic hypotheses. Of all full-form materialisations, the most famous are those observed by William Crookes in his sittings with Florence Cook, who in 1872 at the age of sixteen began giving sittings at which a "spirit form", known as "Katie King", materialised. At a sitting held in December 1873 at the house of the medium's father the medium sat in a curtained recess, clothed in a black dress and boots and tied to the chair by sealed tape. A figure in white drapery ("Katie King") came out of the recess into the room and moved about under the observation of the sitters. One of these, a Mr. Volkman, after watching the figure for about forty minutes came to the conclusion that it was the medium disguised, sprang up and seized first a muscular wrist and then a substantial waist. Other sitters then rescued the figure out of Volkman's grasp. It retreated into the recess, which was opened after about five minutes to reveal the medium in the black dress and boots and tied to the chair by the sealed tape. No white drapery was found. Volkman published an account of the sitting, and so stimulated Crookes, who had not been present at this sitting, to publish his accounts of sittings with Florence Cook in 1872 and 1874 at which he had been present; they will be found in the issues of The Spiritualist for 6th February, 3rd April and 5th June, 1874. Crookes wished to rebut any suggestion that the medium had masqueraded as the spirit by showing that to his own observation both had been present at the same time. On one occasion Katie King at a sitting in Crookes's house invited him behind the curtain. He followed within "three seconds", as he says, and saw the medium in her black dress lying an the sofa, but in the meanwhile Katie King had vanished. On other occasions, also in his own house, several of the sitters saw figures they believed to be the medium and Katie King together under strong electric light. Crookes reports:
None of the photographs taken at the sittings at Crookes's house showed the two faces.
But there were two sittings held at the medium's suggestion in her own home, when two figures were certainly seen together, the faces of both being visible. Other members of the medium's family were present, and the medium's bedroom served m a cabinet. On the 29th March 1874 Katie King walked about the room where the sitting was held for nearly two hours, talking to those present, and several times taking Crookes's arm. She then said she thought she could show herself and the medium together, and invited Crookes to come into the cabinet with a phosphorus lamp he had brought. He went in and by the light of his lamp saw the medium crouching on the floor, dressed in black velvet; she did not move when he took her hand and held the light close to her face.
At a later sitting (21st May, 1874), also at the medium's house, Crookes was present behind the curtain and saw and heard Katie and the medium say goodbye to each other.
The genuineness of the Katie King phenomena has from then till now been a matter of acute controversy. On the affirmative side the main argument is that Crookes was a highly intelligent man, and an eminent scientist - facts of course altogether beyond dispute - and that he has given clear testimony in a case where mistake was incredible. Intelligence is highly relevant; eminence in science or any other walk of life is not, unless accompanied by long experience and objective examination of psychical phenomena. Crookes began his interest in spiritualism in a state of strong emotion, owing to the loss of a brother to whom he was deeply attached. His first sittings, as described in his biography by Fournier d'Albe, show a complete disregard of commonsense precautions against fraud. By 1874 however he had had considerable experience of mediums, including D. D. Home, the most famous of all "physical" mediums. Crookes himself reinforced the case for genuineness by an argument which cannot in the light of later investigations of poltergeist cases be allowed much weight, namely that Florence Cook was too young to carry out a fraud of the complexity that, if fraud there were, must be assumed. A like argument is raised over and over again when poltergeists are discussed but long experience has shown both the inclination and the ability of adolescents to gull their seniors. On the negative side the main arguments were: first that the control conditions throughout were inadequate; second that at the sittings at Crookes's house he did not see both figures at the same time, being perhaps deceived into thinking that clothes which the medium had removed in order to impersonate the spirit still had the medium's body inside them; thirdly, that it is significant that the only two instances when it is beyond doubt that the medium and Katie King were present at the same time, both having forms sufficiently material to he touched, were sittings held at the medium's house, where a member of her family might possibly have impersonated Katie King. The inadequacy of the Control at these two sittings was pointed out by several spiritualists when Crookes published his account of them. Impersonation of Katie sometimes by the medium and sometimes by another woman would account for difference., in Katie's appearance, height, etc., noticed at various times by Crookes himself. In later years Florence Cook confessed - boasted might be the better word - that Katie King was a deliberate fraud on her part. These "confessions" were never, I believe, made public during Crookes's life and he had no opportunity of answering them. They are therefore in no way evidence against him, and if there were no other grounds for suspecting the genuineness of Katie King they could he disregarded. In a case however of phenomena for which no close parallel could be cited, and in which strong doubts of genuineness have been raised by the Volkman sitting and the unsatisfactory conditions at Crookes's own sittings, the medium's confessions seem to me rather damaging. It is to be noted that, whether genuine or not, the manifestations were thoroughly material. Crookes noted nothing quasi-material about Katie's arm when she took his, any more than Volkman did when he grasped a muscular wrist and substantial waist. Since the days of Florence Cook other mediums have been famous for the appearance at sittings with them of fully-formed phantoms. About two of the most famous, Marthe Beraud, later known as Eva C., and Helen Duncan, something will now be said. At the end of the nineteenth century there were living in Algiers a French General, Noel, and his wife. They were holding regular séance at their villa, and in 1900 they invited a M. Marsault, a lawyer by profession and a friend of their son Maurice, to attend them. At this stage no materialisations had taken place. Later in 1900 Maurice went to the Congo on business and died there in 1904. He had, before leaving Algiers, become engaged to a young Frenchwoman named Marthe Beraud. On learning of his death Marsault, between whom and Maurice's parents some coldness had developed owing to his sceptical attitude to the séances, paid them a visit of condolence. Marsault learnt that the manner of the séances had changed. A spirit named Bien-Boa, who claimed to have been an Arab Chief, had for some time been giving communications without showing himself. He was now appearing in a fully materialised form, and another spirit, calling herself Bergolia and claiming to be his sister, was materialising too. Bergolia had chatted with Mme. Noel, drunk tea and eaten sweets with her. Mine. Noel said that Maurice also had appeared and kissed her. She invited Marsault and a friend to supper and a séance. After the supper Marthe, finding herself alone for a few minutes with Marsault and his friend, is reported by Marsault as saying, "Do you want to have some fun? You know Bergolia is all humbug; my sister and I will give you some fun". She had previously told Marsault that all the materialisations were false, but this avowal astounded him. They were then joined by Marthe's two younger sisters. At the séance which followed Marthe, he says, impersonated Bergolia in a very transparent way. The next stage was that Charles Richet, the distinguished physiologist, visited Algiers, had sittings at the Noel's house and witnessed the materialised Bien-Boa. His account may be read in his Thirty Years of Psychical Research(translated from the French, 1923) where a photograph of Bien-Boa is reproduced (p. 507). He accepted the materialisation as a genuine case of ideoplasmy. His favourable report was first published in 1905 and was read with amazement by Marsault, who wrote confidentially to Richet saying he feared Richet had been deceived. In January, 1906, Marsault went to see Marthe and her father, meeting also her mother and two sisters. He reports Marthe as saying that she had been led into mediumship by Mme. Noel's importunities, and that, being already established as a materialising medium, she could not avoid giving Richet sittings; the whole thing was a sham, but her part in it had been passive. Marsault published his account of the affair in 1906. Richet stuck to his own opinion, dismissing Marsault in a very cavalier fashion. For this part of Marthe's career see SPR Proceedings Vol. XXVII, 333-369. In 1908 Marthe came to Paris and in 1909 began to give sittings to a private circle to which Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing, a well-known German doctor and psychical researcher, was introduced. Schrenck-Notzing in his first reports of her called her "Eva W' without any hint that she was the same person as the famous Marthe Beraud. So began a new phase of Marthe's mediumship, in which the control conditions were not so negligible as in the time of Bergolia, and the phenomena were of a rather different order. No full-form phantoms were seen but from various parts of the body there seemed to come masses of cc substance" of various sizes, colours and consistencies, sometimes shapeless, sometimes roughly suggestive of hands etc., and sometimes in the form of flat or flattish objects on which appeared faces either roughly drawn or in a more finished style, like photographs. Of the faces produced at her Paris sittings, some bore a curious resemblance to photographs of notable persons published in the French Press. Thus at two sittings in 1913 she produced faces bearing a likeness, which notwithstanding differences of detail was unmistakable, to photographs of President Wilson and President Poincare which had been published in 1912 in the Miroir. The faces were not just cut out from the Miroir but look like rough copies of the Miroir photographs deliberately altered in detail, e.g. President Wilson is given a moustache. A few faces of both the rough and the more finished types were produced at the series of forty sittings given to an SPR Committee in 1920. My wife was present at some of these sittings and I was the note-taker at a sitting described in the report (SPR Proc. Vol. XXXII) as "a very remarkable one" (p. 275). Before the sittings Eva C. was stripped and sewn into a stockingette costume, and during the sitting both her hands were controlled by experienced sitters. The investigating Committee considered that the precautions taken were sufficient to prevent the extrusion of pseudo-paranormal objects even if the medium had succeeded in introducing them into the séance-room, concealed in some way. The only continuous lighting during the medium's trance was a dim red light on the note-taker's desk. When Eva C. announced the production of "substance", it was inspected by an electric torch turned on for that purpose, and on occasion flashlight photographs were taken. Dr. Dingwall, who was a member of the Committee, contributed to the report a section in which he discussed the possibility of fraud in relation both to Eva C's sittings on the Continent and to the London series. He says (pp. 328, 329):
The Committee as a whole much regretted that they were unable to come definitely either to positive or negative conclusions.
A glance at the photograph of Bien-Boa in Richet's book, or at the photographs of the faces produced at the sittings with Eva C. is sufficient to explain why many believers in the genuineness of her mediumship rejected a spiritistic view of it. The souls of the departed may conceivably inhabit forms resembling Bien-Boa; if so we must endure the prospect with fortitude, regretting only that we have been misled by the poets and artists to expect something different. But does not Bien-Boa look like a clumsy attempt, whether ideoplasmic or fraudulent, to imitate the established traditional concept of a spirit? To me it most certainly does. Much the same criticism applies to the faces of the Eva C. sittings. Some of them are pleasant enough as two-dimensional drawings: but why two-dimensional if they are spirits? Again, not even the addition of a moustache could convert the President Wilson of 1913 into a plausible visitor from another world. Mrs. Helen Duncan was the most famous materialising medium of our time in this country. She was twice prosecuted for fraud and convicted, first in 1933 and then in 1944, but until her death in 1956 enjoyed the confidence of many believers. It is not however the question whether any of her phenomena were genuine which I wish to discuss, but that other question whether her materialisations in themselves suggest a spiritual origin. I would refer, for example, to the photograph facing p. 37 of SPR Proc. XLVIII, reproduced from a book of Harry Price. How much spirituality is there in that? Another type of occurrence sometimes claimed to demonstrate the presence in the séance-room. of a materialised or partly materialised spirit is the production of wax moulds of parts of the human body, especially hands. At a sitting for this sort of phenomenon the procedure adopted is somewhat as follows: The medium's hands are controlled by sitters; a bowl of wax warm enough to take a mould from is placed near by; out of the bowl is taken a mould, say, of a hand, which when the wax has hardened shows all the characteristic contours and markings of a human hand. It is claimed that the mould could not have been formed round a hand of flesh and blood that was subsequently withdrawn, as the aperture at the wrist was too small to permit withdrawal of anything but an ectoplasmic hand. Such moulds were obtained with the Polish medium Kluski in 1921 at sittings conducted by Charles Richet and Dr. Geley, head of the Institut Metapsychique at Paris. They were convinced that the moulds were produced paranormally by "Ideoplasmy". In the absence of precautions it would be possible for a trickster to produce bogus moulds in two ways at least: (1) by a hand or hands dipped in the wax and withdrawn when the wax cooled, provided the trickster had, as some people have, an exceptional power of compressing the wrist and the bones at the base of the thumb; (2) by the introduction into the séance-room of moulds made before the séance by ordinary technical processes, Richet and Geley claimed that they had taken adequate precautions against both these forms of trickery. The question is whether this claim was justified, particularly as regards the second method. The precaution taken was to mix with the wax used for the séance a chemical substance easily traceable after the séance, and this substance was in fact found in the moulds produced. This would seem to be an adequate safeguard, provided it were certain that the medium had no knowledge before the sitting that the chemical was to he used. Mediums do sometimes get to know before a séance of supposedly secret methods of control. In sittings held under the auspices of the SPR. I should be confident that no such risk would be incurred, but I have less confidence that nothing of the kind could have happened in the Institut of those days. In 1926 Mrs. Crandon ("Margery"), the wife of a well-known surgeon of Boston, Mass., was already known as a medium whose phenomena, produced in the presence of many experienced investigators, were of astonishing variety and had aroused violent controversy as to their genuineness. In that year there was a new development. Large numbers of prints of thumbs, fingers and palms of the hand were produced, paranormally as it was claimed, the thumb and finger prints being said to correspond to those of her dead brother, Walter. Some thumb prints of the same pattern were also produced at sittings given by her in England. At one of the English sittings in 1929 a fingerprint of the medium's was found on a piece of wax used at the sitting, and the natural inference was that at a critical moment Margery's hands were not controlled so efficiently as to prevent her being able to manipulate the wax. In 1932 however a more damaging discovery was made. A Mr. Dudley, one of her strongest supporters, who had supervised many of her American sittings and published reports on them, was collecting for the records of the American Society for Psychical Research digital prints of all the sitters who had ever been present at a Margery sitting when thumb or finger prints were produced. Among her earlier sitters was a dentist, called in the reports "Kerwin". On comparison of the sitters' prints with the numerous impressions from Margery sittings which were accessible to him, Dudley found to his surprise that the impression of Kerwin's right thumb corresponded in every instance with impressions of right thumbs produced at the sittings, and that his left thumb prints corresponded to some left thumb impressions from the sittings. It was later found that the correspondence extended to the thumb prints obtained at Margery's sittings in England. As a result of further enquiries Mr. Dudley ascertained that very shortly before the first sitting at which "Walter" prints had been produced, Margery had paid Kerwin a professional visit when he had explained to her how dental wax was used, and had given her impressions on wax of both his thumbs, together with spare pieces of wax. Mr. Dudley's view as to the correspondence between the "Walter" impressions and the Kerwin prints was confirmed by Professor Cummins, an American authority on "dermatoglyphics", who made reports on the American prints to the American Society, and on the English prints to the SPR. (see SPR Proc. Vol. XLIII pp. 15-23). Before Dudley's discovery many of Margery's supporters had accepted without question a supposed correspondence between her séance-room. prints and prints made on a razor by her brother shortly before his death. On examination it was found that the prints on the razor were too indistinct to prove anything. Another type of phenomenon which, it is sometimes contended, proves the survival of spirits in a quasi-material form is "Spirit-photography". Amateur photographers of unquestionable bona fides sometimes get results which puzzle them and lead them to wonder whether they may not, without any intention to do so, have photographed some manifestation of the spirit world. Their prints are often forwarded to the SPR for an opinion. It should be noted here that, while the cause of the unexpected result can often be detected from the positive print, the original negative film or plate is much more informative and, if it is a film, negatives of the complete roll are more informative still. Sometimes the puzzling results are due to an accidental intrusion of light, producing blurs or fogs which a lively imagination can convert into persons or things of another world. Sometimes a freak of light and shade makes a real object present within the photographic field - a tree, perhaps, or a part of a building - look like a figure, although the photographer knows that no such figure was visually present. The effects of accidental double exposure in producing "ghosts" are now so well known that few amateurs bother the SPR with examples. The appearance of several ghostly figures before the altar of a cathedral in an amateur photograph that attracted much publicity recently was pronounced by experts to be due partly to double exposure and partly to a slight movement of the camera while one of the exposures was being made. If amateur photographs, mostly snapshots, were all that had to be considered, there would he no need to bring "spirit photography" into a discussion of survival. But there have been mediums who specialised in the production of "spirit photographs", and this form of mediumship has a very long history, stretching back to 1862. In that year Mumler in America began to produce photographs on which the forms of "spirits" appeared. In the following year it was discovered that in two of his photographs the "spirit" was a person still living. Ten years later an English practitioner, Hudson, was active, and aroused a violent controversy in Spiritualist circles. His supporters admitted that some of his photos looked as if there had been double exposure. The "spirits" however assured them that the appearance of double exposure did not indicate fraud, but was due to the refraction of rays of light passing through the mixed auras of the "spirits" and the sitters. In 1875 a Frenchman, Buguet, on being prosecuted by his Government, confessed to the fraudulent production of "spirit" photos by double exposure. For the early history of "spirit" photography see SPR Proc. VII, 268-289. These inauspicious episodes have not prevented the revival of "spirit photography" from time to time. The technique used has been carefully studied, and some fraudulent methods have been discovered. The two principal are these: (1) For the virgin plate, which the sitter is intended to believe is being exposed, there is substituted a plate on which a "spirit" image has already been impressed. When the plate is developed, there appear both a normal portrait of the sitter, and an "extra", as it is called, that is to say, something which would not have been visible in the ordinary way to a person standing where the camera stood. The developed negative will often show signs of the double exposure. For instance the rebate of the dark slide makes a distinct line down the margin of the plate, and as dark slides do not exactly fit the plates they are to hold, a double exposure usually means a double marginal line; the presence on the plate of a double marginal line is strong evidence of double exposure, which is strong evidence of fraud. In a print the edges can be trimmed so as to conceal this clue. "Extras" are often well defined photographs of heads. Sometimes the heads are surrounded by "ectoplasmic clouds" similar to what can be produced by placing some fluffy material in contact with the plate. Where substitution is possible, it is no mystery if "extras'' appear, with or without "ectoplasmic clouds", reproducing the features of well-known public men or women. The original magazine or book illustration from which the "extra" has been copied has sometimes been identified, and the grain of the paper on which the original was printed detected. If the identity of the sitter is known to the medium beforehand, he may be able to obtain for copying photographs taken during life of some of his dead friends or relations, though, of course, this is not always possible. Substitution of plates may be more clearly detected in other ways than by inference from such clues as the double marginal line. It takes a very expert observer under better conditions than usually prevail to see the substitution being made, but where the sitter brings with him marked plates which he gives the medium, and at the end of the sitting is handed a plate complete with "extra" but lacking the mark, it is clear that substitution has in fact taken place. (2) There is however another technique which can be used by a medium who knows that he has to work with a marked plate, but determines not to be defeated by this precaution. I quote from a report made to the SPR in 1932 by Mr. Fred Barlow, who had Previously been a strong supporter of the genuineness of "spirit Photography". It should be explained that in 1922 Harry Price had a sitting with William Hope, the best known "spirit" photographer of that time. Price took with him plates on which the makers had printed marks that remained invisible till after development. He got back a plate with an "extra" but without any makers' mark. Mr. Barlow writes:
Major Rampling Rose, who had a large business as a photographic manufacturer, and collaborated with Mr. Barlow in his research, demonstrated the use of a flashlamp of this kind at a meeting of the SPR. He added that during the thirty years he had been in the trade, his work had been to track down defects and devise methods to overcome them, that he had taken photographs in almost every part of the world, and had had four years aerial photographic experience during the First World War. He continued:
For the Barlow-Rampling Rose paper see SPR Proc. XLI, 121-138.
Whatever the method used by the spirit photographer, a good deal of reliance seems to be placed on the imaginative powers of the sitter, which are at least equal to those shown by any amateur photographer in interpreting blurs and fogs on his snapshots. As the famous Spiritualist, Stainton Moses ("M.A. Oxon."), wrote in 1875:
He was referring to the materialised phantoms of the séance-room, but his words are equally appropriate to spirit photographs. It is not only in the psychic context however that the problem of false recognition arises. There is, for instance, the case of that most substantial revenant, the Tichborne Claimant. Some who had known the real man well accepted the Claimant; others rejected him. Both parties cannot have been right, but as to which was wrong there still lingers a doubt sufficient to provoke animated controversy in books and the Press.
The presence of "ectoplasmic clouds" in such a position on the plate as to obscure the features of the "spirit extra" naturally greatly increases the chances of false recognition. Finally reference should he made to the claim sometimes advanced by the Controls of mediums, including some whose bona fides is above suspicion, that the voice in which "communications" are given comes not from the medium's own mouth or vocal chords, but from some other part of the room where the sitting is being held, and through some ectoplasmic vocal organism of the Control. Efforts to test this claim with appropriate apparatus for locating sounds have not so far succeeded. Most people's judgment as to the source of sounds is notoriously fallible, especially in the dark or in poor light. For the weight to be attached to the statements of Controls about themselves see Chapter IX. As regards any type of psychic experience it is impossible to prove that no genuine example has ever occurred. A medium may cheat whenever lax conditions permit trickery and yet, apparently, produce genuine results under strict conditions. Eusapia Palladino is the most striking instance. At Cambridge in 1895 and at other times and places she was caught in the act, but at Naples in 1908 she produced phenomena which the highly competent committee who then investigated her believed to be genuine: see SPR Proc. Vol. XXIII. And, of course, the, exposure of one medium is not evidence against another medium producing similar phenomena, although it is highly suspicious if, in the second case, there occur incidents of a kind which, in the first case, have been found connected with fraudulent methods. Florence Cook, William Hope, Margery Crandon, whose cases have been discussed in this chapter, were the most famous mediums of their day in their own lines, and were accepted as genuine by many sitters. The reader can form his own opinion as to the probability or otherwise that genuine full-form materialisations, genuine "spirit" photographs or genuinely paranormal thumb-prints were ever produced through the mediumship of any of them, and generally whether or not phenomena of these types lend any support to belief in survival in a quasi-material form. Mediums used to complain that the conditions of control to which they were asked to submit were unpleasant and irksome search of the body for concealed objects, tying of hands and wrists, and so on, - conditions which were imposed to prevent the simulation of phenomena in sittings held, at the medium's insistence, in poor light or even complete darkness. Whatever substance there may have been in this complaint has long lost all its relevance. For years now the apparatus generally known as the "infra-red telescope", which enables movements to he seen in the dark, has made unnecessary the measures complained of. A reward has been offered for mediums capable of producing physical phenomena with the infra-red telescope as the sole method of control. No medium has so far come forward to claim the reward. This reluctance confirms me in my view that none of the phenomena discussed in this or the preceding chapters support the quasi-material conception of survival. It is not difficult to trace the stages which have led to these various types of phenomenon being taken, separately or together, as evidence supporting this conception. First of all there are visual and auditory hallucinations at or about the time of the death of the person "seen" or "heard", or later. These are genuine experiences misinterpreted, very naturally in pre-scientific times, as happening not in the percipient's mind, but in some external region, and to that extent as being physically objective, though not as solid as living flesh and blood. The nation of this limited, quasi-physical objectivity is confirmed by some of these experiences conveying or implying knowledge of facts not till then known to the percipient, which does indeed involve objectivity of a different order, and by others of them being collective or recurrent. The next stage is for popular belief, with the help of the poets and story-tellers, to embellish narratives of subjective occurrences with picturesque details that, if true, would make the whole experience physically objective: hence the traditional ghost story. All this may have been done in good faith, even where, as in the original version of the Don Juan story, the motive of edification is at the back of it. This leads on to poltergeist trickery, which one hesitates to stigmatise as fraud because of the irresponsible nature of the persons most closely concerned. But the belief in quasi-material spirits, originating and confirmed in the way described above, is often shamelessly exploited in the séance-roorn by deliberate fraud, to the discredit of a profession numbering many honourable members.
Chapter 7: Ecstasy and Inspiration
- W. H. Salter -
THE PREVIOUS chapter was concerned with the particular form of mediumship that produces materialisations and other "physical" phenomena sometimes supposed to support the theory of survival in a quasi-material form. The mediumship with which the rest of this book will be concerned is of a different kind, which for want of a better term is often called "trance mediumship". The presence of trance is not the criterion. Many phenomena of "physical" mediumship are probably produced in genuine trance, while many "communications" are given in states not far removed from normal consciousness: this is particularly true of automatic writing. The phrase "trance mediumship" is however by now established in general use, and is less misleading than such an alternative as "clairvoyant mediumship". The characteristic of mediumship of this kind is the communication of messages purporting to come from the surviving minds of persons now dead. Occasionally such communications are combined with "physical" phenomena, but often, and in the case of mediums of the highest standard generally, they are not. Whether so combined or not the communications ought to be judged on their own merits, independently of the evidential value, if any, of physical phenomena occurring through the same mediumship.
People who encounter mediumship for the first time, whether at actual sittings or through printed reports of them, often doubtless think it a very queer business, and find themselves at a loss whether to regard it with belief or disgust. In discussing therefore this type of mediumship it may be helpful to start with a survey of various mental states which may at first sight seem to have little connection with each other or with mediumship. Some of these states are common and familiar: others in greater or less degree rare. They may or may not form part of the ordinary conscious life. For some, but not all of them a paranormal explanation seems required. We may begin with a condition familiar to everyone, namely sleep. That our dreams are very largely shaped by internal conflicts and resistances, as taught by Freud and his followers, nobody who has examined his own dreams for any length of time will be disposed to doubt. The influence of the Freudian unconscious is extremely pervasive, but psychical research has shown in relation, for instance, to telepathy, that much goes on in the subconscious which will not fit into the canonical scheme of Freudianism (see above); Freud himself was prepared to accept telepathy, and would have made his acceptance public, had his followers allowed him to do so. Many sleepers have found on waking that problems that seemed to them insoluble overnight have somehow solved themselves without any conscious effort on their part. This however, although it suggests paranormal activity during sleep, does not clearly demonstrate it, nor indeed does it prove any subconscious activity at all. Possibly a solution had been almost reached by normal mental processes before sleep, but the final stage of grasping it had been frustrated by fatigue or by excessive concentration working through "the law of reversed effort", and with sleep the obstacles to success may just have vanished. There are however instances in which the sleeper did not merely find the solution complete in his conscious mind on waking, but had it presented to him in a dream with that mixture of realism and symbolic imagery typical of dreams. Here is an example quoted from SPR Proc. XII, 13-17. An archaeologist, who was in 1893 preparing a report on some Babylonian finds for an American university, was puzzled by two small pieces of agate with fragmentary inscriptions. He thought the pieces had originally been part of finger rings, and while he could decipher some of the writing on one piece he could make nothing of the other. In his dream a Babylonian priest took him into the treasure house of a temple, and declared to him that these two pieces were not finger rings, but two sections of a cylinder which had been cut into three parts, and that the third section would not he found. The first two rings had served as ear-rings for the god Ninib. "If you will put the two together you will have confirmation of my words." On the next day he put the two pieces together, found that they fitted so as to form part of a cylinder, and that from the previously indecipherable inscriptions he could reconstruct a dedication to the god Ninib. As the dream had stated, it was impossible to make a complete cylinder out of the two fragments, and the piece needed for this was never found. All the information required for this solution was already possessed by the archaeologist before he fell asleep. His dream may therefore have been no more than a mechanism for presenting to his conscious mind a connection, already formed by his subconscious, between consciously known facts. If that view is correct, the priest in the dream would be his own subconscious dramatised. Even more impressive are the instances of imaginative creation in dreams, of which Coleridge's fragmentary Kubla Khan is the most famous example. The latter part of this chapter will treat of creative imagination, but it may aid to a better understanding of what the poets have to say on that subject, if we now consider some curious psychological states of which accounts have been given by persons of more common clay. These states are generally known as "out-of-the-body" experiences, a description which, however clumsy, fairly explains itself. There are several examples on record, differing greatly as to the fullness of the experience, and the nature of its constituent parts, but having this feature in common, that a living person feels, and often seems to see, his real self separated for a time from his body, which he also "sees", as it were, from outside. The most famous case is that of the American Dr. Wiltse, reported in SPR Proc. VIII, and also in Human Personality, Vol. II. The following is a summary of Dr. Wiltse's own account of his experience. In the yeas 1889 he seemed to himself, and also to the doctor attending him, about to die. He said goodbye to his family, composed his limbs, sank into unconsciousness, and passed about four hours without pulse or perceptible heart-beat. He then returned to a state of conscious existence within the body and "watched the interesting process of the separation of soul and "body". His "Ego", to use his own phrase, gradually detached itself from one part of the body after another, finally emerging from the head "like a soap-bubble attached to the bowl of a pipe", which broke loose from the body and fell to the floor, "where I slowly rose and expanded into the full stature of a man. I seemed to be translucent, of a bluish cast and perfectly naked", a fact which embarrassed him as he was aware of the presence of two ladies. His Ego somehow or other acquired clothes. Looking at the couch he had left he saw his body lying there just as he had Composed it. On leaving the house he walked a short way down the street, and later along a mountain road, which was blocked by three enormous rocks. Then a great dark cloud, with bolts of fire darting through it, stood over his head, and he was aware of a presence which he could not see, not seeming to be a form, but filling the cloud:
The thoughts were to the effect that the rocks were the boundary between two worlds; once he passed them he could no more return into the body; he could not do so unless he believed his work in the body to he finished. After some hesitation he attempted to cross the boundary, but a small, densely black cloud moved towards him and he knew he was to be stopped: "... the cloud touched my face, and I knew no more. Without previous thought and without apparent effort on my part my eyes opened." He saw the cot on which he was lying and realised "in astonishment and disappointment" that he was in the body.
A rather more recent case is that contributed to the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1937 by Sir Auckland Geddes, and reviewed in the SPR Journal, Vol. XXX. Here again the percipient was a doctor, who was apparently dying. He relates that at no stage of the experience was his consciousness dimmed, but:
The Ego attached itself to one consciousness (A), while he recognised the B personality "as belonging to the body", showing signs of being a composite of "consciousnesses" from different parts of the body, and tending to disintegrate,
From a source he did not know, but which he found himself calling his "mentor", he received information as to the problems of space and time. But a doctor hastily summoned made an injection which made his heart beat more strongly:
In another case a Mr. "Kenwood", who had been suffering greatly from fatigue and anxiety as a result of tending his wife during an Illness, remembered in the morning an experience he had had during the night. The ceiling and roof seemed to disappear and he clearly saw a star:
The next day the wife's health was greatly improved. The case is reported in the SPR Journal, Vol. XXXIII.
This type of case, of which other examples are on record, prompts the question: Have we not proof here of an "astral body", capable of almost complete detachment from the "earth body" during life, capable of making contact with, though not of fully entering into, the spiritual world before death, and presumably therefore capable of continued existence after death and of complete entry into the world of the spirit then? There is indeed enough uniformity within this group of cases to show that they describe a genuine class of experience and are not a random assortment of oddities. Common to all the instances quoted is the sense (a) of existence in an entity not entirely out of touch with earthly affairs, but not dependent on the "earth body", (b) of this existence being preferable to earthly existence, so that in the Wiltse case there is "disappointment" and in the Geddes case "annoyance" at the return, while Mr. "Kenwood" had "never enjoyed such mental exhilaration before or since" as during his experience, and (c) of contact with some intelligence other than that of the percipient. But the differences must not be overlooked. In the Wiltse case the external intelligence becomes almost a personal Deity, manifesting in dark clouds and lightning. In the Geddes case the "mentor" hardly emerges from abstraction. In Mr. "Kenwood's" experience a "star" becomes a dead relative. In each of the three instances there is strong element of symbolism, and this varies from case to case just as might be expected if we were to suppose the presentation to the conscious mind of several real but subjective adventures of the subconscious. Many important observations on cases of this kind are to be found in Professor Whiteman's paper in Proc. 50, pp. 240-274, in which he analyses a number of experiences including several in which he was himself the percipient. With these examples of one part of the personality feeling itself to be detached temporarily from another may be compared the experiences of men who in situations of difficulty and danger have had the reassuring sensation of the presence of a protective companion. An instance of this, not, I think, previously published, was that of a man who in early manhood roughed it in various parts of the world, particularly the back blocks of Australia, a country for which he had a great affection. Later he had a job as engineer in a still undeveloped part of Canada. He reached his camp there one winter afternoon and decided to collect his mail, which he had not received for several days, from the post office, about two miles distant through the bush. By the time he had collected it, and was starting back, it was rapidly getting dark. He could hear wolves howling in the distance. He heard footsteps behind him and a voice which said, "Windy, cobber?". He pressed on and when he reached his quarters turned round to see who his companion was, and saw nobody. The next morning he went carefully over his track of the previous day, and saw one pair of footprints in the snow, his own, going and returning, and no more. The interesting point of this narrative is that the unseen companion of the Canadian wilds should talk Australian slang. The protector was doubtless a projection, externalised to his sense of hearing, of happy days in Australia, when the hardships may have been severe, but did not include the risk of being eaten by wolves in the snow. The story, famous at one time, of "The Angels of Mons" was a pious fiction originating in a parish magazine. It incorporated sensational features, such as the production of panic among the horses of the enemy cavalry, that are without parallel in well-evidenced cases. After long enquiry only one man could be traced who claimed to have been an eye-witness, and his regimental records showed that he was in England at the time. But there are first-hand accounts from soldiers who took part in the famous retreat of weary men having collective illusions of seeing friendly troops covering their flanks when no such troops were there. (SPR Journal XVII, 106- 118). Some of the characteristics of these experiences have curious parallels in the accounts which authors and artists have given of the process of imaginative creation. On this subject Rosamond Harding's An Anatomy of Inspiration(2nd Edn. Heffer, 1942) is most instructive. The reader of that book may be surprised to learn how great a number of authors, artists, musical composers and scientific discoverers have left it on record that their best work was done wholly or partially without conscious effort, and how great a variety of forms the feeling of inspiration may take. For my present purpose it will be sufficient to quote a few examples from well-known English authors. Towards the end of his lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge University Press 1933) A. E. Housman describes the conditions that he found conducive to the writing of poetry, and the bodily sensations that he experienced when in the creative mood. He mentions that he has seldom written poetry unless he was rather out of health. When taking an afternoon walk, he says,
Housman is clearly describing a process of subconscious activity, with no hint of inspiration from an external source. In fact he specially mentions the pit of the stomach as "the source of the suggestions thus proferred to the brain".
In R. L. Stevenson's Across the Plains there is A Chapter on Dreams, which tells us much more about the development of his creative powers. As a not very happy child he had typical anxiety dreams, but found that he had some control as to what he dreamt, and having developed a taste for the Georgian period of history,
Later still, when he began to write fiction he found that "the little people who manage man's internal theatre", whom he also calls "Brownies", were willing to stage for him scenes which in his waking life he could work up into "printable and profitable tales". Thus, wishing to write a story round the theme of "man's double being", and unable after two days' racking his brains to think of a plot, he dreamt two scenes which became the nucleus of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All that came to him in his dreams he put to the Brownies' credit, but it always had to he worked over and completed in his waking hours. He thought however that the Brownies had "a hand in it even then". Speculating as to who the Brownies were, he points out their connection With himself and his training as a writer:
If Stevenson's account of his childhood phantasies be compared with his description of his adult literary activities, the change towards "otherness" is noticeable. Is the change entirely verbal? The Brownies might be taken simply as his own conscious personification of his subconscious, or they might denote some entity that Stevenson felt to be external to himself, though accessible only through his subconscious. Stevenson was an early member of the SPR, and he has put all psychical researchers in his debt by relating so fully the development of his subconscious. The debt would be still greater if he had contrived to be a little more plainspoken.
Other authors have recorded that their characters have become so alive as to take the development of the story into their hands, and to hold conversations with them, as Dickens says Mrs. Gamp did with him. This seems to be an example of the tendency of the subconscious to project itself into some external and independent entity, a tendency not, of course, in this instance pushed to the point of complete acceptance of the projection. It is a big leap from Sarah Gamp and the Brownies to the transcendent Beings and Powers, with whom the poets claim to have been in communion. I am about to quote several passages in which the poets assert that either in some ecstatic state, or in the course of inspiration, they have encountered some Being or Power which has seemed to them outside themselves. Considerations of space compel me to detach these passages ruthlessly from their context, but the damage thus done may perhaps be mitigated by printing all the passages consecutively, and reserving to a later stage all comparison between them and the accounts which have already been quoted of other experiences, such as those called "out-of-the-body".
That in all these passages the poets are recounting vivid experiences of their own will hardly be doubted, even in the case of The Prisoner, although the passage quoted from that poem is set in a fictional framework, susceptible none the less of a symbolic interpretation. No one would mistake the tone in which Milton and Shelley speak of the source of their inspiration or confuse their words with the conventional invocations of the Nine. Nor can it be doubted that the experiences described have a general resemblance one with another in spite of great differences on some points. In this latter respect the parallel with the "out-of-the-body experiences" is close, and when we come to analyse the drama of mediumship we shall find parallels there to both the classes of experience discussed in the present chapter. Common to both classes of experience is the sense of being in touch with some power which definitely is not the conscious mind of the poet, or percipient, as the case may be. The external powers sensed by the percipients were, it will be remembered, of many kinds, and so it is with the poets too. Emily Bronte's "Messenger of Hope" is as much an abstraction as the "mentor" of the Geddes case. Blake and "Kenwood" both speak of messages from a dead kinsman. Milton, in words suggestive of an actual out-of-the-body experience, speaks of Urania as sister to the Eternal Wisdom, and as such she is almost an aspect of Deity: Wiltse is admonished by a power with the traditional divine adjuncts of thunder and lightning. In Adonais and In Memoriam the power is, in some way, the soul of a dead man, and also, conjoined with it, the ultimate reality of the Universe.
To these sources of inspiration Blake adds his own antenatal memories for which the "out-of-the-body" experiences provide no parallel. One may however be found in the case of Hélène Smith, summarised in the next chapter, a case which lies on the boundary of dissociation and mediumship. The second passage quoted from Blake's Milton is of particular interest. The falling star there is reminiscent of the falling star in the Kenwood case, and the cloud of the same passage reminds us of Wiltse's cloud. Both in that passage of Blake and in the first passage quoted from the same poem the idea of a particular part of the body, hand or foot, being controlled by the external power suggests a connection with a phase of the Piper mediumship (see pp. 116-120 below), when her right hand and arm were, it is claimed, under a spirit-control different from that of the rest of her body. All these are doubtless details in themselves of no particular significance, but they may serve as clues to trace connections between mental states which at a first glance seem very different. In the out-of-the-body experiences the sense of separation from the body seems to be due to bodily illness or extreme bodily fatigue, or, as in some cases I have not quoted, to a severe physical shock, such as concussion in an air raid or a hammering in a boxing match. It is to be noted that of the authors mentioned, Blake's eccentricity came at times near insanity, Coleridge was an opium addict, Shelley, Emily Bronte and Stevenson were all consumptives. Milton (P.L. 111, 1-55) definitely associates his inspiration with his blindness. In view of the dream experiences mentioned at the beginning of this chapter-the dream of which Kubla Khan was a memory, the dream that solved the archaeologist's puzzle - it may be significant that Milton's inspiration came to him in sleep, or in the borderland state following on sleep ("dictates to me slumbering or when Morn purples the East"), and that it was at night that Tennyson fell into a trance and Emily Bronte was visited by the Messenger of Hope. Is it possible by comparison of the points of agreement and difference between all the experiences described in this chapter, dreams, "out-of-the-body" cases, and states of inspiration and ecstasy as known to the poets, to form a picture of the subconscious at work that will be of use in the later stages of the enquiry? It should be borne in mind that a group of experiences which are substantially similar may appear very unlike each other when they emerge into consciousness, for either or both of two reasons, first that even in a well-defined group there are likely to be real differences of detail in the subconscious impression they create, and secondly that the subconscious draws on an extensive symbolic repertory in presenting them to the conscious mind. This complicates the problem, but I suggest, that the following factors are common to all the experiences: (a) The partial or complete withdrawal of the mind from the pre-occupations of ordinary life. The withdrawal is slightest when, for example, Stevenson puts the finishing touches, with the Brownies' help, to work begun and fairly far advanced without conscious effort on his part. It is at its maximum when the sleeper on waking believes himself to have been presented with material complete, except for transcription. Cases of this latter kind raise the question whether there is during sleep subconscious, constructive mental activity, of which the waking consciousness retains at most a shadowy recollection, or whether in the borderland state following sleep constructive activity goes on with a pressure and at a speed which, when fully awake, we find hard to conceive. If Coleridge really had in his mind, when he started to write down Kubla Khan, not only the fragment that he has left us, but the complete poem of hundreds of lines which he believed himself to have dreamt, it is difficult to suppose that his creative power at the moment of waking could have composed the whole with such speed as to make him believe that all the work had been done during sleep. (b) There is a sense of existence at a higher level during the experience, which may take the form of greater mental clarity, enhanced creative power or ecstasy, and a corresponding distaste, sometimes extreme, for the return to normal, conscious life. It is to be noted however that some very inferior authors and artists have felt the sense of inspiration as keenly as any of the great masters. Perhaps the situation can best be explained by supposing that in all the instances cited in this chapter there is a temporary fusion of the conscious mind, when freed from the preoccupations of ordinary life, with the subconscious, a condition particularly likely to occur in the borderland state between sleep and waking. This was the state in which Urania dictated to Milton his "unpremeditated verse", and it may perhaps best be described in the words in which Milton calls on Celestial Light to "irradiate" his mind "through all her powers". This comes very near to suggesting that when all these poets claim that they have been inspired by an external Being or Power, they have deluded themselves and have simply been drawing on their. subconscious. That is a nation one would not readily entertain even in the case of Stevenson's Brownies, if one held the view that the subconscious was nothing more than an inferior section of the mind, and that the whole personality was closed against all access to reality except through the conscious use of the five senses. But if the view is accepted, that the conscious mind has been specialised to deal with the everyday details of life, and that the subconscious has wider and more subtle powers of apprehension, there is nothing derogatory to the Brownies, or the Daughters of Beulah, or even to Urania herself in regarding them all as self-dramatisations of the subconscious. In Chapter III it was suggested that in a crisis-apparition there was evidence of constructive work by the percipient's subconscious, elaborate perhaps in detail, but of short duration. In creative imagination, on the other hand, we have examples of subconscious constructive activity more complex, extending over years rather than seconds, and capable of producing works like Paradise Lost, famous alike for the architectural conception of the whole, and for elaboration of detail. But it must be the right subconscious, with a special association with the right person. Even so it would be imprudent to speak of "merely the subconscious", since it is an important function of the subconscious to be something more than itself, by mediating between the particular conscious mind with which it is specially associated, and other minds with which it has less intimate and continuous contact. If the view of telepathy put forward in the preceding chapters is even approximately true, it is impossible to divide into completely water-tight compartments the subconscious activities of members of a pair or group of persons in telepathic relation with each other, although for many purposes some of these activities more closely concern one of the pair than the other or one member of the group than the rest, and may conveniently be referred to as his activities. In the crisis-apparitions it is the percipient's subconscious that has the best claim to be responsible for the constructive, dramatic work, but prompted by an external stimulus. The same principle may govern creative imagination. Several of the experiences quoted on pp. 86-89 were in some degree mystical, as affirming contact with a superhuman reality, to which Tennyson applies the words, "that which is". It does not lie within the province of psychical research to venture any opinion as to the truth of such an affirmation, whether made by any of these poets, or more emphatically still by persons whom one associates with the name mystic. Only those who have had comparable experiences have a claim to be heard on this point. If, however, and so far as it is possible to apply ordinary standards to experiences from which the essential part as it would seem to them, the overwhelming vividness and certainty, has been left out, a scale could be drawn, at no point of which could a sharp division be made. At one end of this would be placed the authors who have felt that their best work came independently of their conscious effort, without any definite feeling as to how it came, and at the other the mystics who believe themselves to have been in touch with the One, however they name it. At various points in between would come the authors who have felt they have been conscious of the influence of some external source of power, which they proceed to personalise, but without the intensity of feeling or certainty experienced by the mystics. We are not justified in Putting any limit, any alte terminus haerens, on the power of the subconscious to apprehend what lies, or appears to lie, outside the individual mind, whether as regards the events, even the trivial events, of ordinary life, or whatever there is beyond flammantia moenia mundi. NOTE: In Memoriam, Section XCV: in the edition of 1878 Tennyson's "conscience" induced him to change the words "His living soup, of the original edition to "The living soul", and "his" to "this" in the next line. He did not apparently wish, at that time at least, to be misunderstood as claiming that his trance-experience proved, as regards Arthur Hallam's continued personal existence, a reality independent of his own feeling. He made no alteration in the phrase "that which is", as this was consistent with his belief that he had several times been in touch with the Great Soul. Transcendental experiences, as was said in Chapter Ill, start from normal life and return to it again. To express his awareness of this Tennyson uses a curious literary device. In the fourth stanza of this section, describing the setting of his lonely vigil, before the onset of the trance, he speaks of the knolls,
And in the thirteenth stanza, after his trance had ended, he repeats the same words.
Emily Brontë's The Prisoner. A parallel to the experience described here may be found in the account given by Lucy Snowe of the beginning, development and end of her trance in Chapters XV and XVI of Charlotte Brontë's Villette. Writing to G. H. Lewes in a letter, quoted in The Brontë Story by Margaret Lane (p. 194), Charlotte Bronte writes:
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Chapter 8: Dissociation
- W. H. Salter -
IT IS indeed a sharp descent from the empyreal air of the poet to the "Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire" of the psychiatrist, creatures that are now so familiar to the public through films and novels that some justification may seem to be needed for inviting the reader to bestow further attention upon them here The reason for doing so is that cases of "split personality" some times show curious parallels with some of the incidents of medium ship, and are sometimes reported to be accompanied by the production of paranormal phenomena both of the "physical" and "mental" types. These aspects of dissociation have therefore a special significance for psychical research. There are other aspects which raise many problems, psychological and physiological, which lie outside the scope of this discussion.
I will first summarise a case reported in SPR Proc. VI1 221- 257. In 1826 there was born in New York a boy called Ansel Bourne, who was trained as a carpenter and carried on that trade until 1857. In his youth he was religious, but became in course of time a convinced atheist, and developed feelings of enmity for the Minister who lived next door. In August of that year he had a severe illness, aggravated by a sunstroke, and broke down several times on attempting to resume work. On the 28th October he had a strong internal feeling that he ought to go to "Meeting" at the Chapel, but "his spirit rose up in decided and bitter opposition, and he said within himself 'I would rather he struck deaf and dumb for ever than to go there'." A few minutes later he lost sight, hearing and speech; he became perfectly helpless, but his mind remained quite clear, and he retained the sense of touch. Twenty-six hours later his sight was perfectly restored, and he wrote on a slate asking the Minister for forgiveness. He also asked, by writing, for a prayer-meeting to be held in his house, and attended the Chapel several times, being still deaf and dumb. On Sunday, 15th November, he wrote on a slate a long message, which the Minister read to the congregation. He then ascended the pulpit. In an instant his hearing and speech were completely restored. A fortnight later he had a vision, in consequence of which he became an evangelist. At first he travelled a great deal but as the result of his wife's disapproval of his frequent absences from home he confined his activities to his own neighbourhood. This troubled him and weighed on his conscience and may have contributed to the second great crisis of his life. On 17th January, 1887, he went from his home to Providence, R.I., to draw money to pay for a farm he was buying. He stabled his horse, drew several hundred dollars from the bank, paid various bills, and started to visit a sister living in that town. He never reached his sister's house, or took away his horse. About 1st February, 1887, there arrived in Norristown, Pa., a man who rented a stare-room there, living in half of it and using the other half as a small toy and sweet shop. He went by the name of A. J. Brown. There was nothing peculiar in his behaviour, which was quiet and respectable, and he attended the Methodist Church regularly. On the I 5th March, about five in the morning, he heard an explosion like a gun shot, and woke to find himself in a strange bed in a town he did not recognise. The last thing he could remember was visiting Providence. He was amazed to learn from a neighbour that he was in Norristown and that eight weeks had elapsed since he left home. A nephew from Providence came over, settled up his business affairs and took him back to Rhode Island. A few years later he was hypnotised and in trance gave an account of his doings and travels between the 17th January and the 1st February, which was substantially verified by enquiry at the places where he said he had stayed en route. This case shows dissociation in a very simple form. In neither of the two crises of Ansel Bourne's life was there any change Of character. In the first crisis there was temporary loss of control Of several bodily functions-sight, hearing, speech-and abrupt change of opinion, but no loss of personal identity or of memory. In the second crisis there was loss of identity, change of Occupation, and loss of memory for almost, not quite, everything belonging to his life before the 17th January, and for everything that had happened between then and the 1st February. Memory of the earlier life returned spontaneously in March: memory of the interval between 17th January and 1st February was tapped under hypnosis. The Beauchamp case, known by name at least to most readers, was more complex. Miss Beauchamp of Boston, Mass., came to Dr. Morton Prince for treatment in 1898, when she was twenty-three years old, and his report of the case, The Dissociation of a Personality (Longmans), is a document of absorbing interest. At the age of 13, Miss Beauchamp, a sensitive child much given to day-dreaming, had a severe shock with disastrous results on her mental stability. Her mother, whom she idolised, gave birth to a baby, and while the mother was seriously ill, Miss Beauchamp was given the baby to hold. It died in her arms, and her mother died soon after. Miss Beauchamp herself became "delirious", as the doctors put it, a word probably implying dissociation. A few years later she began to train as a hospital nurse and in 1893, while being trained, underwent a second shock, followed by a longer spell of dissociation, from which she was still suffering when she came under Prince's care. When Prince first knew her, she was, in his words, "a 'neurasthenic' of a pronounced type", suffering greatly from headaches, insomnia, bodily pains and other troubles. She was well-educated and religious and had strong literary tastes, but she was morbidly conscientious and reticent. It was only after treatment had proceeded for some time that Prince learnt of the shock she had had in 1893. In his book Prince gave the name BI to the personality with which he thus became acquainted. Prince treated BI by hypnotic suggestion, and found that when out of the hypnotic state she had no memory of what took place within it. To the hypnotised BI he gave the name BII. The treatment given produced a marked, though temporary, improvement in appetite, vigour and general bodily health. But after a few weeks' treatment the patient, while in hypnosis, first denied making certain statements which had been made during a previous period of hypnosis, and then admitted having made them. On a later occasion, not long after, the hypnotised patient spoke of herself as she was in her waking state, as "She". In the hypnotic state she persisted in saying "no" when Prince said "You are 'She'", and gave as her reason for the denial "Because 'she' does not know the same things as I do." This new personality BII later adopted for herself the name "Sally", by which she has become deservedly famous. Sally at first manifested herself only when BI had been hypnotised, but soon BI found herself being governed in her waking life by impulses alien to her own character, telling fibs, for example. Then one day in June, 1898, when BI was daydreaming, Sally made her take both hands and rub her eyes. So Sally "got her eyes open", and was in her own words "on top of the heap at last". She was able to control the body for hours at a time. BI would fade out, and then come to, perhaps with a lighted cigarette in her hand: she detested smoking. She would find that she had unaccountably "lost" several hours, and that the interval had been employed by Sally, who was insusceptible to fatigue, in taking the body a long walk which left it, when BI returned, dog-tired, or in writing indiscreet letters, which BI had to disown. Sally in fact enjoyed tormenting BI, who was an easy victim. But she met a tougher antagonist when in 1899 BIV appeared. There were then three personalities, BI, Sally and BIV controlling the body turn and turn about, as well as the BII of the hypnotic state. Each of the three had a different temperament. Each had also her own stream of memory and consciousness, and Sally claimed to have access to the memories of the other two. None of them, however, was capable of maintaining a normal, healthy existence for any length of time continuously. BI was an ultra-sensitive and conscientious adult. BIV was also adult, but self-reliant and self-assertive, with tastes that in general were exactly the opposite of Bl's. Sally had all the spontaneity and mischievousness of a child of twelve or thirteen. There were very large gaps in BI's memory, especially of things that had happened since the hospital episode in 1893: she had no knowledge of what occurred while either Sally or BIV were uppermost. BIV had no clear memory of things that happened between the hospital episode and her own emergence in 1899, but she came to acquire a good deal of knowledge of that period partly by inference from what she heard, partly from things coming hazily and unconsciously into her mind, and partly by "deliberate" effort of recollection. Sally claimed to remember everything that had happened since early infancy, both before and after the hospital episode, and whether she, BI or BIV were uppermost. She also knew Bl's thoughts, but not at first BIV's, and this lack of knowledge prevented her being able to bully BIV as she had bullied Bl. Eventually by a process of suggestion Prince achieved a synthesis of BI and BIV which he calls "the Real Miss Beauchamp". This meant "squeezing" Sally, who at first strongly objected, but came to acquiesce in the process and even to further it. One is glad to learn that in the final product the more engaging of Sally's characteristics, so regrettably lacking in the other two personalities, were not wholly destroyed. Among all the psychological subtleties carefully analysed by Prince the status of Sally is the one most important for an understanding of mediumship. Treatment of the kind applied by Prince tends perhaps in the early stages to emphasise any dissociations that may have arisen spontaneously, and may even go so far as to initiate others, but he was doubtless right in repudiating suggestions that Sally was no more than an artifact of his own creation. Her childishness was that of temperament rather than of intelligence. She had all the spontaneous gaiety varied with fractiousness of a lively child, and was very shrewd in the way children often are. But on occasion she would also show a power of sustained thinking, and a gift for expressing her trains of thought which seem to me exceptional even among clever children. It is reasonable to suppose that the two severe emotional shocks experienced by Miss Beauchamp during her adolescence, first at the time of her mother's death and then at the time of the episode at the hospital, prevented her personality developing in a balanced way as a whole. If however Prince was right in regarding Sally as a "co-conscious" entity, i.e. one capable of growth and development within the subconscious, that might account for the comparatively mature side that Sally sometimes showed. On one occasion BIV tried talking to Sally and asking her questions which, after some resistance, Sally answered in writing. To the question, "Who are you?" Sally replied "A Spirit", but this answer need not be taken too seriously as representing Sally's real views of herself. For some reason Prince heads the Chapter (XXII) in which this episode is narrated "Sally plays the medium", but the only foundation for this assertion is that Sally disclosed matters unknown to BIV. It is desirable to make this point plain, as in the other cases of multiple personality now to be mentioned a very much closer approximation to mediumship can be found. For instance in the Doris Fischer case, reported in the Proc. of the American SPR 1915, 1916 and reviewed in SPR Proc. Vol. XXIX, where the subject was a girl who had had a very severe shock in early childhood, there were several personalities bearing a general resemblance to the Beauchamp family group. When in 1909, at the age of twenty-one, she came in touch with the eminent American psychical researcher, Walter Prince(1), her mother had been dead for more than two years and her drunken father had used her as a household drudge, underfeeding and overworking her. Three personalities were then in joint occupation of the body, "Real Doris" who since the mother's death had only achieved conscious existence for a few minutes at a time, "Sick Doris", "morbidly the slave of duty and lacking in humour", and Margaret who was child-like in her limitations and enjoyed tormenting Sick Doris. In 1911 Walter Prince discovered a fourth personality, which only manifested when Margaret was asleep, and so became known as "Sleeping Margaret": she had a mature mind and helped Walter Prince with advice in the treatment of the case.(1) No relation of Morton Prince. By suggestion and persuasion, without hypnosis, Walter Prince succeeded in eliminating first Sick Doris and then Margaret, leaving Real Doris as the only personality active during waking hours, with Sleeping Margaret still uppermost during sleep. Walter Prince was puzzled as to Sleeping Margaret's nature and origin, matters on which she was reticent. Relying on her apparent immunity to the influence of suggestion, he put it to her that she was a spirit. This she repeatedly denied, but qualified her denials with ambiguous statements. It was eventually decided that Doris should have sittings with a medium, and when this had been arranged Sleeping Margaret wrote (see SPRProc. XXIX p. 394),
Then she said,
Doris Fischer was later on adopted by Walter and Mrs. Prince as their daughter and was known as Theodosia Prince. While she was a member of their household, occurrences of an ostensibly paranormal kind took place in three houses where they lived. They were observed by Walter Prince and formed the subject of a report by him to the Boston SPR of which he was the Executive Officer, under the title "The Psychic in the House'' (Boston SPR Proc. Vol. I, 1926). Some of the occurrences were raps and other auditory phenomena, as to the paranormality of which Walter Prince, a man with a highly critical mind but suffering from deafness, may possibly have been mistaken. But there were also crystal visions seen by Miss Prince relating to past events in the three houses, some of which were confirmed by previous occupants, and these, in Walter Prince's view, could only with extreme improbability be assigned to her normally acquired knowledge.
A still closer approach to mediumship appears in "the Watseka Wonder". In 1871 there were living at Watseka, Illinois, two families named Vennum and Roff: for a few months in that year they lived near each other, but nothing more than a slight acquaintance grew between them during that time. After that the Vennums moved to the other end of the city. They had a daughter named Lurancy, born in 1864 at a place about seven miles from Watseka. Later in that year they moved into another State, and they made various other moves before settling in Watseka in 1871. The Roffs had settled in Watseka in 1859. They had a daughter, Mary, born in 1846, who died in Watseka in 1865, when Lurancy Vennum was about a year and a half old. Mary Roff had suffered from periods of insanity. As a small child Lurancy was healthy, but in 1877 when she was thirteen, she began having fits or trances, sometimes several times a day, and these continued until the end of January 1878. In the trances she had ecstatic visions of heaven and angels, and of people who had died, including a small brother and sister. On the 31st January 1878 the Roffs persuaded the Vennums to call in a Dr. Stevens, who was a stranger to them. He found Lurancy looking like an "old hag", sullen and refusing to speak with anyone except himself. In his presence she had a fit which he relieved by hypnotising her. When she became calm, she said that she had been controlled by evil spirits, and he suggested she should find a better Control. She then mentioned the name of Mary Roff who, she said, wanted to come. Mary's father said that his daughter had been in heaven for twelve years, but that he and his wife would be glad to have her come. He told Lurancy that Mary had been used to the same conditions as she herself, and Lurancy said that Mary would take the place of the previous evil Controls. The next day Vennum told Roff that Lurancy claimed to be Mary and was "homesick". She remained with the Vennums for several days, being well-behaved, but not knowing the family, and "constantly pleading to go home", i.e. to the Roff household. On the 11th February she was sent by the Vennums to the house of the Roffs where she met the Roff family in a most affectionate way. Being asked how long she would stay, she said, "The angels will let me stay till some time in May", and she in fact stayed with them till the 21st May, 1878. During this period she was a happy member of the Roff family. She occasionally went into trance, and talked with angels and other spirits, but her physical health greatly improved. She readily recognised all the members of the Roff family and their friends, calling them by the pet-names Mary had used, and calling a lady, who had re-married since Mary's death, by her previous name. She remembered various incidents, some of then, trivial, occurring during Mary's life. She seemed also to have paranormal knowledge of contemporary events. Thus she announced one afternoon that her "brother", Frank Roff, then apparently in good health, would be taken seriously ill that night as happened. She then demanded that Dr. Stevens should be sent for, and declared that he would be found at a certain house. Tills was not where the Roffs believed him to be, but they sent there and found him. On the 19th May, 1878, Lurancy for a time resumed full possession of her own body, and recognised her brother, Henry Vennum. On the 21st she took a formal farewell of the Roff family and their friends, and was escorted to her father's office by a married Roff daughter. On arriving at the Vennum's home she recognised all the Vennum family, and was perfectly happy with them. When Dr. Stevens called the next day he had to be introduced as a stranger. She lived with the Vennums until 1882 when she married a farmer, and two years later moved further West. Until this move the Roffs continued to see her, and she would give them long messages from Mary. Her health remained good. The case was reported by Dr. Stevens in the Religio-Philosophical Journal for 1879, and Hodgson, the investigator of the Ansel Bourne case, contributed to the same paper a report of a visit paid by him to Watseka in 1890, when he cross-examined several of the principal witnesses. He failed however to get a reply to letters sent by him to Lurancy herself. Some years later Hodgson reported the case to the SPR: see Journal X pp. 98-104. It may be doubted whether as "Mary Roff", Lurancy ever showed paranormal knowledge. Although there had never been intimate friendship between the two families before 1878, the Roffs and Vennums had lived in the same town for nearly seven years, and for a short time had been close neighbours. No one can say with certainty how much gossip Lurancy may not have heard about the Roffs, and particularly about their daughter Mary, whose illness had been much discussed locally. Dr. Stevens's report is generally accepted as an accurate account of what came under his own observation, but he had had no special training in testing evidence of supposedly paranormal events, and Hodgson, who had had the requisite training, came on the scene too late to clear up the doubts on this point. His personal opinion, however, was that the case belonged "in its main manifestations to the spiritistic category", meaning presumably by "main manifestations" the incidents connected with the Mary Roff Control. He evidently considered that through that Control paranormal powers were displayed. On neither point did he win the support of all his colleagues on the Society's Council. The important point however for the present purpose is that the case started as one of pathological dissociation and was at first marked by the appearance of Controls, such as those that confronted Dr. Stevens when he was called in, who gave no evidence of an existence independent of Lurancy. Whatever view therefore be taken of the Mary Roff Control, the case can properly be cited as an example of a secondary personality dramatised as a group of spirits of the dead. The cases so far cited in this chapter happen all to have occurred in the United States. Parallel instances could have been quoted from British and Continental sources. The last case to be quoted, which differs in various ways from the preceding ones, is from Switzerland. In the closing years of the nineteenth century there was living at Geneva a young woman who held with success a responsible business position. She was healthy in body and mind, and her curious psychic experiences do not seem either to have been caused by her state of health, or yet to have affected it in any way. She gave sittings, without accepting payment, to a circle of friends. Professor Flournoy of Geneva University attended these sittings, made a study of her case and reported on it in a book the English translation of which is called From India to the Planet Mars. In this book she is given the pseudonym Hélène Smith. The psychic experiences of Hélène's adult life had their roots in incidents of her childhood. Although both her parents were Protestants, she was for some reason baptised in a Catholic Church. This circumstance, when she learnt of it, lent colour to a fantasy of a very common type, that there was some mystery about her birth, and that she was really someone different from, and of course superior to, the middle-class young woman she seemed to her neighbours to be. Then at the age of ten, when returning one day from school, she was attacked by a dog, from which she was rescued by a man, apparently a member of a religious order, wearing a brown robe. This incident caused a great shock to her. She had during childhood recurrent visions and other experiences, which led on to her taking part in séances. Her first Control claimed to be Victor Hugo, but a rival soon appeared who gave the name of Leopold. At a sitting in February, 1893, Leopold pulled away the chair on which Hélène was about to sit. For the most part however he was friendly to her, and she felt that at various times in her normal life he had helped and protected her. He claimed, during one of her trances, to have been the man in the brown robe who had rescued her from the dog. When in her normal condition however she knew that her rescuer had been a living man of her own time, while Leopold established himself in her belief as the eighteenth-century wonder-worker Cagliostro. If Leopold was Cagliostro, then Hélène must have been his wife, but on learning doubts as to the historicity of that lady, she became convinced she was the re-incarnation of Marie Antoinette. In October 1894 she learnt that she was also a reincarnation of a medieval Indian princess, Simandini, whose husband had been re-born as Prof. Flournoy. Under the guidance of Leopold she visited the planet Mars, learnt the language, and on her return to earth described and drew pictures of the inhabitants, their houses and the scenery, so that in addition to previous existences on earth, she was in her latest incarnation an inhabitant both of earth and Mars. Some of the Martians were old friends, such as the magician Astane, formerly the Indian magician Kanga. The various characters of this elaborate drama could be evoked at séances, but they would also intervene on their own initiative, as it were. Thus Hélène would begin to write a letter in her ordinary handwriting and Leopold would complete it in his handwriting, which, incidentally, bore no resemblance to that of the historic Cagliostro. The Marie Antoinette Control would do much the same. The Martian language, as written by Hélène, reproduced with surprising accuracy some of the grammatical and syntactical peculiarities of her native French. Her reminiscences of her Indian pre-existence, both so far as they coincided with historical fact, and on points where they were at variance with it, kept close to the statements to be found in an old history of India written in French. Hélène, whose bona fides was above suspicion, had no conscious recollection of having read the book, but copies of it were accessible in Genevan public libraries. Her Martian language was rather more elaborate and coherent than the language which children often invent to puzzle their elders, but may reasonably be taken as a highly developed specimen of that class. The Simandini and Made Antoinette Controls seem to be both examples of the self-magnifying fantasy based on the supposed Mystery of her birth, aided so far as regards the Indian episode, by subconscious memory of the history book mentioned above. In three points the case of Hélène Smith differs strikingly from those of Miss Beauchamp, Doris Fischer and Lurancy Vennum. For the whole period when she was under observation her general health, mental and physical, was good, and she was able to take an active and useful part in life. Her mediumship was fully developed. The principal personalities of the drama were all herself as transplanted from another planet, or from other ages on this planet, and the subordinate roles were filled by Genevan friends or acquaintances slightly disguised. The incident of the dog which attacked her left permanent traces both on Hélène's conscious and subconscious mind, on the former as a horror of dogs in general, on the latter in the production of the triad of wonder-workers, Leopold, Kanga, Astane, the first identified by her with her actual protector from the dog. But before he had established himself in a beneficent role, Leopold, by pulling the chair from under Hélène, showed that he was not free from the tendency to annoy, common among secondary personalities, even if he never showed the persistent hostility to her that Sally showed to BI and BIV. The shock of the dog incident did not however shatter Hélène's personality. This may have been one of the reasons for the reincarnationist form that the mediumship took. A Hélène transplanted to nineteenth-century Geneva from medieval India or eighteenth-century France or the planet Mars was still Hélène, despite all changes of name, place and time. But there may have been other reasons. In the English-speaking countries reincarnationist doctrine has, up to the present, affected spiritualism much less than elsewhere, probably because modern spiritualism was born a hundred years ago in the United States as one among many varieties of more or less Christian belief then flourishing or developing there. In most Latin countries on the other hand opposition to spiritualism by the dominant religion was from the start absolute, and the spiritualist movement was not tied to traditional Christian views of the life after death. As a natural consequence reincarnation, which has throughout the ages been part and parcel of many religious and philosophical systems, has found it comparatively easy to gain adherence in Latin countries, even among non-Catholic communities such as the Geneva of sixty years ago. The cases discussed in this chapter may naturally raise a doubt whether human personality is not so mutable and fragmentary as to make it absurd to suppose that it could conceivably survive the death of the body. If there is survival, is it Sally who is destined to survive, or BI or BIV or the Miss Beauchamp created (or was it reconstructed?) by Morton Prince's professional skill? This difficulty has been familiar to all who have combined the study of dissociation with that of paranormal phenomena. Myers, for example, in Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, a book whose title shows the conclusion to which his argument is directed, after discussing fully in his first five chapters cases of the kind quoted in this chapter and the preceding one, and much other matter indicative of the complexities of personality as well, writes as follows in the opening paragraph of his sixth chapter:
Myers did not live to complete his book, a fact which may perhaps account for the inconsistencies in his views of the subliminal which his critics have pointed out.
Among these critics was (Gerald) Lord Balfour, who was very familiar with the literature of alternating and multiple personalities. In his Presidential address (SPR Proc. XIX) Balfour put forward the view that the human organism was "polypsychic", that is to say that it consisted, so far as its psychical elements were concerned, of centres linked together by telepathy, one of the psychical centres being the controlling self. This view he elaborated in his study of Mrs. Willett's mediumship in SPR Proc. Vol. XLIII. Although his view differed so widely from that of Myers, it is well known that lie believed no less strongly in survival. An argument has sometimes been based on cases of dual or multiple personality that, if two or more "minds" (or whatever word is preferred) are specially connected with one body, each with different memories, temperaments, capacities, they cannot all be conditioned by the body which they share. One, or possibly both or all of them, must therefore be self-subsistent in life, and might well so continue after the death of the body. If so, the same would be true of all "minds", including those of persons whose psychological make up was normal. Modern psychological research has however, I understand, reduced the status of secondary personalities to that of moods of the principal partner. If that is so, the argument for survival from split personalities can no longer be maintained. It was always a two-edged argument, as the passage just quoted from Myers shows, and its disappearance is not one that believers in survival have any cause to regret. |
Chapter 9: The Control of Mediums
- W. H. Salter -
WHILE MEDIUMS might claim remote descent from such ancient and exalted persons as the Sibyl who guided Aeneas through the world of the dead, their pedigree in the direct line does not go back much more than a century and is of humble origin. Two young girls in fact, who in 1848 were living in a farmhouse in Arcadia, State of New York, Margaretta Fox aged 15, and her sister Katie aged twelve. On the evening of the 31st March, after the two girls had gone to bed, raps were heard which answered questions put in the presence of about a dozen persons, mostly neighbours called in by the parents. Correct answers were given to such questions as the ages of various neighbours, the number of their children, and of the deaths that had occurred in their families. In reply to a question as to who was giving the answers it was stated to be a pedlar who had been murdered on the spot for a sum of $500 he had been carrying. There is no reason to suppose that the pedlar or his $500 ever existed.
It was his spirit that was credited by the Arcadians with producing the raps, though it was noticed that at first they did not occur unless the girls were present. Their fame grew: together with an elder sister they gave sittings for raps in several towns. After an exhibition which they gave at Rochester, N.Y., three professors of the local university declared that the raps were produced by deliberate movements of the girls' knee-joints, but this did not check the growth of the movement they had set on foot. Raps broke out in houses they had never visited. There was an epidemic of rapping, and by 1851 there were said to be a hundred Mediums in New York City.
The mediumistic movement soon spread to Europe, with the Fox sisters among the leaders. Great however as was their fame, it was overshadowed by that of D. D. Home, who paid his first visit to England in 1855. The most famous of all mediums, he gave sittings in many countries to royalties, and to persons eminent in other walks of life, scientists like William Crookes, arid writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He is the original from whom Robert Browning, who intensely disliked Home's influence over his wife, drew Mr. Sludge, the Medium, an admirable study of the relations between the sillier type of sitter and the less reputable type of medium, but unfair in one important point, if the reader is intended to identify Sludge with Home. Sludge in the poem is caught cheating and, though there were several suspicious incidents in Home's career, fraud was never proved against him.
Messages claiming to come from the spirits of the dead were given through Home, but they do not seem in themselves to have been very impressive. In 1926 Lord Dunraven published through the SPR (Proc. Vol. XXXV) the account of his sittings with Home which he had printed for private circulation in 1870. To the new issue Oliver Lodge contributed an Introduction in which he lists and classifies the phenomena described under ten headings, nine of them referring to phenomena of the purely "physical" type. The remaining one is the so-called "direct voice", in which messages are given in what is claimed to be the voice of the Communicator: since it is the resemblance of the voice, and not the content of the message, that is considered important, this is in fact as "physical" a phenomenon as the other nine.
Many of Home's "physical" phenomena are extremely difficult to explain away by normal means, unless one attributes to the many eminent witnesses of them an astounding incompetence as observers and as recorders of what they observed. But while these witnesses have recorded the deep impression made on them by such feats as Home's taking in his hands a red-hot coal from the fire and placing it on the head of an old gentleman without doing an injury to his own hand or the other's head, it is not, I think, reported that while doing this any of those who saw it exclaimed, "How characteristic of poor dear So-and-so! just how he used to behave!" Physical phenomena may, possibly, provide evidence of the existence of some physical force not at present recognised by science; they are no evidence at all of the survival of any person who has departed this life, unless either there is present at the sitting a form perceptible to the sitters' senses and such as the surviving spirit may reasonably be supposed to inhabit, or else there occurs behaviour distinctive of the bodily activity of that person. The question as to the genuineness and origin of materialised forms was sufficiently discussed in Chapter VI. As to physical phenomena purporting to be produced by a surviving spirit, the more paranormal they are the less likely are they to be distinctive or even appropriate, and vice versa, since the conditions of ordinary life are very different from those of a properly controlled séance. It is, for example, a common occurrence in séances held in the dark for a tambourine to be shaken, ostensibly by the communicating spirit. The number of persons addicted to this practice in life cannot be considerable. It is a habit which, if the phenomena are genuine, we must suppose we adopt when we join the Choir Invisible.
It is sometimes claimed that messages purporting to come from a particular dead person, and not uncharacteristic of him, are strengthened as evidence of his survival and identity when accompanied by "physical" phenomena, also purporting to be due to him. If the messages are by themselves sufficient to establish his survival (as to which see the chapters that follow this), then the "physical" phenomena accompanying them are superfluous. If the messages do not prove themselves, they are no guarantee of the "physical" phenomena. Even if the genuineness of these phenomena is established on other grounds, such as the adequacy of the control measures in force at the sitting, their origin cannot be proved by communications which are themselves of dubious authenticity. Not all believers in "physical" phenomena accept the spiritualistic view of them. As in the case of materialisations, so with regard to other "physical" phenomena, alternative explanations have the support of several eminent and experienced investigators.
I shall accordingly omit further discussion of "physical" phenomena except in so far as their occurrence throws light on the psychological situation in which phenomena of the so-called "mental" type are produced, as it does in the mediumship (1872-1883) of Stainton Moses. As this was in several ways a turning-point in the history of mediumship, it may be a convenient place to explain some of the words that will be used to describe the personalities, actual or ostensible, now to be discussed and the phenomena connected with them. Psychical research and spiritualism both have fairly long histories in the course of which they have elaborated terminologies, not always mutually consistent, sometimes based on obsolete conceptions of the things intended to be defined, and changing with the course of time. Where a word has become established in general use, it has seemed to me better to retain it with such change in definition as lucidity may demand, even at the expense of verbal symmetry, rather than to bother the reader with a new technical term that fresh research might in a few years render obsolete.
There is no very convenient or exact term in general use to describe the sort of medium whose phenomena are not of the "physical" order. "Mental" as applied to persons has an unfortunate connotation, and is anyhow inexact. "Clairvoyant" is no longer tolerable now that clairvoyance has acquired a more precise definition: its use would only lead to serious 'confusion. "Trance-medium" is also inexact, as "physical" phenomena are generally produced in trance, or ostensibly so, and moreover while many "communications" are received in trance, others, especially those received through automatic writing, are not. As however it is short and less misleading than "clairvoyant" it will be used to cover all forms of mediumship in which communications are received that purport to come from the surviving spirits of the dead. Automatists are a type of trance-medium who practise one on the various techniques described in a later chapter.
In the early days of trance-mediumship, the view was prevalent that during trance a spirit invaded the medium's body of which it took complete and undivided control, displacing the medium's own spirit. Hence the personalities who claimed to manifest during the trance were called "Controls". (It is now usual to spell this word with a capital C when applied to a trance personality, and with a small c when applied to the condition prevailing when such a personality is manifesting.) In course of time however it became desirable to distinguish between (a) the spirits whose purpose it was to give evidence of their identity to their friends on earth, and messages of interest to them, these being called "Communicators", and (b) other spirits who made no serious attempt to prove their identity, but confined themselves to introducing the Communicators and relaying their messages in the third person ("He says" etc.), to arranging the times, duradon and general conditions of sittings, to imparting moral exhortation, and to explaining the philosophy of mediumship. It is to spirits of this second kind that the word "Control" is now mostly applied. It remains in general use even by persons who do not accept the independent existence of Controls, or, if they accept it, do not regard the medium's own mind or spirit as being eliminated by the Control's activity.
The distinction between Control and Communicator is not sharply defined. Some Communicators speak in the first person without the intervention of a separate Control: this state of things is called "direct control". Some, besides sending evidential messages themselves, introduce other Communicators. It may not be superfluous at this point to remind the reader of what was said in Chapter II that the omission of qualifying words such as "ostensible" in speaking of controlling or communicating personalities, while convenient for the sake of brevity, does not imply any assertion whether they are, or are not, what they purport to
The mediumship of Stainton Moses has been spoken of as a historical turning-point. It may be so considered for several reasons. It began in what may be called the pre-historical period before the founding of the SPR in 1882 made psychical research an organised study. Stainton Moses was an original member of the Society. He produced both physical and mental phenomena. Later mediums have specialised in one or the other, there being no more recent example of a trance-medium worth serious consideration who produced notable physical phenomena, or of a cc physical" medium through whom communications of importance have been received. In his mediumship the distinction between Control and Communicator becomes plain, about a third of the four score spirits manifesting through him being the spirits Of persons recently dead who claimed to give evidence of their survival and identity.
An interesting and instructive example is the manifestation at sittings on the 1st and 2nd September, 1874, of a Communicator who gave the name Abraham Florentine. An extract from Stainton Moses's notebook for 1st September, 1874, reads:
It was his spirit that was credited by the Arcadians with producing the raps, though it was noticed that at first they did not occur unless the girls were present. Their fame grew: together with an elder sister they gave sittings for raps in several towns. After an exhibition which they gave at Rochester, N.Y., three professors of the local university declared that the raps were produced by deliberate movements of the girls' knee-joints, but this did not check the growth of the movement they had set on foot. Raps broke out in houses they had never visited. There was an epidemic of rapping, and by 1851 there were said to be a hundred Mediums in New York City.
The mediumistic movement soon spread to Europe, with the Fox sisters among the leaders. Great however as was their fame, it was overshadowed by that of D. D. Home, who paid his first visit to England in 1855. The most famous of all mediums, he gave sittings in many countries to royalties, and to persons eminent in other walks of life, scientists like William Crookes, arid writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He is the original from whom Robert Browning, who intensely disliked Home's influence over his wife, drew Mr. Sludge, the Medium, an admirable study of the relations between the sillier type of sitter and the less reputable type of medium, but unfair in one important point, if the reader is intended to identify Sludge with Home. Sludge in the poem is caught cheating and, though there were several suspicious incidents in Home's career, fraud was never proved against him.
Messages claiming to come from the spirits of the dead were given through Home, but they do not seem in themselves to have been very impressive. In 1926 Lord Dunraven published through the SPR (Proc. Vol. XXXV) the account of his sittings with Home which he had printed for private circulation in 1870. To the new issue Oliver Lodge contributed an Introduction in which he lists and classifies the phenomena described under ten headings, nine of them referring to phenomena of the purely "physical" type. The remaining one is the so-called "direct voice", in which messages are given in what is claimed to be the voice of the Communicator: since it is the resemblance of the voice, and not the content of the message, that is considered important, this is in fact as "physical" a phenomenon as the other nine.
Many of Home's "physical" phenomena are extremely difficult to explain away by normal means, unless one attributes to the many eminent witnesses of them an astounding incompetence as observers and as recorders of what they observed. But while these witnesses have recorded the deep impression made on them by such feats as Home's taking in his hands a red-hot coal from the fire and placing it on the head of an old gentleman without doing an injury to his own hand or the other's head, it is not, I think, reported that while doing this any of those who saw it exclaimed, "How characteristic of poor dear So-and-so! just how he used to behave!" Physical phenomena may, possibly, provide evidence of the existence of some physical force not at present recognised by science; they are no evidence at all of the survival of any person who has departed this life, unless either there is present at the sitting a form perceptible to the sitters' senses and such as the surviving spirit may reasonably be supposed to inhabit, or else there occurs behaviour distinctive of the bodily activity of that person. The question as to the genuineness and origin of materialised forms was sufficiently discussed in Chapter VI. As to physical phenomena purporting to be produced by a surviving spirit, the more paranormal they are the less likely are they to be distinctive or even appropriate, and vice versa, since the conditions of ordinary life are very different from those of a properly controlled séance. It is, for example, a common occurrence in séances held in the dark for a tambourine to be shaken, ostensibly by the communicating spirit. The number of persons addicted to this practice in life cannot be considerable. It is a habit which, if the phenomena are genuine, we must suppose we adopt when we join the Choir Invisible.
It is sometimes claimed that messages purporting to come from a particular dead person, and not uncharacteristic of him, are strengthened as evidence of his survival and identity when accompanied by "physical" phenomena, also purporting to be due to him. If the messages are by themselves sufficient to establish his survival (as to which see the chapters that follow this), then the "physical" phenomena accompanying them are superfluous. If the messages do not prove themselves, they are no guarantee of the "physical" phenomena. Even if the genuineness of these phenomena is established on other grounds, such as the adequacy of the control measures in force at the sitting, their origin cannot be proved by communications which are themselves of dubious authenticity. Not all believers in "physical" phenomena accept the spiritualistic view of them. As in the case of materialisations, so with regard to other "physical" phenomena, alternative explanations have the support of several eminent and experienced investigators.
I shall accordingly omit further discussion of "physical" phenomena except in so far as their occurrence throws light on the psychological situation in which phenomena of the so-called "mental" type are produced, as it does in the mediumship (1872-1883) of Stainton Moses. As this was in several ways a turning-point in the history of mediumship, it may be a convenient place to explain some of the words that will be used to describe the personalities, actual or ostensible, now to be discussed and the phenomena connected with them. Psychical research and spiritualism both have fairly long histories in the course of which they have elaborated terminologies, not always mutually consistent, sometimes based on obsolete conceptions of the things intended to be defined, and changing with the course of time. Where a word has become established in general use, it has seemed to me better to retain it with such change in definition as lucidity may demand, even at the expense of verbal symmetry, rather than to bother the reader with a new technical term that fresh research might in a few years render obsolete.
There is no very convenient or exact term in general use to describe the sort of medium whose phenomena are not of the "physical" order. "Mental" as applied to persons has an unfortunate connotation, and is anyhow inexact. "Clairvoyant" is no longer tolerable now that clairvoyance has acquired a more precise definition: its use would only lead to serious 'confusion. "Trance-medium" is also inexact, as "physical" phenomena are generally produced in trance, or ostensibly so, and moreover while many "communications" are received in trance, others, especially those received through automatic writing, are not. As however it is short and less misleading than "clairvoyant" it will be used to cover all forms of mediumship in which communications are received that purport to come from the surviving spirits of the dead. Automatists are a type of trance-medium who practise one on the various techniques described in a later chapter.
In the early days of trance-mediumship, the view was prevalent that during trance a spirit invaded the medium's body of which it took complete and undivided control, displacing the medium's own spirit. Hence the personalities who claimed to manifest during the trance were called "Controls". (It is now usual to spell this word with a capital C when applied to a trance personality, and with a small c when applied to the condition prevailing when such a personality is manifesting.) In course of time however it became desirable to distinguish between (a) the spirits whose purpose it was to give evidence of their identity to their friends on earth, and messages of interest to them, these being called "Communicators", and (b) other spirits who made no serious attempt to prove their identity, but confined themselves to introducing the Communicators and relaying their messages in the third person ("He says" etc.), to arranging the times, duradon and general conditions of sittings, to imparting moral exhortation, and to explaining the philosophy of mediumship. It is to spirits of this second kind that the word "Control" is now mostly applied. It remains in general use even by persons who do not accept the independent existence of Controls, or, if they accept it, do not regard the medium's own mind or spirit as being eliminated by the Control's activity.
The distinction between Control and Communicator is not sharply defined. Some Communicators speak in the first person without the intervention of a separate Control: this state of things is called "direct control". Some, besides sending evidential messages themselves, introduce other Communicators. It may not be superfluous at this point to remind the reader of what was said in Chapter II that the omission of qualifying words such as "ostensible" in speaking of controlling or communicating personalities, while convenient for the sake of brevity, does not imply any assertion whether they are, or are not, what they purport to
The mediumship of Stainton Moses has been spoken of as a historical turning-point. It may be so considered for several reasons. It began in what may be called the pre-historical period before the founding of the SPR in 1882 made psychical research an organised study. Stainton Moses was an original member of the Society. He produced both physical and mental phenomena. Later mediums have specialised in one or the other, there being no more recent example of a trance-medium worth serious consideration who produced notable physical phenomena, or of a cc physical" medium through whom communications of importance have been received. In his mediumship the distinction between Control and Communicator becomes plain, about a third of the four score spirits manifesting through him being the spirits Of persons recently dead who claimed to give evidence of their survival and identity.
An interesting and instructive example is the manifestation at sittings on the 1st and 2nd September, 1874, of a Communicator who gave the name Abraham Florentine. An extract from Stainton Moses's notebook for 1st September, 1874, reads:
"A new spirit manifested by tilts. He gave his name as Abraham Florentine, and lie was in the American War of 1812, died August 5th 1874, aged 83 years, 1 month, 17 days, at Brooklyn."
From enquiries made of his widow it was shown that the statements made as to his name, the date and place of his death, and his war service were correct. As to his age there appeared to he a trifling mistake: he was indeed 83 years old, but as his birthday was the 8th June, he had lived in addition 1 month and 27 days, not one month and 17. On the whole however the message seemed at the time to provide striking evidence for spirit communication. But further enquiry made in 1921 showed that the mistake might be significant. An entry in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of the evening of the 5th August 1874 read:
FLORENTINE. In Brooklyn, August 5th, after a long and painful illness, ABRAHAM FLORENTINE aged 83 years, 1 month and 17 days. A veteran of the war of 1812. Notice of funeral hereafter.
The New York Daily Tribune of the 6th August 1874 printed an almost identical notice, with the same statement as to his age. It is to be noted that, though neither Stainton Moses's contemporary record nor Mrs. Speer's account of the sitting say anything as to the length of Abraham Florentine's illness or whether it was painful, Stainton Moses in a letter to the Spiritualist speaks of "his liberation from the body which (if I may guess again) had become a burden to him from a painful illness". This fact supports the inference suggested by the correspondence between the newspaper notices and the record of the sitting, especially where both were incorrect, that the source of the information given at the sitting was one of the newspapers.
If so, how had it come to Stainton Moses's conscious, or subconscious, mind? Enthusiasts for an indefinite extension of extrasensory perception might attribute it to direct clairvoyance, or possibly to telepathy between the compositor in America and Stainton Moses. If however it was possible for him to have read the Obituary in either paper, it would be simpler to assume that he had in fact read it. There was time for the newspapers to reach London, where he lived, before the sitting, but there is no evidence that he actually saw them, and it may appear curious that if he had done so he should have forgotten it within a few days. There being no ground for imputing conscious deception to him, it must be supposed that the newspaper entry attracted a casual glance ("marginal perception" is the term), making no impression on his conscious memory, but producing a latent subconscious memory that was activated by the conditions of the sitting. The possibility of marginal perception with consequent latent memory is the most serious difficulty to be faced when assessing records of sittings with trance mediums. For this important case see SPR Proceedings XI, 82-85 and Journal XX 148-152, 223-226.
For the present purpose however a greater interest attaches to the Controls who gave no evidence of identity that need be considered. It is of course conceivable that the Egyptian Chom, not otherwise known to fame, or the prophet Haggai, or Plotinus, or Beethoven or Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few of this group, might have given Stainton Moses information about themselves which could be shown to be true and which could be shown at the same time not to have formed part of his extensive scholarly knowledge, but so far as I know this did not happen.
Within this group the lead was taken by a band of spirits who assumed descriptive Latin names such as "Imperator Servus Dei", "Rector", "Prudens", etc., to conceal their identities from the world at large. The names they had borne on earth were revealed to Stainton Moses, but not made public during his life or for some time after. They included characters from the Old and New Testaments, and learned men of various periods and countries.
The most anomalous of the Controls was "Little Dicky", a child spirit, who on one occasion during a séance is reported to have brought a brass candlestick from another room and hit the medium over the head with it. It is not unnatural that to many of the medium's contemporaries, who knew Stainton Moses to be in ordinary life a sincere and conscientious man, such an assault should seem, however playfully intended, conclusive proof that "Little Dicky" was a personality quite separate from his victim. To a later generation familiar with records of poltergeist cases and the story of Sally Beauchamp, this is not at all so obvious. Comparison with them suggests exactly the opposite, that "Little Dicky" was a dramatisation of one aspect of the medium's subconscious, and that it is not unlikely that other aspects were dramatised by other of his Controls.
This suggestion would not deserve to carry much weight in tile absence of reasonable motives for so elaborate a mystification. Subconscious motives of course, because as regards his conscious mind there is no doubt that Stainton Moses sincerely believed in the independent reality of the Controls. The primary consideration was, I think, that only through the Controls could he effectively fulfil his mission of giving to the world the philosophy embodied in the "Spirit Teachings" dictated by them. They provided a multiple alias for the expression of views formed by him over many years, which it would have been impossible to reconcile with the doctrines of the Church of England of which he was a priest, though he no longer had a cure of souls. Moreover these opinions were more likely to impress the world if issued over the names of a host of saints and sages than they would have done if he had claimed to, be their author.
A secondary motive may have been that in the company of the saints and sages he obtained welcome relief from the dull routine of a schoolmaster's life, diversified otherwise only by frequent bouts of illness. Perhaps "Little Dicky" was a relief from too many saints and sages.
The mediumship of Mrs. Piper, the most famous of trance mediums, began in 1884, the year following the close of Stainton Moses's activity. She lived to a great age, dying in 1950, but does not seem to have produced anything of importance after 1915. During the whole of her active mediumship she was under the close investigation of critical and competent researchers. She willingly collaborated with them, and they were all agreed that she was perfectly honest, and that the communications received through her conveyed information outside her normally acquired knowledge. On two points however there was disagreement, whether any of her Controls existed independently of her, and whether any of the communications should be taken as what they claimed to be, messages from particular dead persons. The latter point will be discussed in another chapter, and all that need for the present be said is that through Mrs. Piper there was for the, first time obtained a substantial body of evidence on which such a claim could with any show of reason be based.
Mrs. Piper's mediumship may be divided into five periods, in the first four of which her communications were produced in trance, while in the fifth she practised automatic writing without trance. The first period began when, an her second visit to a healing medium named Cocke for relief from the effects of an accident, she herself went into trance. The main Control during this period, which lasted until 1892, was Phinuit who claimed to have been a French doctor. Cocke had a doctor-Control called Finney, and Mrs. Piper's Phinuit (the spelling is due to the sitter who recorded her trance) obviously owed his name and his self-attributed doctorship to Cocke's Control. Phinuit had only a smattering of French and no systematic knowledge of medicine, and he made contradictory statements as to his birthplace. But he seems to have shown some flair for diagnosis and he impressed his investigators as a personality who, whatever his own psychological status, should be taken seriously. He was the dominant Control during Mrs. Piper's first visit to England in 1889-1890, when she was investigated by a very able SPR Committee consisting of Myers, Lodge and Walter Leaf. His last appearance was in 1897. In 1892 a young man named Pellew (called in the records George Pelham. or G.P.) died suddenly in America, where he had been well known to Hodgson, Mrs. Piper's principal investigator. At a sitting a few weeks after his death, at which Phinuit was Control, G.P. appeared as Communicator and gave the anonymous sitter correct information. Later he acted as Control, frequently until 1896, and more rarely after that.
The third period may be considered as extending from January 1897 to Hodgson's sudden death in December 1905. The main Control at this time was Rector, who was introduced by a Control calling himself Stainton Moses as a former member of his Imperator group. The name to which the Moses-Rector laid claim had not at this time been made public: it was in fact St. Hippolytus. The Piper-Rector failed to establish his identity with the Moses-Rector, being unable to give this name, or indeed to give proofs of being any person who had ever lived. He was none the less, on the testimony of several sitters, distinctly impressive, and was regarded by William James as having a "Capacity for being a spiritual advise?' superior to that of Mrs. Piper in the state of ordinary consciousness. He continued as main Control after Hodgson's death and acted as such during the fourth period of the mediumship.
With the changes in Controls was associated a change in the Condition in which Mrs. Piper gave messages. In the first period the messages were entirely oral, delivered in trance. In the second they were mainly oral, with some writing, delivered in trance in either case. During these periods entry into trance was painful, but with the advent of Rector it became much easier. The messages were given during this, the third period, in writing while the trance lasted, the whole body of the medium, except the hand that wrote, appearing inert. The same conditions prevailed during the fourth period, which lasted until 1911, when her Imperator Control "closed the light". There followed a fifth period when she wrote automatically but not in trance.
In addition to the principal Controls named, the Piper mediumship had a host of minor ones. There was, for instance, a Mentor who asserted his identity with the Stainton Moses Control of the same name. The latter claimed to be Algazzali, an eleventh century Arab philosopher. But the Piper-Mentor avowed himself to be the classical Ulysses, not, one would say, a person pre-eminently fitted to serve as a spiritual guide. There was a Sir Walter Scott who declared there were monkeys in the sun, and a George Eliot who had met Adam Bede in heaven. These are obvious absurdities, not worth further discussion were it not that their appearance raises doubts as to the scope of fantasy in her mediumship as a whole, and so casts doubts on the claims to an independent existence made by the principal Controls, Phinuit, G.P., and Rector.
None of these three can so readily be dismissed as figments of Mrs. Piper's subconscious. Their status was debated at great length and with much ability on both sides in SPR Proceedings. In favour of their independence there are several points deserving consideration, but none in my view conclusive. First there is the integrity of Mrs. Piper's conscious mind, which is admitted, but is not inconsistent with elaborate dramatisation in the subconscious, examples of which have been given in Chapter VII. Then there is the fact, accepted by critical investigators, that though neither Phinuit nor Rector could prove their identity, each in his way seemed to surpass Mrs. Piper's normal powers. Here again Chapter VII should be taken into account.
The other points relate to the veridical nature of the communications made by all of them. In particular a plausible, but not in my view conclusive, case could be made out for regarding G.P.'s apparent success as a Communicator, which will be discussed in a later chapter, as guaranteeing his independence as a Control.
To define the status of the Piper Controls is a matter of great psychological interest, but does not very closely concern the question of survival, since whatever view be taken as to their independence no action of theirs is as relevant to that question as the communications obtained through the same medium. The same is true of the Controls of other trance mediums and the messages received through them.
It is however of interest to note that the odd phenomenon of Mrs. Piper's hand acting as if it by itself, and it alone, possessed intelligence, has a parallel in the case of Anna Winsor, (1860-1863: see H.P. I. 354-360). Not indeed a complete parallel, as Anna Winsor represented "an extreme form of hystero-epilepsy" while Mrs. Piper, though often in great physical pain, was notably placid in temperament. Anna Winsor, who called her right arm and hand "Old Stump", regarded them as something intelligent but foreign, as Mrs. Piper's right hand gave the appearance of being. But there was in Mrs. Piper's case no such show of hostility between the hand and the rest of the organism as was recorded with Anna Winsor.
At the end of her sittings Mrs. Piper several times spoke of "sliding down" a cord into the body, or of being pulled back by one, and she also expressed disgust at finding herself back in normal life, in a way recalling the feelings of the percipient in "out-of-the-body" experiences. While in hospital, after an operation it seems, she had a well-developed experience of this type, which she styles "a dream or vision". Two of her Controls, Phinuit and G.P., appeared to her. She heard voices saying "Come, we wish to take you with us: we wish to give you a rest from your tired body". After a pause she felt she was being lifted and was not on her bed. She passed through a delicate blue drapery, and "saw a light as though all space-the whole earth was aglow-such a light! I never saw anything like it before". She was greeted by singing, and a ring of beautiful women dancing, passed between hedges with flowers, and came to a pillared building where she met several dead relations and Communicators. She felt a stab in the back where she was attached to a cord that looked like the ray of light which she had followed in her ascent. She was pulled back to her body and found herself awake. "My body seemed so dark and heavy as though it did not belong to me: I had to struggle for breath. I felt depressed to think that I had got back." (Proc. XXVIII, 377-380).
The analogy between some aspects of the Piper mediumship and conditions unassociated with mediumship described in earlier chapters is obvious. But in considering the nature of mediumistic Controls one is not entirely confined to argument from analogy. More direct psychological methods have been brought to bear on the Controls of some recent mediums, such as Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Garrett. Mrs. Leonard's only Control, apart from Communicator-Controls, is the child Feda, who in some ways, but not altogether, closely resembles secondary personalities of the Sally type. Feda, like Sally, is most amusing, and professes a contempt for her medium, not unlike that which Sally boasted to have for Miss Beauchamp, or Margaret for Doris Fischer. But whereas both Sally and Margaret were guilty of spiteful actions, Feda has never gone beyond causing Mrs. Leonard such embarrassments as prevailing on her to give an expensive present or to walk through the streets of a town trailing a toy balloon. Feda is moreover, on the universal testimony of Mrs. Leonard's sitters, absolutely straightforward. For a character sketch of her see SPR Proceedings XXXII, 344-378.
In 1933 Whately Carington began to apply to Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Garrett, both of whom collaborated most willingly, the established psychological technique of word-association tests. The method is to read to a subject lists of stimulus words to which the subject replies with the first words he thinks of. The subject's reactions, e.g. the time between stimulus and response, are noted and on examination are found to show a pattern characteristic of each subject.
Carington administered this test first to each of these mediums in their normal state, and then, using the same stimulus-list to each of them in trance. The analysis of the results led to a long technical discussion in several volumes of SPR Proceedings. Carington's conclusion, which was not however accepted by all Mrs. Leonard's sitters, was that Feda was a secondary personality, probably formed round a nucleus of material repressed by the medium's conscious mind.
With Mrs. Garrett recourse has also been had to the electro- encephalograph, by which the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex is recorded on a moving paper strip, the record being known as an electro-encephalogram. or E.E.G. The purpose was to discover whether mediumistic trance could be shown to have features distinguishing it from the normal ("alpha") rhythm observed with subjects resting but awake, and from the rhythm observed in hypnosis, in hysterical dissociation, and in light and deep sleep. The instrument was attached to Mrs. Garrett's head at two sessions in 1951, first when she was awake but resting, and then while she went into, remained in, and came out of trance, during which time her Control, Uvani, spoke. Trance was at the second session induced by hypnosis. The SPR Journal (XXXVI, 588-596) reports, "There was no significant E.E.G. change when the subject went into or came out of either the trance state or the hypnotic state".
E.E.G. tests, and other physiological tests, have a bearing on the status of Controls only if it be a valid assumption that the correlation between mental processes and bodily conditions is constant, whether the mental processes manifest themselves in normal or paranormal activities. This has yet to be proved, and indeed such evidence as is available suggests that in telepathy mental activity may occur without a corresponding physical stimulus, a conception which many scientists find difficulty in accepting notwithstanding the impressive mass of evidence in its favour. In the present state of knowledge therefore physiological tests, whether they give positive or, as in the E.E.G. test described above, negative results, are not conclusive for or against the independence of Controls.
In the latter part of this book much will be said about the "SPR group of automatists", whose contribution towards a solution of the problem of survival is generally agreed to be outstanding. A discussion of the bearing on this problem of the status of Controls would he incomplete without consideration of the part they play in the scripts of this group, which represent each of the members of the group as being in touch with another group consisting of Communicators, all identifiable either by their names or in other ways. Of the five principal members of the group of automatists none had a Control who was not also a Communicator, i.e. who did not give messages purporting to be evidential. With some of the automatists the Communicators hardly emerged from an impersonal collectivity, the messages being introduced with some such phrase as "they say". With others a Communicator would take on for a time a not very strongly marked individuality, and with one, Mrs. Willett, the Control-Communicators took on marked personal characteristics of speech and manner. In the "cross-correspondences" which were an important feature of these scripts, the scripts of two or more automatists of the group had to be read together to get at the meaning. For this purpose the degree of personalisation shown by the Control-Communicators of the various automatists counted for nothing. The evidence therefore of the automatic writings of the SPR group does not run counter to the view formed from a survey of trance-mediumship in general that the case for survival is not strengthened by the very doubtful claims to independent existence made by Controls, so far as they can be differentiated from Communicators.
If so, how had it come to Stainton Moses's conscious, or subconscious, mind? Enthusiasts for an indefinite extension of extrasensory perception might attribute it to direct clairvoyance, or possibly to telepathy between the compositor in America and Stainton Moses. If however it was possible for him to have read the Obituary in either paper, it would be simpler to assume that he had in fact read it. There was time for the newspapers to reach London, where he lived, before the sitting, but there is no evidence that he actually saw them, and it may appear curious that if he had done so he should have forgotten it within a few days. There being no ground for imputing conscious deception to him, it must be supposed that the newspaper entry attracted a casual glance ("marginal perception" is the term), making no impression on his conscious memory, but producing a latent subconscious memory that was activated by the conditions of the sitting. The possibility of marginal perception with consequent latent memory is the most serious difficulty to be faced when assessing records of sittings with trance mediums. For this important case see SPR Proceedings XI, 82-85 and Journal XX 148-152, 223-226.
For the present purpose however a greater interest attaches to the Controls who gave no evidence of identity that need be considered. It is of course conceivable that the Egyptian Chom, not otherwise known to fame, or the prophet Haggai, or Plotinus, or Beethoven or Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few of this group, might have given Stainton Moses information about themselves which could be shown to be true and which could be shown at the same time not to have formed part of his extensive scholarly knowledge, but so far as I know this did not happen.
Within this group the lead was taken by a band of spirits who assumed descriptive Latin names such as "Imperator Servus Dei", "Rector", "Prudens", etc., to conceal their identities from the world at large. The names they had borne on earth were revealed to Stainton Moses, but not made public during his life or for some time after. They included characters from the Old and New Testaments, and learned men of various periods and countries.
The most anomalous of the Controls was "Little Dicky", a child spirit, who on one occasion during a séance is reported to have brought a brass candlestick from another room and hit the medium over the head with it. It is not unnatural that to many of the medium's contemporaries, who knew Stainton Moses to be in ordinary life a sincere and conscientious man, such an assault should seem, however playfully intended, conclusive proof that "Little Dicky" was a personality quite separate from his victim. To a later generation familiar with records of poltergeist cases and the story of Sally Beauchamp, this is not at all so obvious. Comparison with them suggests exactly the opposite, that "Little Dicky" was a dramatisation of one aspect of the medium's subconscious, and that it is not unlikely that other aspects were dramatised by other of his Controls.
This suggestion would not deserve to carry much weight in tile absence of reasonable motives for so elaborate a mystification. Subconscious motives of course, because as regards his conscious mind there is no doubt that Stainton Moses sincerely believed in the independent reality of the Controls. The primary consideration was, I think, that only through the Controls could he effectively fulfil his mission of giving to the world the philosophy embodied in the "Spirit Teachings" dictated by them. They provided a multiple alias for the expression of views formed by him over many years, which it would have been impossible to reconcile with the doctrines of the Church of England of which he was a priest, though he no longer had a cure of souls. Moreover these opinions were more likely to impress the world if issued over the names of a host of saints and sages than they would have done if he had claimed to, be their author.
A secondary motive may have been that in the company of the saints and sages he obtained welcome relief from the dull routine of a schoolmaster's life, diversified otherwise only by frequent bouts of illness. Perhaps "Little Dicky" was a relief from too many saints and sages.
The mediumship of Mrs. Piper, the most famous of trance mediums, began in 1884, the year following the close of Stainton Moses's activity. She lived to a great age, dying in 1950, but does not seem to have produced anything of importance after 1915. During the whole of her active mediumship she was under the close investigation of critical and competent researchers. She willingly collaborated with them, and they were all agreed that she was perfectly honest, and that the communications received through her conveyed information outside her normally acquired knowledge. On two points however there was disagreement, whether any of her Controls existed independently of her, and whether any of the communications should be taken as what they claimed to be, messages from particular dead persons. The latter point will be discussed in another chapter, and all that need for the present be said is that through Mrs. Piper there was for the, first time obtained a substantial body of evidence on which such a claim could with any show of reason be based.
Mrs. Piper's mediumship may be divided into five periods, in the first four of which her communications were produced in trance, while in the fifth she practised automatic writing without trance. The first period began when, an her second visit to a healing medium named Cocke for relief from the effects of an accident, she herself went into trance. The main Control during this period, which lasted until 1892, was Phinuit who claimed to have been a French doctor. Cocke had a doctor-Control called Finney, and Mrs. Piper's Phinuit (the spelling is due to the sitter who recorded her trance) obviously owed his name and his self-attributed doctorship to Cocke's Control. Phinuit had only a smattering of French and no systematic knowledge of medicine, and he made contradictory statements as to his birthplace. But he seems to have shown some flair for diagnosis and he impressed his investigators as a personality who, whatever his own psychological status, should be taken seriously. He was the dominant Control during Mrs. Piper's first visit to England in 1889-1890, when she was investigated by a very able SPR Committee consisting of Myers, Lodge and Walter Leaf. His last appearance was in 1897. In 1892 a young man named Pellew (called in the records George Pelham. or G.P.) died suddenly in America, where he had been well known to Hodgson, Mrs. Piper's principal investigator. At a sitting a few weeks after his death, at which Phinuit was Control, G.P. appeared as Communicator and gave the anonymous sitter correct information. Later he acted as Control, frequently until 1896, and more rarely after that.
The third period may be considered as extending from January 1897 to Hodgson's sudden death in December 1905. The main Control at this time was Rector, who was introduced by a Control calling himself Stainton Moses as a former member of his Imperator group. The name to which the Moses-Rector laid claim had not at this time been made public: it was in fact St. Hippolytus. The Piper-Rector failed to establish his identity with the Moses-Rector, being unable to give this name, or indeed to give proofs of being any person who had ever lived. He was none the less, on the testimony of several sitters, distinctly impressive, and was regarded by William James as having a "Capacity for being a spiritual advise?' superior to that of Mrs. Piper in the state of ordinary consciousness. He continued as main Control after Hodgson's death and acted as such during the fourth period of the mediumship.
With the changes in Controls was associated a change in the Condition in which Mrs. Piper gave messages. In the first period the messages were entirely oral, delivered in trance. In the second they were mainly oral, with some writing, delivered in trance in either case. During these periods entry into trance was painful, but with the advent of Rector it became much easier. The messages were given during this, the third period, in writing while the trance lasted, the whole body of the medium, except the hand that wrote, appearing inert. The same conditions prevailed during the fourth period, which lasted until 1911, when her Imperator Control "closed the light". There followed a fifth period when she wrote automatically but not in trance.
In addition to the principal Controls named, the Piper mediumship had a host of minor ones. There was, for instance, a Mentor who asserted his identity with the Stainton Moses Control of the same name. The latter claimed to be Algazzali, an eleventh century Arab philosopher. But the Piper-Mentor avowed himself to be the classical Ulysses, not, one would say, a person pre-eminently fitted to serve as a spiritual guide. There was a Sir Walter Scott who declared there were monkeys in the sun, and a George Eliot who had met Adam Bede in heaven. These are obvious absurdities, not worth further discussion were it not that their appearance raises doubts as to the scope of fantasy in her mediumship as a whole, and so casts doubts on the claims to an independent existence made by the principal Controls, Phinuit, G.P., and Rector.
None of these three can so readily be dismissed as figments of Mrs. Piper's subconscious. Their status was debated at great length and with much ability on both sides in SPR Proceedings. In favour of their independence there are several points deserving consideration, but none in my view conclusive. First there is the integrity of Mrs. Piper's conscious mind, which is admitted, but is not inconsistent with elaborate dramatisation in the subconscious, examples of which have been given in Chapter VII. Then there is the fact, accepted by critical investigators, that though neither Phinuit nor Rector could prove their identity, each in his way seemed to surpass Mrs. Piper's normal powers. Here again Chapter VII should be taken into account.
The other points relate to the veridical nature of the communications made by all of them. In particular a plausible, but not in my view conclusive, case could be made out for regarding G.P.'s apparent success as a Communicator, which will be discussed in a later chapter, as guaranteeing his independence as a Control.
To define the status of the Piper Controls is a matter of great psychological interest, but does not very closely concern the question of survival, since whatever view be taken as to their independence no action of theirs is as relevant to that question as the communications obtained through the same medium. The same is true of the Controls of other trance mediums and the messages received through them.
It is however of interest to note that the odd phenomenon of Mrs. Piper's hand acting as if it by itself, and it alone, possessed intelligence, has a parallel in the case of Anna Winsor, (1860-1863: see H.P. I. 354-360). Not indeed a complete parallel, as Anna Winsor represented "an extreme form of hystero-epilepsy" while Mrs. Piper, though often in great physical pain, was notably placid in temperament. Anna Winsor, who called her right arm and hand "Old Stump", regarded them as something intelligent but foreign, as Mrs. Piper's right hand gave the appearance of being. But there was in Mrs. Piper's case no such show of hostility between the hand and the rest of the organism as was recorded with Anna Winsor.
At the end of her sittings Mrs. Piper several times spoke of "sliding down" a cord into the body, or of being pulled back by one, and she also expressed disgust at finding herself back in normal life, in a way recalling the feelings of the percipient in "out-of-the-body" experiences. While in hospital, after an operation it seems, she had a well-developed experience of this type, which she styles "a dream or vision". Two of her Controls, Phinuit and G.P., appeared to her. She heard voices saying "Come, we wish to take you with us: we wish to give you a rest from your tired body". After a pause she felt she was being lifted and was not on her bed. She passed through a delicate blue drapery, and "saw a light as though all space-the whole earth was aglow-such a light! I never saw anything like it before". She was greeted by singing, and a ring of beautiful women dancing, passed between hedges with flowers, and came to a pillared building where she met several dead relations and Communicators. She felt a stab in the back where she was attached to a cord that looked like the ray of light which she had followed in her ascent. She was pulled back to her body and found herself awake. "My body seemed so dark and heavy as though it did not belong to me: I had to struggle for breath. I felt depressed to think that I had got back." (Proc. XXVIII, 377-380).
The analogy between some aspects of the Piper mediumship and conditions unassociated with mediumship described in earlier chapters is obvious. But in considering the nature of mediumistic Controls one is not entirely confined to argument from analogy. More direct psychological methods have been brought to bear on the Controls of some recent mediums, such as Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Garrett. Mrs. Leonard's only Control, apart from Communicator-Controls, is the child Feda, who in some ways, but not altogether, closely resembles secondary personalities of the Sally type. Feda, like Sally, is most amusing, and professes a contempt for her medium, not unlike that which Sally boasted to have for Miss Beauchamp, or Margaret for Doris Fischer. But whereas both Sally and Margaret were guilty of spiteful actions, Feda has never gone beyond causing Mrs. Leonard such embarrassments as prevailing on her to give an expensive present or to walk through the streets of a town trailing a toy balloon. Feda is moreover, on the universal testimony of Mrs. Leonard's sitters, absolutely straightforward. For a character sketch of her see SPR Proceedings XXXII, 344-378.
In 1933 Whately Carington began to apply to Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Garrett, both of whom collaborated most willingly, the established psychological technique of word-association tests. The method is to read to a subject lists of stimulus words to which the subject replies with the first words he thinks of. The subject's reactions, e.g. the time between stimulus and response, are noted and on examination are found to show a pattern characteristic of each subject.
Carington administered this test first to each of these mediums in their normal state, and then, using the same stimulus-list to each of them in trance. The analysis of the results led to a long technical discussion in several volumes of SPR Proceedings. Carington's conclusion, which was not however accepted by all Mrs. Leonard's sitters, was that Feda was a secondary personality, probably formed round a nucleus of material repressed by the medium's conscious mind.
With Mrs. Garrett recourse has also been had to the electro- encephalograph, by which the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex is recorded on a moving paper strip, the record being known as an electro-encephalogram. or E.E.G. The purpose was to discover whether mediumistic trance could be shown to have features distinguishing it from the normal ("alpha") rhythm observed with subjects resting but awake, and from the rhythm observed in hypnosis, in hysterical dissociation, and in light and deep sleep. The instrument was attached to Mrs. Garrett's head at two sessions in 1951, first when she was awake but resting, and then while she went into, remained in, and came out of trance, during which time her Control, Uvani, spoke. Trance was at the second session induced by hypnosis. The SPR Journal (XXXVI, 588-596) reports, "There was no significant E.E.G. change when the subject went into or came out of either the trance state or the hypnotic state".
E.E.G. tests, and other physiological tests, have a bearing on the status of Controls only if it be a valid assumption that the correlation between mental processes and bodily conditions is constant, whether the mental processes manifest themselves in normal or paranormal activities. This has yet to be proved, and indeed such evidence as is available suggests that in telepathy mental activity may occur without a corresponding physical stimulus, a conception which many scientists find difficulty in accepting notwithstanding the impressive mass of evidence in its favour. In the present state of knowledge therefore physiological tests, whether they give positive or, as in the E.E.G. test described above, negative results, are not conclusive for or against the independence of Controls.
In the latter part of this book much will be said about the "SPR group of automatists", whose contribution towards a solution of the problem of survival is generally agreed to be outstanding. A discussion of the bearing on this problem of the status of Controls would he incomplete without consideration of the part they play in the scripts of this group, which represent each of the members of the group as being in touch with another group consisting of Communicators, all identifiable either by their names or in other ways. Of the five principal members of the group of automatists none had a Control who was not also a Communicator, i.e. who did not give messages purporting to be evidential. With some of the automatists the Communicators hardly emerged from an impersonal collectivity, the messages being introduced with some such phrase as "they say". With others a Communicator would take on for a time a not very strongly marked individuality, and with one, Mrs. Willett, the Control-Communicators took on marked personal characteristics of speech and manner. In the "cross-correspondences" which were an important feature of these scripts, the scripts of two or more automatists of the group had to be read together to get at the meaning. For this purpose the degree of personalisation shown by the Control-Communicators of the various automatists counted for nothing. The evidence therefore of the automatic writings of the SPR group does not run counter to the view formed from a survey of trance-mediumship in general that the case for survival is not strengthened by the very doubtful claims to independent existence made by Controls, so far as they can be differentiated from Communicators.
Chapter 10: Communications Through MediumsI: As affected Through Normal Means
- W. H. Salter -
THE USE of the cumbrous double word "Control-Communicator" in the last chapter illustrates the difficulty of defining precisely what is meant by a "communication". Messages of comfort and exhortation may be closely combined in mediumistic utterance with other messages which, if taken at their face value, suggest the survival and identity of some specific person. The remainder of this book will be devoted to a consideration of how far this latter type of material can be reasonably attributed to normal causes, as discussed in this chapter, or, failing that, to the operation of the paranormal faculties of living persons. If neither of these causes fully accounts for the evidence, it would follow that unless some transcendental factor unverifiable by ordinary enquiry has intervened, the apparent indications of survival are not wholly illusory but point to some underlying reality. If so, can the nature of this reality be ascertained?
To illustrate the argument I shall draw on my own experience, and still more on that of my wife and her family. While the communications I have myself received are of no exceptional importance, and are cited here simply because they have in my mind become attached to various points that will need discussion, no survey of this problem would approach completeness that failed to give prominence to the parts played in it by A. W. Verrall, classical scholar and Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, his wife, and their daughter, Helen, whom I married. That this is not a private fad of my own can be shown by the very numerous papers in SPR Proceedings from Vol. XX (1906) on, in which one or other of them figures as experimenter, automatist, Communicator or sitter. Verrall died in 1912; Mrs. Verrall in 1916; my wife (whom for brevity I will call H.V.) ceased to be active as an automatist or sitter about twenty-five years ago. This lapse of time justifies me, I think, in claiming freedom from such personal bias, if any, as I ever had in estimating the value of their contribution towards the solution of this problem. How each of them comes into the story will appear as this discussion proceeds.
Automatists are not essentially a different type of person from mediums. It is however convenient to give them a different name. By mediums are generally meant persons who make a regular practice of employing their psychic powers, whether pro. fessionally or not. The automatist, on the other hand, is one who makes use of these powers occasionally, and very often spontaneously. Automatists also in general go into a lighter state of dissociation than regular mediums. In fact much automatic speech and writing is of the "inspirational" type and produced in a state very slightly removed from normal consciousness. The use of devices such as planchette or ouija-board is more frequent with automatists than with regular mediums, and the emergence of well-developed Controls rarer. The distinction however between the two is not clear cut, nor is it fundamental. G. W. Balfour, when analysing the psychology of Mrs. Willett, a famous member of "the SPR group of automatists", speaks of her "mediumship": (SPR Proc. XLIII).
To return from this parenthesis to mediumistic communications and their bearing on the question of survival, I will first consider messages purporting to convey information that was within the knowledge of the Communicator when alive, but lies outside the conscious knowledge of the medium. The first question here is whether it is knowledge of verifiable facts. Messages for example often describe the conditions in which the Communicator finds himself after bodily death. If any test of their truth is to be applied, it must be a transcendental one lying outside the province of psychical research. So far as more ordinary standards of judgment are applicable, allowance must he made for conventional ideas of a future life derived from the complex interaction of out-of-the-body experiences, literary tradition as exemplified in the Frogs, the Sixth Aeneid and the Divina Commedia, and the systematic teaching of religious bodies. Where the descriptions come through a professional medium, account must also be taken of the extent to which spiritualism, long established as a regular cult pursued with great ardour, has both adopted and modified these conventional ideas. If evidence of survival is to be sought from verifiable statements of fact, it must be sought elsewhere.
And of course verifiable statements abound in mediumistic utterances. But of those that are true how many are lucky shots? How many can be assigned to the medium's normally acquired knowledge? Mediums are members of an honourable profession, but they work under conditions that axe a temptation to devious practices. They have to give sittings, at pre-arranged dates which, when they fall due, may not find them in a mood that promises success. The sitter may be by nature uncongenial, or himself in a difficult mood. No member of a profession likes to fall down on the job, and the subconscious, active during trance, has a particular dislike of acknowledging defeat. It looks for an easy way out and finds there is a choice of several. The course which puts the least strain on it is to describe the other world, the nature of the "astral" or "etheric" body, and the mechanism of communication by whatever formula is at the time prevalent in the spiritualist movement. The medium may, and very likely will, sincerely believe these descriptions.
A sitter who does not care to waste his time or his guineas in listening to a medium say what he can, if he so wishes, read for himself any day in the spiritualist press in the comfort of his home and at the cost of a few pence, will politely but firmly direct the communications into other channels. But much may be learnt from a medium who can describe the process of communication as he feels it, without recourse to stock phrases; much also from the use in one meaning of words the usual and established meaning of which is different. G. W. Balfour in his important study of Mrs. Willett's psychology, points out that, though she was familiar with Myers's writings on the "subliminal", and uses his language to describe her sensations, she gives an account of the relations between "subliminal" and "supraliminal" (approximately equivalent to subconscious and conscious as I use those words) that differs widely from his, thereby throwing light on her own psychic processes.
The sitter who is dissatisfied with vague talk and wishes for verifiable facts may receive strings of common Christian names, thrown out tentatively. If he shows interest in any of them, such remarks as these may be added: "There has been a birthday in the family lately." (The sitter, we will suppose, does not respond.) "Or perhaps he" (i.e. the Communicator) "means it is coming soon." Given a wide meaning to each of the words "family", "lately", and "soon", these sentences would at any time fit a large part of the population. If the sitter rises to any item, it may be used as bait for more extensive "fishing".
A large number of random shots will almost certainly produce some hits, and if any of these happen to light on a spot where the sitter is emotionally sensitive, he may be deeply impressed. In that case he would do well to ask a few of his friends to look through the records, and to tell him how far the communications fit their own circumstances. This will give him a rough and ready guide as to the extent to which the successes may be assigned to chance. If he wants a more precise assessment, he can apply one of the various formulae that have been worked out for the statistical evaluation of sittings. I have yet however to meet any experienced sitter who has found this technique satisfactory in practice, except as a means of showing up the poverty of sittings that any emotionally unbiased person of intelligence would at the first glance recognise as poor.
It is a frequent criticism of qualitative material in psychical research, whether spontaneous in origin such as apparitions, experimental as where the targets are "free", or mediumistic, that there is no certainty as to the extent to which chance has affected the results. This is a fair criticism of a great deal of the material reported to the SPR, and of some of the material published by it. It is a waste of time attempting to decide how much of this equivocal material falls on one side of the dividing line between chance and non-chance, and how much on the other, since there is on record a larger mass than the most diligent student could master of qualitative material, spontaneous, experimental and mediumistic, that could only be assigned to chance by a ludicrous straining of probability. All the rest can simply be disregarded. And of course material that successfully passes the test of chance, has still other tests to meet before it can be accepted as paranormal. A too free response to "fishing" is not the only way in which a sitter may convey to a medium information which may later reappear in a communication to himself or to some other sitter. It is fit and proper that a sitter should wish to be on informal, friendly terms with the medium, but this desire may lead to gossipy chatting before or after the sitting, while the medium is in a fully conscious state. Good mediums intensely dislike having unsought confidences thrust upon them when in a state of ordinary consciousness. If any of the information so imparted comes out later in a trance communication, doubts may be thrown on the genuineness of the trance. On the other hand anticipation of such a possible consequence may inhibit the flow of communication. In either event the medium has been put in an unfair position.
There are moreover other ways, besides incautious chatter, of conveying useful information. Some years ago a sitting was booked with a well-known medium for an anonymous sitter. To the medium's great annoyance the sitter arrived in deep widow's weeds, wearing a brooch with a coronet and the initials of a man of title whose sudden death had not long before received great newspaper publicity. This reduced the anonymity to a farce. But the anonymous sitter cannot always help revealing his identity. Thus when Walter Prince, who has already been mentioned, paid a short visit to England which was announced in the psychic press, he booked an anonymous sitting with Mrs. Leonard. With typical candour she said to him, "I think you are Dr. Prince." "My! How did you guess that?" "I knew you were in England and thought you would probably ask for a sitting with me. I knew about how old you are and your voice told me you were from the States." Prince had an accent of the pungency of which he was quite unaware.
A sitter's age may by itself mislead a fishing medium. I was well past middle age before either of my parents died. For some years before that a few mediums judged me to be a man likely to have a father and/or mother in the spirit world and gave me messages of comfort appropriate to my supposed state of bereavement.
"Good sitters make good mediums." That puts a good point too bluntly, for no amount of skill or patience or tact on the sitter's part will make up for the absence or weakness of a medium's paranormal powers. But it is the fact that no small share of the credit for the long and successful careers as mediums of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard is due to the SPR investigators who from the early days of their mediumship combined personal friendliness with a sharp eye for evidence. In return both of thee mediums eagerly collaborated with the SPR in planning and conducting experiments designed to extend knowledge of psychic processes. Bad sitters on the other hand must take a large share of the blame for the less satisfactory features of mediumship. Much as he disliked "Mr. Sludge" (i.e. D. D. Home), Browning evidently agreed that Sludge's complaint on this score was well founded.
Instances have already been given of the too informative sitter. But undue reticence may be equally detrimental. A sitter who maintains a frigid silence throughout the sitting is likely to come away with little to show for it. For success he must acquire the art, which comes easily with practice, of encouraging the medium at appropriate moments without giving away facts. The main difficulty is in extemporising sufficiently neutral responses to remarks by the Control or Communicator which come near to being questions and would in an ordinary talk between friends meet with frank replies.
Few persons interested in the survival question are likely to have a sufficient number of sittings with trance mediums of high quality to provide out of their own experience material on which to form a judgment. This has always been true and never more than at the present time. A few years ago, when Mrs. Leonard had restricted her activity as a medium, an exhaustive search was made in Great Britain for other trance mediums worth intensive study, with disappointing results. Reports from America indicate that things are no better there. Fortunately there is in the Proceedings of the SPR an almost embarrassing wealth of material, on which the student can rely. Most of it was collected before tape-recording of sittings was introduced, and therefore fails to give complete information as to whether the medium attempted to "fish", and if so to what extent and with what success, or as to whether the sitter was too expansive, or not expansive enough. It may however be taken for granted that the sitters were in the main friendly but discreet, casual lapses being candidly noted; that the note-takers, whether themselves sitters or not, made a fair record of what passed between medium and sitter; and that the annotations, showing the degree of success or failure at each point of the sitting, were the result of careful enquiry. It adds to the value of the reports that their authors were far from unanimous in their views of trance-mediumship.
"Fishing" and "fluking" are practices to be regretted because they waste the time (and money) of the sitter, may discourage a sitter from further enquiry, and provide a facile pretext for the depreciation of mediumship and of psychical research. Before however anyone passes a too censorious judgment on the medium, let him examine his own subconscious in the light of his everyday experience. He wants perhaps to remember some name which has completely escaped his conscious memory. His subconscious rummages around, and offers his conscious mind one name after another, all wrong and some of them fantastic, before finally, if his luck is in, fetching up a name which the conscious mind will accept as that really needed.
Much the same thing happens to experimenters with the planchette or ouija-board, when they get through these devices incorrect, it may be absurdly incorrect, answers to their questions. In the conditions in which such experiments are usually conducted, there is obviously no deliberate intention to deceive. In full trance the subconscious enjoys greater liberty and is even less willing to admit defeat. It is no slur on the integrity of a trance-medium if, having nothing paranormal in stock, he hands out to an expectant sitter anything lying ready in his subconscious. "Fishing" is a further step, a small step, in the wrong direction.
All this may properly be described as "trance-deception" and not as conscious fraud. But the milder phrase is sometimes used to cover actions that are thoroughly fraudulent, such as the ferreting out of information about a sitter, his family circle and interests in order to provide material which could be worked up into "communications". Sitters who have established friendly relations with trance-mediums are from time to time told by them that they have been present when other mediums have pooled information about sitters. They report remarks such as this: "Mrs. Jones who sat with you last week has booked a sitting with me for next week. What sort of communication does she want? Is it her husband or her son she wants messages from?" And so on. Not long ago I happened to mention to a trance-medium that an old case seemed to me to show internal evidence of collusion between two other mediums. "Quite right", she said, "one of them asked me to join in." It is also possible that mediums may "mug up" from biographies and books of reference facts as to a sitter or his friends that may come in useful later.
How far the rot extends it would be impossible to say. A few black sheep do not discredit a whole profession. The trance. mediums who have been most intensively studied by the SPR are Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard, and it is on records of sittings with them that I shall mainly draw. There never was any ground for suspecting the good faith of either, but by way of superlative caution each was at an early stage of her career subjected to private enquiry, from which each of them emerged with flying colours. I should not however wish it to be supposed that, because these are the mediums most frequently quoted by me, there are not other mediums of equal integrity. It has been necessary more than once in the fore-going pages to discuss the fraudulent simulation of psychic phenomena. We here leave behind us that unsavoury topic, "escaped the Stygian Pool though long detained". In none of the material I shall from now quote do I believe fraud to have played a part, and I shall not waste time discussing it as a serious hypothesis.
Richard Hodgson, who had for many years supervised the American sittings given by Mrs. Piper, died in 1905. He was a bachelor and was generally believed by his intimate friends never to have contemplated marriage while living in America. But at sittings with Mrs. Piper in the spring of 1906(1) the Hodgson-Control stated that he had met a lady in Chicago to whom he had proposed marriage, but that she had refused him. Her maiden name ("Miss Densmore" in the report) was given together with her two Christian names. These enabled William James, notwithstanding a mistake in the middle name, to identify her as an old acquaintance of his. He did not know that she and. Hodgson had even known each other, but she confirmed to him the statement as to Hodgson's proposal. He made enquiries among other intimate friends of Hodgson as to the names of women to whom they thought he might have proposed, and none of them suggested Miss Densmore. She seemed not to have spoken of the proposal to anyone but her sister. The incident, therefore, as James said in his report on the Hodgson-Control (SPR Proc. XXIII 20-25), was
To illustrate the argument I shall draw on my own experience, and still more on that of my wife and her family. While the communications I have myself received are of no exceptional importance, and are cited here simply because they have in my mind become attached to various points that will need discussion, no survey of this problem would approach completeness that failed to give prominence to the parts played in it by A. W. Verrall, classical scholar and Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, his wife, and their daughter, Helen, whom I married. That this is not a private fad of my own can be shown by the very numerous papers in SPR Proceedings from Vol. XX (1906) on, in which one or other of them figures as experimenter, automatist, Communicator or sitter. Verrall died in 1912; Mrs. Verrall in 1916; my wife (whom for brevity I will call H.V.) ceased to be active as an automatist or sitter about twenty-five years ago. This lapse of time justifies me, I think, in claiming freedom from such personal bias, if any, as I ever had in estimating the value of their contribution towards the solution of this problem. How each of them comes into the story will appear as this discussion proceeds.
Automatists are not essentially a different type of person from mediums. It is however convenient to give them a different name. By mediums are generally meant persons who make a regular practice of employing their psychic powers, whether pro. fessionally or not. The automatist, on the other hand, is one who makes use of these powers occasionally, and very often spontaneously. Automatists also in general go into a lighter state of dissociation than regular mediums. In fact much automatic speech and writing is of the "inspirational" type and produced in a state very slightly removed from normal consciousness. The use of devices such as planchette or ouija-board is more frequent with automatists than with regular mediums, and the emergence of well-developed Controls rarer. The distinction however between the two is not clear cut, nor is it fundamental. G. W. Balfour, when analysing the psychology of Mrs. Willett, a famous member of "the SPR group of automatists", speaks of her "mediumship": (SPR Proc. XLIII).
To return from this parenthesis to mediumistic communications and their bearing on the question of survival, I will first consider messages purporting to convey information that was within the knowledge of the Communicator when alive, but lies outside the conscious knowledge of the medium. The first question here is whether it is knowledge of verifiable facts. Messages for example often describe the conditions in which the Communicator finds himself after bodily death. If any test of their truth is to be applied, it must be a transcendental one lying outside the province of psychical research. So far as more ordinary standards of judgment are applicable, allowance must he made for conventional ideas of a future life derived from the complex interaction of out-of-the-body experiences, literary tradition as exemplified in the Frogs, the Sixth Aeneid and the Divina Commedia, and the systematic teaching of religious bodies. Where the descriptions come through a professional medium, account must also be taken of the extent to which spiritualism, long established as a regular cult pursued with great ardour, has both adopted and modified these conventional ideas. If evidence of survival is to be sought from verifiable statements of fact, it must be sought elsewhere.
And of course verifiable statements abound in mediumistic utterances. But of those that are true how many are lucky shots? How many can be assigned to the medium's normally acquired knowledge? Mediums are members of an honourable profession, but they work under conditions that axe a temptation to devious practices. They have to give sittings, at pre-arranged dates which, when they fall due, may not find them in a mood that promises success. The sitter may be by nature uncongenial, or himself in a difficult mood. No member of a profession likes to fall down on the job, and the subconscious, active during trance, has a particular dislike of acknowledging defeat. It looks for an easy way out and finds there is a choice of several. The course which puts the least strain on it is to describe the other world, the nature of the "astral" or "etheric" body, and the mechanism of communication by whatever formula is at the time prevalent in the spiritualist movement. The medium may, and very likely will, sincerely believe these descriptions.
A sitter who does not care to waste his time or his guineas in listening to a medium say what he can, if he so wishes, read for himself any day in the spiritualist press in the comfort of his home and at the cost of a few pence, will politely but firmly direct the communications into other channels. But much may be learnt from a medium who can describe the process of communication as he feels it, without recourse to stock phrases; much also from the use in one meaning of words the usual and established meaning of which is different. G. W. Balfour in his important study of Mrs. Willett's psychology, points out that, though she was familiar with Myers's writings on the "subliminal", and uses his language to describe her sensations, she gives an account of the relations between "subliminal" and "supraliminal" (approximately equivalent to subconscious and conscious as I use those words) that differs widely from his, thereby throwing light on her own psychic processes.
The sitter who is dissatisfied with vague talk and wishes for verifiable facts may receive strings of common Christian names, thrown out tentatively. If he shows interest in any of them, such remarks as these may be added: "There has been a birthday in the family lately." (The sitter, we will suppose, does not respond.) "Or perhaps he" (i.e. the Communicator) "means it is coming soon." Given a wide meaning to each of the words "family", "lately", and "soon", these sentences would at any time fit a large part of the population. If the sitter rises to any item, it may be used as bait for more extensive "fishing".
A large number of random shots will almost certainly produce some hits, and if any of these happen to light on a spot where the sitter is emotionally sensitive, he may be deeply impressed. In that case he would do well to ask a few of his friends to look through the records, and to tell him how far the communications fit their own circumstances. This will give him a rough and ready guide as to the extent to which the successes may be assigned to chance. If he wants a more precise assessment, he can apply one of the various formulae that have been worked out for the statistical evaluation of sittings. I have yet however to meet any experienced sitter who has found this technique satisfactory in practice, except as a means of showing up the poverty of sittings that any emotionally unbiased person of intelligence would at the first glance recognise as poor.
It is a frequent criticism of qualitative material in psychical research, whether spontaneous in origin such as apparitions, experimental as where the targets are "free", or mediumistic, that there is no certainty as to the extent to which chance has affected the results. This is a fair criticism of a great deal of the material reported to the SPR, and of some of the material published by it. It is a waste of time attempting to decide how much of this equivocal material falls on one side of the dividing line between chance and non-chance, and how much on the other, since there is on record a larger mass than the most diligent student could master of qualitative material, spontaneous, experimental and mediumistic, that could only be assigned to chance by a ludicrous straining of probability. All the rest can simply be disregarded. And of course material that successfully passes the test of chance, has still other tests to meet before it can be accepted as paranormal. A too free response to "fishing" is not the only way in which a sitter may convey to a medium information which may later reappear in a communication to himself or to some other sitter. It is fit and proper that a sitter should wish to be on informal, friendly terms with the medium, but this desire may lead to gossipy chatting before or after the sitting, while the medium is in a fully conscious state. Good mediums intensely dislike having unsought confidences thrust upon them when in a state of ordinary consciousness. If any of the information so imparted comes out later in a trance communication, doubts may be thrown on the genuineness of the trance. On the other hand anticipation of such a possible consequence may inhibit the flow of communication. In either event the medium has been put in an unfair position.
There are moreover other ways, besides incautious chatter, of conveying useful information. Some years ago a sitting was booked with a well-known medium for an anonymous sitter. To the medium's great annoyance the sitter arrived in deep widow's weeds, wearing a brooch with a coronet and the initials of a man of title whose sudden death had not long before received great newspaper publicity. This reduced the anonymity to a farce. But the anonymous sitter cannot always help revealing his identity. Thus when Walter Prince, who has already been mentioned, paid a short visit to England which was announced in the psychic press, he booked an anonymous sitting with Mrs. Leonard. With typical candour she said to him, "I think you are Dr. Prince." "My! How did you guess that?" "I knew you were in England and thought you would probably ask for a sitting with me. I knew about how old you are and your voice told me you were from the States." Prince had an accent of the pungency of which he was quite unaware.
A sitter's age may by itself mislead a fishing medium. I was well past middle age before either of my parents died. For some years before that a few mediums judged me to be a man likely to have a father and/or mother in the spirit world and gave me messages of comfort appropriate to my supposed state of bereavement.
"Good sitters make good mediums." That puts a good point too bluntly, for no amount of skill or patience or tact on the sitter's part will make up for the absence or weakness of a medium's paranormal powers. But it is the fact that no small share of the credit for the long and successful careers as mediums of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard is due to the SPR investigators who from the early days of their mediumship combined personal friendliness with a sharp eye for evidence. In return both of thee mediums eagerly collaborated with the SPR in planning and conducting experiments designed to extend knowledge of psychic processes. Bad sitters on the other hand must take a large share of the blame for the less satisfactory features of mediumship. Much as he disliked "Mr. Sludge" (i.e. D. D. Home), Browning evidently agreed that Sludge's complaint on this score was well founded.
Instances have already been given of the too informative sitter. But undue reticence may be equally detrimental. A sitter who maintains a frigid silence throughout the sitting is likely to come away with little to show for it. For success he must acquire the art, which comes easily with practice, of encouraging the medium at appropriate moments without giving away facts. The main difficulty is in extemporising sufficiently neutral responses to remarks by the Control or Communicator which come near to being questions and would in an ordinary talk between friends meet with frank replies.
Few persons interested in the survival question are likely to have a sufficient number of sittings with trance mediums of high quality to provide out of their own experience material on which to form a judgment. This has always been true and never more than at the present time. A few years ago, when Mrs. Leonard had restricted her activity as a medium, an exhaustive search was made in Great Britain for other trance mediums worth intensive study, with disappointing results. Reports from America indicate that things are no better there. Fortunately there is in the Proceedings of the SPR an almost embarrassing wealth of material, on which the student can rely. Most of it was collected before tape-recording of sittings was introduced, and therefore fails to give complete information as to whether the medium attempted to "fish", and if so to what extent and with what success, or as to whether the sitter was too expansive, or not expansive enough. It may however be taken for granted that the sitters were in the main friendly but discreet, casual lapses being candidly noted; that the note-takers, whether themselves sitters or not, made a fair record of what passed between medium and sitter; and that the annotations, showing the degree of success or failure at each point of the sitting, were the result of careful enquiry. It adds to the value of the reports that their authors were far from unanimous in their views of trance-mediumship.
"Fishing" and "fluking" are practices to be regretted because they waste the time (and money) of the sitter, may discourage a sitter from further enquiry, and provide a facile pretext for the depreciation of mediumship and of psychical research. Before however anyone passes a too censorious judgment on the medium, let him examine his own subconscious in the light of his everyday experience. He wants perhaps to remember some name which has completely escaped his conscious memory. His subconscious rummages around, and offers his conscious mind one name after another, all wrong and some of them fantastic, before finally, if his luck is in, fetching up a name which the conscious mind will accept as that really needed.
Much the same thing happens to experimenters with the planchette or ouija-board, when they get through these devices incorrect, it may be absurdly incorrect, answers to their questions. In the conditions in which such experiments are usually conducted, there is obviously no deliberate intention to deceive. In full trance the subconscious enjoys greater liberty and is even less willing to admit defeat. It is no slur on the integrity of a trance-medium if, having nothing paranormal in stock, he hands out to an expectant sitter anything lying ready in his subconscious. "Fishing" is a further step, a small step, in the wrong direction.
All this may properly be described as "trance-deception" and not as conscious fraud. But the milder phrase is sometimes used to cover actions that are thoroughly fraudulent, such as the ferreting out of information about a sitter, his family circle and interests in order to provide material which could be worked up into "communications". Sitters who have established friendly relations with trance-mediums are from time to time told by them that they have been present when other mediums have pooled information about sitters. They report remarks such as this: "Mrs. Jones who sat with you last week has booked a sitting with me for next week. What sort of communication does she want? Is it her husband or her son she wants messages from?" And so on. Not long ago I happened to mention to a trance-medium that an old case seemed to me to show internal evidence of collusion between two other mediums. "Quite right", she said, "one of them asked me to join in." It is also possible that mediums may "mug up" from biographies and books of reference facts as to a sitter or his friends that may come in useful later.
How far the rot extends it would be impossible to say. A few black sheep do not discredit a whole profession. The trance. mediums who have been most intensively studied by the SPR are Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard, and it is on records of sittings with them that I shall mainly draw. There never was any ground for suspecting the good faith of either, but by way of superlative caution each was at an early stage of her career subjected to private enquiry, from which each of them emerged with flying colours. I should not however wish it to be supposed that, because these are the mediums most frequently quoted by me, there are not other mediums of equal integrity. It has been necessary more than once in the fore-going pages to discuss the fraudulent simulation of psychic phenomena. We here leave behind us that unsavoury topic, "escaped the Stygian Pool though long detained". In none of the material I shall from now quote do I believe fraud to have played a part, and I shall not waste time discussing it as a serious hypothesis.
Richard Hodgson, who had for many years supervised the American sittings given by Mrs. Piper, died in 1905. He was a bachelor and was generally believed by his intimate friends never to have contemplated marriage while living in America. But at sittings with Mrs. Piper in the spring of 1906(1) the Hodgson-Control stated that he had met a lady in Chicago to whom he had proposed marriage, but that she had refused him. Her maiden name ("Miss Densmore" in the report) was given together with her two Christian names. These enabled William James, notwithstanding a mistake in the middle name, to identify her as an old acquaintance of his. He did not know that she and. Hodgson had even known each other, but she confirmed to him the statement as to Hodgson's proposal. He made enquiries among other intimate friends of Hodgson as to the names of women to whom they thought he might have proposed, and none of them suggested Miss Densmore. She seemed not to have spoken of the proposal to anyone but her sister. The incident, therefore, as James said in his report on the Hodgson-Control (SPR Proc. XXIII 20-25), was
"an excellent one to count in favour of spirit return, unless indeed it should turn out that while it was happening, he (Hodgson) had been led to consult the Piper-Controls about it himself."
(1) Owing to misprints, the date of these sittings is given in the SPR report, Proc. XXIII, as 1905.
In June 1906 another old friend of Hodgsn, Professor W. R. Newbold, had a sitting with Mrs. Piper at which the Hodgson-Control asked him whether he remembered "Miss Densmore". Newbold replied that he began to remember: was it about eight or nine years ago? To this the Control assented. On looking up his correspondence with Hodgson, Newbold found that in 1895 the Piper-Controls had prophesied that both he and Hodgson would soon be happily married: Newbold was; Hodgson was rejected. Newbold, who seems to have been Hodgson's only confidant, adds that Miss Densmore was frequently mentioned in the sittings of 1895.
This incident (known as the "Huldah" case from the second name wrongly assigned to Miss Densmore) shows the importance of preserving complete records. It also shows the tenacity of the subconscious memory. Mrs. Piper in trance remembered what had passed in trance between her and the living Hodgson eleven years earlier (Newbold's "eight or nine years" was an understatement) and also remembered that Newbold was the one sitter who could have been expected to remember it. To none of the other sitters to whom the Control spoke of the affair was any suggestion made that they remembered it. Newbold in a state of ordinary consciousness remembered what he had been told, also in a conscious state, eleven years before. In each case the memory seems to have been latent in the subconscious for many years; in Newbold's probably for less than eleven, as for some time after 1895 he would almost certainly have retained a conscious memory of it. In each case the memory is revived by an appropriate stimulus; in her case by Hodgson's death and the presence of his friends at her sittings; in his by her trance reference to the incident at his sitting. For her, the whole process, or sequence of processes, (1) acquisition of knowledge, (2) retention, (3) revival, was subconscious. For Newbold only stage (2) was subconscious, both the acquisition of the knowledge and the revival of the memory being conscious processes.
Latent memory (or "cryptomnesia") is a particularly baffling problem, and its possible occurrence in a communication through a medium or through automatic writing is hard to assess owing to individual differences between one person and another, to the varying states of mind in which the initial (1) and final (3) stages may take place, and to the fact that when the knowledge is acquired in a conscious state, the second process must be subdivided into (2a) relegation to the subconscious, as Newbold relegated his knowledge of Hodgson's proposal, and (2b) retention of what has been so relegated.
To latent memory I am inclined to assign the rather numerous correct statements I recently received from a non-professional medium about my ancestors and one of my living relatives. Almost everything said during the trance about my ancestors was correct. It could be verified from works of reference, a careful reading of which would however also show that a few mistakes were made. About my living relative much was said that was true and could be verified from books of reference that were sufficiently up-to-date. But the true statements about him were mixed with several that were fictitious; e.g., accounts of conversations that never took Place with dead persons in whom the medium was interested. Moreover the background of the communications was altogether unreal, both as regards the character and opinions of the persons named, and the significance of some of the facts stated correctly. It is no good cross-examining Controls as to their statements and I refrained from attempting to do this, but I deliberately gave the Control several openings to expand by talking of matters connected with the persons named which were known to me but could not be found in books of reference. The Control never followed up my lead.
It was obvious that the medium's subconscious had erected a structure of imaginative fiction on a basis of fact. For imaginative fiction or dramatisation the subconscious, as was shown in previous chapters, has a marked propensity. But how in this instance did the basis of fact get there? The correct statements were too numerous and too far removed from the common-place to be attributable to chance, even when liberal allowance was made for the mistakes. All the facts had, I think, at some time been within my conscious knowledge, though I had to verify some of them from printed sources. If however the communications were a telepathic reflection of my conscious and /or subconscious mind, why this curious distinction between largely correct fact, and wholly incorrect background? If, again, it was a real communication from the other world, why this inability to make correct statements as to matters not to be found in the reference books?
The most probable explanation seems to me to be that the medium, for purposes quite unconnected with these sittings, had occasion to look up passages in books of reference, and that glancing through the pages casually she had come on references to my relatives, living and dead. She may never have consciously digested what she thus came across, but having what is called a "fly-paper mind", passed it on undigested to her subconscious memory, which assimilated it with other matter acquired in the same way. This explanation has already been suggested in connection with the case of Abraham Florentine in the records of Stainton Moses: see Chapter IX. It may also explain the Margaret Veley scripts of Dr. Soal: see SPR Proc. XXXVIII 281374.
Margaret Veley (1843-1887) was a novelist and poet of some note during her life. When in 1927 and 1928 Dr. Soal and a friend produced a number of scripts purporting to be communications from her, and asked me to look into them, I had never heard of her, but on looking her up in the Dictionary of National Biography while the scripts were in progress I was astonished to find that almost everything said in them about her life and writings was correct. Other statements volunteered by the Communicator could also be verified as correct from the preface to one of her novels and from local directories of the district, Braintree, Essex, where her family lived. Mainly, however, through friends and relations of Margaret Veley, I got to know facts about her and her family which were not to be found in any of these books. Questions on these matters, some of which were of deep interest to Margaret Veley when alive, met with practically no response. (After rereading my report recently I must admit that some of the questions savoured of cross-examination, and dealt with matters that should have been introduced more delicately.)
In my report (Proc. XXXVIII, 322-323) I summed up my analysis of the veridical element in the communications as follows:
In June 1906 another old friend of Hodgsn, Professor W. R. Newbold, had a sitting with Mrs. Piper at which the Hodgson-Control asked him whether he remembered "Miss Densmore". Newbold replied that he began to remember: was it about eight or nine years ago? To this the Control assented. On looking up his correspondence with Hodgson, Newbold found that in 1895 the Piper-Controls had prophesied that both he and Hodgson would soon be happily married: Newbold was; Hodgson was rejected. Newbold, who seems to have been Hodgson's only confidant, adds that Miss Densmore was frequently mentioned in the sittings of 1895.
This incident (known as the "Huldah" case from the second name wrongly assigned to Miss Densmore) shows the importance of preserving complete records. It also shows the tenacity of the subconscious memory. Mrs. Piper in trance remembered what had passed in trance between her and the living Hodgson eleven years earlier (Newbold's "eight or nine years" was an understatement) and also remembered that Newbold was the one sitter who could have been expected to remember it. To none of the other sitters to whom the Control spoke of the affair was any suggestion made that they remembered it. Newbold in a state of ordinary consciousness remembered what he had been told, also in a conscious state, eleven years before. In each case the memory seems to have been latent in the subconscious for many years; in Newbold's probably for less than eleven, as for some time after 1895 he would almost certainly have retained a conscious memory of it. In each case the memory is revived by an appropriate stimulus; in her case by Hodgson's death and the presence of his friends at her sittings; in his by her trance reference to the incident at his sitting. For her, the whole process, or sequence of processes, (1) acquisition of knowledge, (2) retention, (3) revival, was subconscious. For Newbold only stage (2) was subconscious, both the acquisition of the knowledge and the revival of the memory being conscious processes.
Latent memory (or "cryptomnesia") is a particularly baffling problem, and its possible occurrence in a communication through a medium or through automatic writing is hard to assess owing to individual differences between one person and another, to the varying states of mind in which the initial (1) and final (3) stages may take place, and to the fact that when the knowledge is acquired in a conscious state, the second process must be subdivided into (2a) relegation to the subconscious, as Newbold relegated his knowledge of Hodgson's proposal, and (2b) retention of what has been so relegated.
To latent memory I am inclined to assign the rather numerous correct statements I recently received from a non-professional medium about my ancestors and one of my living relatives. Almost everything said during the trance about my ancestors was correct. It could be verified from works of reference, a careful reading of which would however also show that a few mistakes were made. About my living relative much was said that was true and could be verified from books of reference that were sufficiently up-to-date. But the true statements about him were mixed with several that were fictitious; e.g., accounts of conversations that never took Place with dead persons in whom the medium was interested. Moreover the background of the communications was altogether unreal, both as regards the character and opinions of the persons named, and the significance of some of the facts stated correctly. It is no good cross-examining Controls as to their statements and I refrained from attempting to do this, but I deliberately gave the Control several openings to expand by talking of matters connected with the persons named which were known to me but could not be found in books of reference. The Control never followed up my lead.
It was obvious that the medium's subconscious had erected a structure of imaginative fiction on a basis of fact. For imaginative fiction or dramatisation the subconscious, as was shown in previous chapters, has a marked propensity. But how in this instance did the basis of fact get there? The correct statements were too numerous and too far removed from the common-place to be attributable to chance, even when liberal allowance was made for the mistakes. All the facts had, I think, at some time been within my conscious knowledge, though I had to verify some of them from printed sources. If however the communications were a telepathic reflection of my conscious and /or subconscious mind, why this curious distinction between largely correct fact, and wholly incorrect background? If, again, it was a real communication from the other world, why this inability to make correct statements as to matters not to be found in the reference books?
The most probable explanation seems to me to be that the medium, for purposes quite unconnected with these sittings, had occasion to look up passages in books of reference, and that glancing through the pages casually she had come on references to my relatives, living and dead. She may never have consciously digested what she thus came across, but having what is called a "fly-paper mind", passed it on undigested to her subconscious memory, which assimilated it with other matter acquired in the same way. This explanation has already been suggested in connection with the case of Abraham Florentine in the records of Stainton Moses: see Chapter IX. It may also explain the Margaret Veley scripts of Dr. Soal: see SPR Proc. XXXVIII 281374.
Margaret Veley (1843-1887) was a novelist and poet of some note during her life. When in 1927 and 1928 Dr. Soal and a friend produced a number of scripts purporting to be communications from her, and asked me to look into them, I had never heard of her, but on looking her up in the Dictionary of National Biography while the scripts were in progress I was astonished to find that almost everything said in them about her life and writings was correct. Other statements volunteered by the Communicator could also be verified as correct from the preface to one of her novels and from local directories of the district, Braintree, Essex, where her family lived. Mainly, however, through friends and relations of Margaret Veley, I got to know facts about her and her family which were not to be found in any of these books. Questions on these matters, some of which were of deep interest to Margaret Veley when alive, met with practically no response. (After rereading my report recently I must admit that some of the questions savoured of cross-examination, and dealt with matters that should have been introduced more delicately.)
In my report (Proc. XXXVIII, 322-323) I summed up my analysis of the veridical element in the communications as follows:
"It will, I think, be generally agreed that the proportion of success to failure, as regards matters outside the admitted normal knowledge of the automatists, is unusually high in these scripts, if they are compared with most ostensibly spiritistic communications. The verifiable statements (and the unverifiable residuum is very small) may be classified under four heads, as follows:
"(A) Statements, whether volunteered by M.V. or made in reply to questions, which can be verified from the D.N.B. and the MS [i.e., the novel already mentioned].
"(B) Statements, whether volunteered or in reply to questions, which can be verified from matter scattered up and down a considerable number of other books, e.g. volumes of the County Directory.
"(C) Statements volunteered as to matters which cannot be verified from any printed source which I1 have been able to trace" [the sources consulted by me were listed in a footnote occupying half a page of small print].
"(D) Statements in reply to questions regarding matters which cannot be verified from any such source.
"The success is almost perfect under head (A) and the failure almost complete under head (D). Under both heads (B) and (C) there is a mixture of success and failure, with the successes largely preponderating."
My report was shown in proof to two of Margaret Veley's relatives with a request that they should say whether in their opinion the scripts were characteristic of her outlook on life and habits of thought. One of them thought that the earlier part of the scripts fell in with her recollections, but the later parts did not; the other (a niece) that there was nothing that recalled her aunt in any way, it being all most unlike her in what was said and the way of saying it.
The scripts included several verses ostensibly dictated by Margaret Veley. The second part of the SPR report, entitled "The Literary Style of the Scripts" was contributed by Dr. Soal, who preferred at the time to he known as "Mr. W'. He did not regard cryptomnesia as a major explanation of the Margaret Veley scripts, differing as to this from the view I have expressed.
It is not surprising that in many cases different views as to the possible operation of latent memory are expressed, since so many uncertain factors are likely to be involved. In the Abraham Florentine case it was possible to paint with fair certainty to a particular printed document as the source from which the communication had been derived, owing to the presence in it of an unusual form of words and of a mistake, both of which were repeated in the communication. This source was an Obituary Notice in an American newspaper, and if the paper in question had first appeared after the communication had been made, the case might possibly be considered as precognitive. Again, if the Obituary, though appearing before the communication, could not possibly have been seen by Stainton Moses, it might perhaps be regarded as an instance, an exceptionally good instance, of clairvoyance. But as hecould have seen it, though there is no direct evidence that he did, it is safer to invoke a normal factor such as latent memory rather than a paranormal one, such as precognition or clairvoyance.
A definite source can seldom be indicated with as much certainty as in that case. The number of items of information which most people acquire by reading books, newspapers, and business documents and by conversation is incalculable. It is sometimes said that the subconscious, like the traditional elephant, never forgets. How clever, or how lucky, man has been to construct consciousness as a shelter under which he can conduct his ordinary affairs unembarrassed by unwanted memories of all the trivialities thrust on his attention hour by hour, day by day, by newspapers, conversation with fellow-commuters and all the apparatus of civilised life!
That however is not the stuff of which communications are made, not at any rate such communications as anyone need bother about. The interest centres on correct statements of facts less accessible to the general public, which may therefore be considered as probably unknown to the medium, unless there are grounds for supposing that in this context his normal knowledge exceeds the average. It is therefore most desirable to ascertain as definitely as practicable in what book or other document the statements may be found, or to whom the relevant facts were known. By this means one can form a fair assessment of the probability of a medium acquiring the necessary knowledge in his ordinary reading or conversation. As stated above, we are not considering possible fraudulent acquisition of knowledge. One can also infer how long before the communication was made the knowledge was first acquired, or was confirmed on some later occasion. This is a matter of importance in judging the probability of information once acquired being forgotten by the conscious mind.
In the Huldah case Newbold, when prompted by the Hodgson-Control, said he "began" to remember the Chicago lady, which seems to suggest that he still retained a conscious memory of the affair, but a very dim and vague one. The incident was then eleven years old, and, had it concerned a matter of indifference to Newbold, might well have slipped his conscious memory altogether. The surprising thing is that he should not have retained even after that lapse of time a clearer memory of an affair that, owing to his friendship with Hodgson and his own engagement, must when it was happening have aroused his keen interest. In the Veley case all the documents mentioned as possible sources of information had been in existence for many years. Dr. Soal seems to have had no personal interest in the Veleys, and if it was in fact a case of cryptomnesia, his normal acquisition of the knowledge about them shown in the scripts might date back long enough to account for it having completely faded from his conscious mind. As regards the communications made about my relatives, I cannot suppose that their affairs were in themselves of any interest to the medium, so that they could well, so to speak, have gone in at one car of her conscious mind and out at the other, though some of the facts, if learnt from written sources, could only have been learnt within a few months before the sitting.
Consider the case of a medium who in a dissociated state makes correct statements of fact which are shown to him when he returns to ordinary consciousness. He may recognise them as facts previously known to his conscious mind, but forgotten by it: he may further be able to recollect how and when he came to know them. Suppose however that (a) a possible source of information can be shown, but (b) he fails to recognise the facts as previously known to him, or to recognise the possible source when pointed out to him, is that an indication that he never knew them normally? That, latent memory bring excluded, he has acquired the information in some other, paranormal way?
This can only be answered by asking several further questions. How accessible to the medium were the supposed sources of information? How complex is the knowledge shown? Is it such as could he acquired by anyone running his eye over a page, or by reading a few pages once without special attention: or must a close and careful study be supposed? How long an interval of time was there between the supposed date of acquisition and the communication? Most important of all, how keen an interest in the relevant facts can be assumed an the medium's part at the date when, if ever, he may have acquired knowledge of them?
Certain answers to these questions may often he unattainable. But by combining what seem to be the most likely answers to each, one can form a fairly good assessment of the respective degrees of probability to be assigned to the hypotheses of paranormal activity and of latent memory.
It is a very common experience, if one glances rapidly at, say, the column of deaths recorded in a newspaper, to receive the impression that somewhere in the smaller type giving details of where the persons named had lived or the place of their death is the name of a particular street or village with which one has some sort of association. One cannot say just where in the column it occurs, but a careful reading will show that the impression was correct. The name has registered but not with the definition that attaches to things perceived in full awareness.
Psychologists in their experiments have gone a stage further. It has been shown that sensory stimuli too faint to be consciously perceived may none the less have registered in the subconscious, by a process called "subception". For instance, a roll of cinema film is cut, and a single exposure from a quite different film is inserted. The roll with the insertion is then flashed on the screen at the usual rate, so rapidly, that is, that the spectator cannot consciously see what the insertion is, or even that there has been any interruption of the sequence. But subconsciously he may not only have noted the interruption but have observed the nature of the insertion.
Use, as is generally known, has been made of this by advertisers, and references to it have been made in the Press under the description of "subliminal" or "split-second" advertising. In view of the possible ethical and political consequences the professional associations, of advertisers in the United Kingdom and the United States have pronounced against its commercial use.
It would however seem at present that there is a considerable difference between experimental subception, or the marginal perception which we frequently observe as following casual glances at a newspaper, and the faculty which would account for even so simple a case as that of Abraham Florentine. Where the amount of verifiable detail in a communication is even greater than was transmitted in that case the plausibility of subception as an explanation is very small.
Doubtful questions of chance-coincidence and lapsed memory are not of course peculiar to psychical research, and it is sometimes helpful to consider them in an unrelated context. A libel action was not very long ago decided in the Courts, the plaintiff being an actress who complained that her name had been attached to a very obnoxious character in a novel. There were several other particulars applicable to herself which also appeared as connected with this character in the book. The Christian name of both real and fictional persons was the same: so was the surname, an unusual one. Both had red or reddish hair. Both were actresses connected with a theatre in the same provincial town. The principal actor in the novel had a name closely resembling that of the principal actor in the plaintiff's company. Both the plaintiff and her fictional counterpart were of the same religious persuasion. The real and fictional actor were also of the same religion as each other, but a different one from that of the plaintiff. There were thus seven points of close resemblance between fact and fiction. The author of the novel said she had never heard of the plaintiff, that the resemblances were accidental, and that in one important particular there was a marked divergence, the action of the novel being dated about a generation before the plaintiff's professional engagement at the town mentioned.
The plaintiff won her case, thereby vindicating her character, but the scale of damages awarded her showed that the Court accepted the author's statement that she intended no reference to the plaintiff and had indeed never heard of her. The author could of course only speak as to her conscious knowledge and memory. Latent memory (cryptomnesia) is therefore left as an alternative explanation to sheer chance-coincidence.
Many communications quoted as evidence for survival show a much less remarkable constellation of correspondences than is to be found in this action.
The scripts included several verses ostensibly dictated by Margaret Veley. The second part of the SPR report, entitled "The Literary Style of the Scripts" was contributed by Dr. Soal, who preferred at the time to he known as "Mr. W'. He did not regard cryptomnesia as a major explanation of the Margaret Veley scripts, differing as to this from the view I have expressed.
It is not surprising that in many cases different views as to the possible operation of latent memory are expressed, since so many uncertain factors are likely to be involved. In the Abraham Florentine case it was possible to paint with fair certainty to a particular printed document as the source from which the communication had been derived, owing to the presence in it of an unusual form of words and of a mistake, both of which were repeated in the communication. This source was an Obituary Notice in an American newspaper, and if the paper in question had first appeared after the communication had been made, the case might possibly be considered as precognitive. Again, if the Obituary, though appearing before the communication, could not possibly have been seen by Stainton Moses, it might perhaps be regarded as an instance, an exceptionally good instance, of clairvoyance. But as hecould have seen it, though there is no direct evidence that he did, it is safer to invoke a normal factor such as latent memory rather than a paranormal one, such as precognition or clairvoyance.
A definite source can seldom be indicated with as much certainty as in that case. The number of items of information which most people acquire by reading books, newspapers, and business documents and by conversation is incalculable. It is sometimes said that the subconscious, like the traditional elephant, never forgets. How clever, or how lucky, man has been to construct consciousness as a shelter under which he can conduct his ordinary affairs unembarrassed by unwanted memories of all the trivialities thrust on his attention hour by hour, day by day, by newspapers, conversation with fellow-commuters and all the apparatus of civilised life!
That however is not the stuff of which communications are made, not at any rate such communications as anyone need bother about. The interest centres on correct statements of facts less accessible to the general public, which may therefore be considered as probably unknown to the medium, unless there are grounds for supposing that in this context his normal knowledge exceeds the average. It is therefore most desirable to ascertain as definitely as practicable in what book or other document the statements may be found, or to whom the relevant facts were known. By this means one can form a fair assessment of the probability of a medium acquiring the necessary knowledge in his ordinary reading or conversation. As stated above, we are not considering possible fraudulent acquisition of knowledge. One can also infer how long before the communication was made the knowledge was first acquired, or was confirmed on some later occasion. This is a matter of importance in judging the probability of information once acquired being forgotten by the conscious mind.
In the Huldah case Newbold, when prompted by the Hodgson-Control, said he "began" to remember the Chicago lady, which seems to suggest that he still retained a conscious memory of the affair, but a very dim and vague one. The incident was then eleven years old, and, had it concerned a matter of indifference to Newbold, might well have slipped his conscious memory altogether. The surprising thing is that he should not have retained even after that lapse of time a clearer memory of an affair that, owing to his friendship with Hodgson and his own engagement, must when it was happening have aroused his keen interest. In the Veley case all the documents mentioned as possible sources of information had been in existence for many years. Dr. Soal seems to have had no personal interest in the Veleys, and if it was in fact a case of cryptomnesia, his normal acquisition of the knowledge about them shown in the scripts might date back long enough to account for it having completely faded from his conscious mind. As regards the communications made about my relatives, I cannot suppose that their affairs were in themselves of any interest to the medium, so that they could well, so to speak, have gone in at one car of her conscious mind and out at the other, though some of the facts, if learnt from written sources, could only have been learnt within a few months before the sitting.
Consider the case of a medium who in a dissociated state makes correct statements of fact which are shown to him when he returns to ordinary consciousness. He may recognise them as facts previously known to his conscious mind, but forgotten by it: he may further be able to recollect how and when he came to know them. Suppose however that (a) a possible source of information can be shown, but (b) he fails to recognise the facts as previously known to him, or to recognise the possible source when pointed out to him, is that an indication that he never knew them normally? That, latent memory bring excluded, he has acquired the information in some other, paranormal way?
This can only be answered by asking several further questions. How accessible to the medium were the supposed sources of information? How complex is the knowledge shown? Is it such as could he acquired by anyone running his eye over a page, or by reading a few pages once without special attention: or must a close and careful study be supposed? How long an interval of time was there between the supposed date of acquisition and the communication? Most important of all, how keen an interest in the relevant facts can be assumed an the medium's part at the date when, if ever, he may have acquired knowledge of them?
Certain answers to these questions may often he unattainable. But by combining what seem to be the most likely answers to each, one can form a fairly good assessment of the respective degrees of probability to be assigned to the hypotheses of paranormal activity and of latent memory.
It is a very common experience, if one glances rapidly at, say, the column of deaths recorded in a newspaper, to receive the impression that somewhere in the smaller type giving details of where the persons named had lived or the place of their death is the name of a particular street or village with which one has some sort of association. One cannot say just where in the column it occurs, but a careful reading will show that the impression was correct. The name has registered but not with the definition that attaches to things perceived in full awareness.
Psychologists in their experiments have gone a stage further. It has been shown that sensory stimuli too faint to be consciously perceived may none the less have registered in the subconscious, by a process called "subception". For instance, a roll of cinema film is cut, and a single exposure from a quite different film is inserted. The roll with the insertion is then flashed on the screen at the usual rate, so rapidly, that is, that the spectator cannot consciously see what the insertion is, or even that there has been any interruption of the sequence. But subconsciously he may not only have noted the interruption but have observed the nature of the insertion.
Use, as is generally known, has been made of this by advertisers, and references to it have been made in the Press under the description of "subliminal" or "split-second" advertising. In view of the possible ethical and political consequences the professional associations, of advertisers in the United Kingdom and the United States have pronounced against its commercial use.
It would however seem at present that there is a considerable difference between experimental subception, or the marginal perception which we frequently observe as following casual glances at a newspaper, and the faculty which would account for even so simple a case as that of Abraham Florentine. Where the amount of verifiable detail in a communication is even greater than was transmitted in that case the plausibility of subception as an explanation is very small.
Doubtful questions of chance-coincidence and lapsed memory are not of course peculiar to psychical research, and it is sometimes helpful to consider them in an unrelated context. A libel action was not very long ago decided in the Courts, the plaintiff being an actress who complained that her name had been attached to a very obnoxious character in a novel. There were several other particulars applicable to herself which also appeared as connected with this character in the book. The Christian name of both real and fictional persons was the same: so was the surname, an unusual one. Both had red or reddish hair. Both were actresses connected with a theatre in the same provincial town. The principal actor in the novel had a name closely resembling that of the principal actor in the plaintiff's company. Both the plaintiff and her fictional counterpart were of the same religious persuasion. The real and fictional actor were also of the same religion as each other, but a different one from that of the plaintiff. There were thus seven points of close resemblance between fact and fiction. The author of the novel said she had never heard of the plaintiff, that the resemblances were accidental, and that in one important particular there was a marked divergence, the action of the novel being dated about a generation before the plaintiff's professional engagement at the town mentioned.
The plaintiff won her case, thereby vindicating her character, but the scale of damages awarded her showed that the Court accepted the author's statement that she intended no reference to the plaintiff and had indeed never heard of her. The author could of course only speak as to her conscious knowledge and memory. Latent memory (cryptomnesia) is therefore left as an alternative explanation to sheer chance-coincidence.
Many communications quoted as evidence for survival show a much less remarkable constellation of correspondences than is to be found in this action.
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