It may be as well, at this point, to pause and ask the question: What does it all mean? There is something about ‘spiritualism’ that is peculiarly irritating. It is one thing to accept that some people, like Rosalind Heywood, possess strange powers of clairvoyance, and quite another to swallow ‘spirit teachings’ that sound like the ramblings of an uninspired Sunday school teacher. It is not that the doctrines of Swedenborg or Kardec are in themselves unacceptable. The notion that man possesses a ‘vital body’, an astral body and an ego-body seems reasonable enough; some may even learn, through self-observation, to distinguish between the promptings of the ‘low self and the detached observations of some higher part of us that looks down ironically on our sufferings and humiliations. But when Kardec tells us that God created spirits, and then set them the task of evolving towards perfection, it sounds boringly abstract. Why did God bother to create spirits in the first place? Why did he not create them perfect in the first place? And surely spirits ought to have something better to do than to communicate with their living relatives through ‘mediums’ and deliver anticlimactic messages about the joys of the afterlife and the trivial problems of the living? If we compare the revelations of spiritualism with those of science or philosophy, or the visions of the great mystics, they seem oddly banal …
This explains why spiritualism aroused such instant hostility among scientists and philosophers. Spiritualism was like a volcanic explosion of belief; the scientists replied with a blast of scepticism that was like cold water. And the combination of boiling lava and cold water produced an enormous cloud of steam that obscured everything. It was not that most scientists disbelieved the evidence: they refused even to look at it. T. H. Huxley expressed the general feeling when he remarked: ‘It may all be true, for anything that I know to the contrary, but really I cannot get up interest in the subject.’
Such an attitude can hardly be defended as scientific. For anyone who has an hour to spare, the evidence is seen to be overwhelming. There are hundreds — thousands — of descriptions of out-of-the-body experiences, of poltergeists, of ‘apparitions of the dead’, of accurate glimpses of the future. Any reasonable person ought to be prepared to come to terms with these, not to dismiss them with the comment: ‘I really cannot get up any interest in the subject.’
Can we come to terms with them without making any commitment to life-after-death or the existence of ‘spirits’? Just about. Consider, for example, the haunting of Willington Mill. One interesting point that emerged was that the male apparition walked across the room several feet above the ground, at the level of the window sill. This suggests that it was walking on a floor that had now been demolished. And we know that the millhouse was built on the site of an older house. It looks as if Sir Oliver Lodge’s ‘tape recording’ theory can explain this particular ghost. We also observe that the house was at the bottom of a valley, next to a stream, and therefore almost certainly damp. T. C. Lethbridge suggested that ghosts are ‘recordings’ on the electrical field of water, and are found most frequently in damp places …
We may also note the comment of the local historian that although the mill was built around 1800, no haunting was recorded until the disturbances experienced by Mr Proctor’s family — a family of young children. Later in the nineteenth century, investigators of poltergeist phenomena observed that children are usually present, and that one of them often seems to be the ‘focus’ of the disturbance — indeed, we may recall that the Rev. Samuel Wesley noticed that his daughter Hetty trembled in her sleep before ‘Old Jeffrey’ began banging around. Split-brain physiology has taught us that we have two people inside our heads. Perhaps ‘Old Jeffrey’ was some kind of manifestation of Hetty Wesley’s unconscious mind or right brain?
In fact, this plausible theory of psychic phenomena was put forward later in the nineteenth century by a brilliant newspaper editor, Thomson Jay Hudson, in a book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893). Hudson was fascinated by hypnotism, and by the unusual powers that people can develop under hypnosis. He became convinced that man has two ‘selves’, which he called the Objective Mind and the Subjective Mind. The objective mind is the part of us that deals with everyday problems — the left brain. The subjective mind is turned inward; it controls our inner being, what goes on inside us. Normally, the subjective mind is impressed and overawed by the objective mind, so it hardly dares to express itself. But when the objective mind is put to sleep by a hypnotist, the subjective mind can reveal its hidden powers. In the late years of the nineteenth century, a hypnotist named Carl Hansen used to go around America, and his favourite trick was to make someone so rigid that he could be placed across two chairs like a plank — his head on one and his heels on the other — while the heavy Hansen jumped up and down on his stomach. Such things as these, said Hudson, were the very least of the powers of the subjective mind (or, as we would say, right brain). The subjective mind can perform miracles — in fact, the miracles of Jesus were probably merely the manifestation of his ‘subjective mind’. It is the subjective mind, said Hudson, that is responsible for such mysterious phenomena as telepathy and clairvoyance.
He then turns his attention to ‘spiritism’. The phenomena, he admits, are undeniable. But they are not produced by the spirits of the dead. What produces the phenomena is ‘essentially a human intelligence, and neither rises above nor sinks below the ordinary intelligence of humanity’. And this is why spiritualism is so oddly boring and disappointing — because it is, as Nietzsche would say, ‘human, all too human’. ‘… we have already seen what remarkable powers the subjective mind possesses in certain lines of intellectual activity, and with what limitations it is hedged about; and we find that the intellectual feats of mediums possess all the characteristics belonging to subjective intelligence — the same wonderful powers and the same limitations’.
It is a convincing theory, and surprisingly ‘modern’; in all the years since The Law of Psychic Phenomena appeared, nothing more plausible or ‘scientific’ has been advanced. But does it really cover all the facts? Hudson’s solution to the problem of spirits is that ‘the subjective mind of the medium, being controlled by suggestion, believes itself to be the spirit of any deceased person whose name is suggested’. But this fails to explain cases — like Swedenborg’s case of the ‘secret drawer’ mentioned in Chapter One — where the medium was able to produce information that was only known to the dead person. And how did Sir Alexander Ogston, (as mentioned in Chapter Two), know that the R.A.M.C. surgeon had died in another part of the hospital, unless his mind had, in some sense, left his body and wandered around the hospital? We might explain these cases — and many others like them — by some form of telepathy: perhaps Ogston’s mind picked up the death-throes of the surgeon, perhaps Swedenborg contacted the mind of the carpenter who made the desk with the secret drawer … But the explanations are becoming absurdly complicated, and they violate the principle known in philosophy as Occam’s razor, which states that, in trying to solve a problem, it is best to look for the simplest and most economical explanation. It seems, on the whole, more straightforward to accept the possibility of life after death — or the spirit’s independence of the body — as a working hypothesis.
The other major objection to spiritualism — that it somehow ‘reduces’ the spiritual to the material — was expressed by Dean Inge when he wrote: ‘The moment we are asked to accept scientific evidence for spiritual truth, the alleged spiritual truth becomes neither spiritual nor true. It is degraded into an event in the phenomenal world.’* And, oddly enough, Rudolf Steiner agreed with him, remarking: ‘The spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ This sounds baffling, in view of the fact that Steiner not only accepted the reality of life after death, but of reincarnation as well.
The explanation is important, and accounts for the general feeling of hostility that is so often aroused by Spiritualism. One of Steiner’s basic doctrines was that ‘the supersensible world appears to us in such a way that it resemble
s our perceptions of the sense world’.** So that he says of Swedenborg:
He was a man who, in the time of dawning natural science, had become accustomed only to recognise the sensible, the visible … Since he insisted on recognising as true only what he could calculate and perceive with his senses … he drew down the supersensible world into a lower sphere under the influence of his habits of natural science.***
What Steiner is saying here is something that soon dawns on most readers of accounts of near-death experiences. Some find themselves walking towards a celestial city, some find themselves in flowery meadows, some find themselves drawn towards a heavenly gateway or a whirlpool of light. It looks as if everyone is interpreting the experience in terms of their own familiar concepts. Steiner is suggesting that visionaries like Swedenborg, who have caught a glimpse of the ‘supersensible world’, are bound to interpret it according to their ingrained mental habits, and that this explains why the revelations of spiritualism often seem slightly ludicrous.
Oddly enough, Steiner thoroughly approved of Kardec, who obtained the material for his books from automatic writing. This clearly suggests that what Steiner disliked so much about Spiritualism was its literal-mindedness — the trumpets and accordions floating through the air, the tables dancing around the room, the spirits made of ectoplasm. His attitude could be compared to that of a Christian mystic who wishes to explain that heaven is not full of angels sitting around on clouds and playing harps.
At the same time, there is bound to be an element of unfairness in such an attitude. Many mediums who started off by producing automatic writing later became ‘voice mediums’, and some even ‘materialisation mediums’. It is impossible to draw a sharp line between them. Steiner is not really criticising Spiritualism; he is criticising spiritualists. Once we have grasped this, one of the major problems disappears — or at least, is revealed as a misunderstanding.
It was a misunderstanding that caused a great deal of trouble and bitterness in the early days of Spiritualism. It was useless for investigators like Catherine Crowe and Allan Kardec to demand a fair hearing for the ‘supernatural’; scientists and intellectuals felt they were being asked to swallow a farrago of childish nonsense. They pointed angrily at the Spiritualist churches that were springing up all over America, and asked how anybody could be serious about a religion started by two silly girls. Their scepticism seemed to be justified in April 1851, when a relative of the Fox family, a certain Mrs Norman Culver, announced in the New York Herald that Kate and Margaretta Fox had shown her how they made the rapping noises with their knees and toes. This may or may not have been true. The girls — and their mother — had become celebrities, and spent a great deal of time travelling around the East coast giving demonstrations. Fate had promoted them from the boredom of small-town life in upper New York State to the equivalent of stardom. If the spirits were occasionally uncooperative, it would have been surprising if they had not been tempted to do a little cheating. What seems perfectly clear is that the original phenomena — bangs that were strong enough to make the house vibrate — could not have been caused by cracking the joints of the knees. Neither could Kate and Margaretta have answered all the questions about the people in the room. The accusations of fraud were just one more excuse for refusing to look dispassionately at the evidence.
The real tragedy in all this was that the cloud of polemical steam obscured a great deal of serious research into the paranormal. In the 1840s, a German scientist named Baron Karl von Reichenbach had rediscovered Mesmer’s recognition that human beings can be affected by magnets. Reichenbach found that sick people seemed to be more sensitive to magnetism than healthy ones, and his ‘sick sensitives’ could see different colours streaming out of the two poles of the magnet — red from the south pole, blue from the north. They could detect the same emanations in crystals. And — most important — they could see it streaming from the finger-ends of human beings. Reichenbach called it ‘odyle’ or ‘the odic force’, and the announcement of his discovery caused widespread excitement when he first made it in 1845. What Reichenbach had really discovered was the human ‘life field’, investigated in the 1930s by Harold Burr and F. S. C. Northrop. But by 1850, the rise of spiritualism made scientists feel that any kind of ‘unseen force’ was suspect; Reichenbach suddenly found himself as discredited and ridiculed as Mesmer.
Joseph Rodes Buchanan was a professor of medicine in Kentucky, who was intrigued when a bishop told him he could detect brass when he touched it — even in the dark — because it produced a bitter taste in his mouth. Buchanan tested his students with various chemicals wrapped in brown paper packages, and found that many of them could distinguish them by touch. He concluded that we have a ‘nerve aura’ streaming from the ends of our fingers, and that this can ‘taste’ things, just like the tongue. Then he discovered that some of his best subjects could hold an unopened letter in their hands, and ‘sense’ the mood of the writer — in fact, some of them could describe the writer with remarkable accuracy.
Now all this fits in perfectly with Sir Oliver Lodge’s ‘tape recording’ theory about ghosts — that strong emotions can ‘imprint’ themselves on their surroundings, and that this ‘recording’ can be detected by people who are sensitive to such things. Buchanan’s subjects were virtually human bloodhounds. Buchanan called this strange faculty ‘psychometry’, and his book about it aroused widespread interest in 1848. It caused a professor of geology named William Denton to try similar experiments on his students, using geological specimens. The results were astounding.* Lumps of volcanic lava brought visions of exploding mountains, mastodons’ teeth visions of primeval forests, meteorites visions of the depths of space. Denton believed that he had discovered a ‘telescope into the past’, an unknown faculty through which man can travel backwards in time. Regrettably, no one paid much attention to Denton’s book The Soul of Things, nor to Buchanan’s Manual of Psychometry. Such things sounded too much like Spiritualism, and any scientist who took them seriously would have condemned himself to ridicule.
To some extent, spiritualists were themselves to blame for all this hostility. They were too gullible, too prone to accept any banal nonsense as a message from ‘the other side’. Hundreds of fake mediums took advantage of their credulity to practise barefaced impositions, and whenever one of them was caught in the act, scientists shook their heads wearily and made comparisons with the mediaeval witchcraft phenomenon. Most of them had become too blasé even to say ‘I told you so.’ Genuine mediums like the Davenport brothers did themselves no good by appearing in theatres and performing hair-raising feats of escapology that would have done credit to Houdini. They allowed themselves to be tied so tight that the ropes cut into their flesh and caused bruises; but after a brief period in a cabinet, they would step out with the ropes around their feet. Professor Benjamin Pierce, a member of an investigating committee, sat between them in the cabinet. As soon as the door was closed, a hand shot the bolt — both brothers were trussed up like mummies — and briefly felt the professor’s face before going on to untie the brothers. Professor Loomis of the Georgetown Medical College admitted that the manifestations were produced by a force with which he was unacquainted. But this kind of testimony meant nothing compared to the fact that the brothers appeared on the same bill with conjurors and acrobats.
All this explains why so little was achieved by the most remarkable medium of the nineteenth century — perhaps of all time — Daniel Dunglas Home. Home retained his powers for more than a quarter of a century, with the exception of a period of one year when, as we shall see, the ‘spirits’ decided to punish him. He performed his astonishing feats in broad daylight. He caused heavy articles of furniture to float up to the ceiling; he himself floated out of one window and in at another; he washed his face in blazing coals; he could make himself several inches taller at will. He was tested dozens of times by committees of sceptics, and was never once caught out in anything that looked like fraud. Yet posterity remembers him ch
iefly as the man Dickens called ‘that scoundrel Home’, and about whom Robert Browning wrote a scurrilous poem called ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’.
A typical Home seance is amusingly described by his biographer Jean Burton. It took place on an evening in January 1863, in the fashionable home of Madame Jauvin d’Attainville, and the guests included Princess Metternich and her husband, the Austrian ambassador. The guests — fifteen in all — sat at the table in the magnificent second empire drawing room, while Home sat in an armchair three or four yards away. When everyone was ready, he sat back in his chair, became paler, and went into a light trance. He asked ‘Bryan, are you there?’ (Bryan being his spirit guide). Sharp raps came from the table, the chandeliers began to swing, and a chair moved of its own accord across the room and stopped in front of the guests. At the same moment, Princess Metternich screamed, as she felt a powerful but invisible hand grip hers. Others also felt hands lightly touching them. (All this was in a room ‘blazing with light’.) The tapestry tablecloth now rose into the air, and underneath it, something seemed to be moving, like a hand or a small animal, towards them. This was too much for the men, most of whom were sceptics; Prince Metternich dived under the cloth and tried to grab the ‘creature’; there was nothing. One of the men pulled the cloth away, while others dived under the table to find the source of the raps; again, they were disappointed. As they scrambled out again, a hailstorm of raps sounded, as if in derision. The angry Prince Metternich was now convinced that they were coming from under the table, and scrambled underneath again. Raps sounded, and Metternich yelled indignantly: ‘No jokes, please!’ The company assured him that they were not responsible.
Apparently in a trance, Home pointed to a corsage of violets on the piano and asked that it should be brought over to them. The violets glided across the piano, floated unsteadily across the room, and fell into the princess’s lap. Prince Metternich bounded forward and grabbed them, then proceeded to search for the thread that he was convinced must be attached; he found nothing.