TO THOSE who are unfamiliar with the procedure of an ordinary séance with a
medium it might be interesting to give an account of what might be usually
expected to happen.
Mediums vary immensely in quality and character. There are some mediums who are
definitely fraudulent and who make a practice, for the sake of gain, of
pretending to have acquired from supranormal sources facts which they have
either picked up elsewhere, or cleverly extracted from the more gullible kind of
sitter. There is probably another class of mediums who have begun by being
entirely honest, but seeing that mediumship is their only source of income,
gradually accustom themselves to pretending, almost without realizing that they
are pretending, to give information as from the other world, which is, in fact,
nothing but their own uninspired commentary on the situation with which they
have to deal. They may be compared, perhaps, to the clergyman who begins his
professional life by genuinely preaching the message which he believes to have
been given to him by God, but who, when confronted with the legal necessity of
making two or more sermons every Sunday, very easily slips into a habit of
rattling off totally uninspired, utterances which have little or no claim to be
considered as messages given to him from on high. The paid clergyman and the
paid medium suffer alike from the necessity of producing results which they
might find it difficult to reconcile with perfect sincerity.
But I will assume that we are dealing with a perfectly honest medium such as,
for instance, would be provided by the London Spiritualist Alliance. This would
be a person who is vouched for as being one of known probity of character. He
would, indeed, like the clergyman, make his living by giving messages from the
world of spirit. It is probable that in every case, even with the best mediums,
this message is profoundly influenced by the medium's own character and, indeed,
by his state of health, and by the personality of the sitter.
The medium will be sitting in an arm-chair in a partly darkened room (a bright
light always seems to interfere with the mediumistic trance). The sitter is
perhaps accompanied by a friend who takes short-hand notes of the sitting. It is
very probable that the medium will first offer prayer. These prayers, in the
case of a good medium, would be obviously genuine, dignified, and earnest. The
subject of the prayer will be that no spirit may approach who is not in touch
with the Divine Will, and that we may be guarded against evil influences. In a
few, minutes, after perhaps a few deep sighs and small muscular movements of the
medium's body, the medium will become entranced. Then a totally new voice will
emanate from the medium's mouth.
It is curious that in many cases this control, as it is called, appears to be of
a childish and uneducated mentality. These controls often have childish names,
very often they claim to be Red Indians, or South Sea Islanders, or Egyptian
Priests. It is thought by some students of psychical research that the control
is not, in fact, a separate individual, as it claims to be, but is only a
detached part of the medium's mind which is able to enter into relations with
some other mode of existence.
Be that as it may, the control will begin conversing with the sitter with ease
and familiarity, asking and answering questions. Generally the conversation will
start by the control mentioning the names of various people who are not
recognizable, giving descriptions which might easily apply to a great variety,
of cases, as for instance, "I see an old man. His hair is white and rather
sparse, he is short of breath, he was very ill before he passed out, he is, of
medium height, neither very tall nor very short, he is nearly related to you, he
is perhaps your uncle or your father. You do not know him? 'Never mind,' he
says, 'you may not have known him but he knows you.'"
This is always the most unconvincing part of the sitting. The medium will go on
to ask whether you know John, or Jim, or Mary, or Alice, and you begin to be, if
you are at all critical, highly suspicious of the whole business. Then, if you
are fortunate, the medium may possibly begin to describe people whom you have
known in this life. In one sitting that I can think of the control said, "I will
try and drive away all these other spirits and shut the door and bring alone the
spirits that want to talk to you." Immediately afterwards I was given the
initials of three men that I have known intimately, then the name by which they
knew me, then the name of the place where I was working. I had every reason to
believe that the medium could not have known who I was, or who were my friends.
There are very numerous cases in which people have been given proofs which they
regard as absolutely convincing, that they have conversed, through the medium,
with people they have known and loved on earth. Such an experience is shared by
thousands of men and women today.
The baffling and disappointing part of the ordinary séance is that, even when we
do feel convinced that we have indeed come into communication with people whom
we have known, the quality of the communication is disappointingly meagre. If we
ask the best mediums why this is so, they will reply that we must always
remember that these communications pass through an almost incredibly difficult
series of channels. Our friend in the other world has first of all to get into
touch with the control, the control very often having the mentality of a young
kitchen maid. The control then has to try impress the message upon the brain
substance of the vocal organs of the medium who is entranced, and this brain
substance of the vocal organs hag to try to make the message audible and
comprehensible to you. We may almost compare the process to two highly educated
men trying to send a message to one another when both are at the mercy of an
almost illiterate messenger. The one, perhaps, has to transmit the message to an
uneducated South Sea Islander. She, in turn, gives the message, we will say, to
a schoolgirl, and the school girl then transmits it to the friend. The message
will reach its destination probably ill-spelt and ungrammatical, and so full of
mistakes that the friend at one end will feel great uncertainty as to whether it
is a genuine message, and, if it be genuine, will marvel that his friend shows
so little mental capacity as to have almost forgotten how to speak grammatical
English.
Most of these messages then are unsatisfying, even when we feel persuaded that
they are genuine. People often complain that instead of informing us about the
life of the other world and giving us messages which will be of aid to our
religious or philosophical interests, they merely recall to us, let us say, the
name of our friend's pet dog or cat, or some absurd incident which happened to
us both when we were in a punt on the river. I think we have got to remember
that, for purposes of identification, a sermon or philosophical disquisition on
the after life would not be very good evidence of identity, whereas the mention
of some quite unimportant incident, giving the pet name of a person or an animal
or recalling some foolish accident, may be, for purposes of identification, far
more convincing than any really serious message. My own opinion is that we very
seldom get much farther than receiving a definite proof that such and such a
person has survived death, by relating some convincing incidents of our past
life, and we are wise if we do not ask for more than this; but I must own that
many friends whose opinion I trust have been far more successful than I have
been in this respect, and have constantly received messages which they regard as
not only genuine but informative and reassuring in the highest degree.
The séance may go on for over an hour, the control becoming chatty and
loquacious. We shall be told details about our future health and prospects which
sometimes come true and sometimes do not (nearly all mediums prophesied that
there would be no war). After about an hour the control will probably say that
the light or the power is failing, and will then say good-bye with many
expressions of goodwill. After a few sighs the medium will then wake up and will
be totally ignorant as to what has happened, whether there has been any success
or none. It may be well to say here that where a medium is carefully looked
after and not allowed to accept too many engagements, there seems to be no
reason to suppose that the medium's health suffers, any more than that of any
other professional person.
It must not be supposed that all communications through entranced persons are as
little satisfactory as the one that I have outlined. There are a few (I should
say very few) that contain very much more detailed evidence. I have already
referred to Mr. Stainton Moses's "spirit
teachings." We may read Mrs. Willett's script professing to come from Mr. F. W.
H. Myers, and commented on elaborately by the present Lord Balfour in
Proceedings of the SPR, Part 140. No one could possibly say that these
messages are trifling or irrelevant, wherever they may come from. They are
serious, important, and detailed. They have convinced men like
Lord Balfour, Sir
William Barrett and Sir
Oliver Lodge that they are genuine,
that is to say they have come from persons who have passed into the other world
and who can be identified as showing a consistent personality and identity.
Anyone who has not studied the literature of psychical research, as for instance
in that great book we have mentioned, Human Personality and its Survival of
Bodily Death, can have no idea how much evidence there is of messages from
persons who have passed into the other world, how dignified, carefully weighed
and characteristic they are, and how carefully those messages have been sifted
by critics eminently fitted for such a task.
The great difficulty remains that it is exceedingly hard to devise any test
which will make us certain that what professes to be a message from our
friend in the other world may not be in fact the evocation by the medium of
recollections drawn from the subconscious strata of our own memory. There is no
doubt, I think, that many of these "messages" do have this origin. The question
remains as to whether this explanation fits all of these so-called messages.
Is there any way of escaping this uncertainty? The only real proof of the
identity of any person professing to speak from the other world is whether they
give a message the content of which is unknown to the medium or the sitter and
can only be afterwards verified. Where this is the case, I find it very
difficult to escape from the belief that I am receiving a message from an
extra-mundane source, and that it comes from the person from whom it professes
to come. It has indeed been suggested that we all of us may possibly, in our
subconsciousness, have access to all the information which there is in the
world, and that even if we do not consciously know this information, we may know
everything subconsciously. This really does seem to me, to be pressing the
theory of telepathy to absurd and incredible extremes. I believe that if we are
told some fact of which we cannot have any knowledge, and never have had any
knowledge in our past life, and this turns out on investigation to be true, then
we may well assume that this is a proof of the survival of the conscious
intelligence of the personality from which the message purports to come. Now
although nine-tenths of the messages which come through even a very good and
successful séance may have a very possible explanation in telepathy between the
sitter and the medium, there is a very definite residuum of the satisfactory
messages which cannot be accounted for by telepathy.
The following is a typical instance of communication from the other world given
by Henry James, the novelist, in his Letters, volume two:
I have had from or through a medium in America near Boston a message purporting,
to come from my mother, who died twenty-five years ago, and from whom it
ostensibly proceeded during a séance at which my sister-in-law, with two or
three other persons, was present. The point is that the message is an allusion
to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the
world but me - not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law, and an
allusion so pertinent and initiated and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped
by any actual earthly knowledge on anyone's part, that it quite astounds as well
as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been conceivably in my
sister-in-law's mind it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case
of telepathy but, as I say, it could not thinkably have been: and she only
transmitted it to me, after the fact, not even fully understanding it. So, I
repeat, I am astounded.
Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking of the
difficulties which surround all these communications, remarks:
The process of communication is sophisticated by many influences, so that it is
very difficult, perhaps at present impossible, to disentangle and exhibit
clearly the part that each plays.
Sir William Barrett, speaking of the
result of his investigations, says,
Certainly, for our own part, we believe there is some active intelligence at
work behind, and apart from, the automatist, an intelligence which is more like
the deceased person it professes to be than that of any other we can imagine.
And though the intelligence is provokingly irritating in the way it evades
simple direct replies to questions, yet it is difficult to find any other
solution to the problem of these scripts and cross-correspondences than that
there is an attempt at intelligent co-operation between certain disembodied
minds and our own ... Some of the evidence, indeed, seems rather to indicate a
more or less truncated personality, a fragment of earthly memories partly roused
by, and mainly connected with, those through and to whom the communications come
... The intelligent and characteristic messages, however, suggest that the vague
ones are due to the fading and dissolving of earthly memories and ties, as the
departed become more absorbed in their new life, the very nature of which we are
in our present state incapable of conceiving. Our own limitations, in fact, make
it impossible for the evidence to convey the assurance that we are communicating
with what is best and noblest in those who have passed into the unseen.
There are also the so-called "book tests," when a spirit purporting to speak
through a medium refers to some book in the sitter's library or some other
library, mentioning, for example, that in the fourth book from the right-hand
end on the fifth shelf, on page 321, the fifth line down, will be found such and
such a message. It may be a book which the sitter has either never read or has
never looked at for many years. Though it is conceivable that our subconscious
may retain the memory of a passage in a book which, we have not read for years
past, remembering also the page and the position in the page where the passage
is to be found, this does seem to me a very improbable explanation. If again we
are told the name of a person who was born in 1721 and we are told where to find
the baptismal register and where to look for his gravestone, this being a person
whom we have never heard of, it seems to me to be unreasonably sceptical if we
refuse to accept this as a genuine of supra-normal knowledge.
We have indeed to beware of supposing that, even if such a genuine message is
given, it necessarily means that we must accept all the other messages given
from the same source as being either valuable or necessarily true. Mr.
Stainton Moses was constantly reminded by
his "guides" that they were very far themselves from being infallible, though
they claimed to have access to a much greater volume of knowledge than he could
have in this world, and he was also warned that these proofs of identity had
little value in themselves, and that the sooner he could give up asking for
signs and wonders the better it would be for his spiritual progress.
Now, as I am rather taking for granted in this book that my readers are for the
most part members of the Christian Church, or at all events accept the main
facts of the Christian revelation, I am anxious to point out once again (and I
feel it is exceedingly important that we should realize this) that the proofs
which we have of Our Lord's miracles, and especially of Our Lord's resurrection,
are very far from being such as would be accepted by men of science to-day.
This thought leads us to ask ourselves on what evidence we do accept or deny the
report of supranormal happenings in ancient records. We no doubt begin by
accepting them because we are taught them by authorities whom we respect, our
parents, our school, the Church, or the Bible. But when we come to a point, as
we must all do, when we have to ask ourselves whether these authorities are to
be trusted or not, we are largely influenced by our conception as to what we
believe is consonant to our ideas about the nature of the universe.
We are ready to accept the record of a man like St. Paul, when he tells us of
his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, and we accept also his explanation
of that experience because we feel that the story bears a stamp of veracity and
fits in to our general belief in the constitution of the universe. After all,
our commonest and most everyday beliefs are subject to a test of this kind. Our
only assurance that our everyday experiences are not dreams, but do correspond
to actual happenings in the outside world, is due, not to any possibility of
conclusive proof, but to our belief that to accept these occurrences as true
makes life rational and intelligible.
To sum up then, I believe there is a small residuum of psychical facts which
have, happened in our own day, which can only be explained on the theory that
certain individuals who have lived upon this earth are now alive, and are able
to communicate with their friends, and that if we reject this evidence we ought
also logically to reject the evidence on which the great facts of our Christian
faith are founded.
Source: "The Truth About Spiritualism" by
Harold Anson (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1941).
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