leaned over to ask me if I saw, if I could see everything quite
clearly. I certainly did; how could I have helped it, unless I had
shut my eyes? And I had never kept them wider open in my life. I
had seen greater things on this earth, more beautiful, more worthy
of admiration. But never before had I seen the impossible happening
despite its own impossibility; and so I kept saying in rather a shaken
voice: “Very good, very good!” though for my own part I felt anything
but good. Here I sat, holding in my very own hands Willy’s wrists in
their tricot sleeves; while immediately next to me I saw his knees in
the custody of the Pole. Not a thought, not a notion, not the shadow
of a possibility that the boy sleeping here could have done what was
happening there. And who else? Nobody. And still it was done. It gave
me a queasy feeling.
The lifting of the handkerchief, I heard said round me, was regularly
the introductory phenomenon. The spell was broken. The medium, who
had been strangely still during these events, sat up with a shiver
and whispered: “Put away the music-box. The bell.” “The bell,” cries
von K., all enthusiasm. “Where is my Minna’s bell? The bell, on
the basket! Good, now we’re off again!” The Baron obeys. He takes
away the music-box and puts the bell on the wastepaper-basket, its
ribbons gleaming in the dusk, and the metal shining redly. Willy
carries his hands and ours to his brow. He sighs. Then the bell is
taken--impossible, of course, but it is taken--by a hand, for what
else can take a bell by the handle? Taken, lifted up, held high and
slanting, rung violently, carried in a curve through the air, rung
again, and then with a swing and a clatter flung under the chair of one
of the audience.
Slight seasickness. Profound wonderment, with a tinge, not of horror,
but of disgust. Minna’s praises resound, loud and unceasingly.
“Unbelievable!” one of the novices cries out. Her head--what am I
saying? I mean his head, Willy’s head--leans toward mine, like a little
child he lays his temple against mine. Good lad, nice lad! You have
done marvels. Shaken and respectful, I let his head rest against mine.
But the Baron says:
“Here, Minna, is something new for you. You haven’t seen it yet, but
it is quite easy to use. It is a bell. You press it, strike on it from
above, you see. Like this. Then it rings. You do it, Minna. Here is the
bell.”
And he sets it on the basket. Tense expectation. At once we hear a
feeling round the bell, as though fingers were touching it uncertainly.
They take it up, shake it slightly; it rings, but not in the right way.
“Not like that,” says the Baron. “You don’t understand. Let me show
you. There, that’s how it’s done.” He strikes the button. “The circle,”
whispers Willy, quivering, against my cheek. But the Baron cannot make
the circle and strike the bell both at the same time. He asks Minna to
realize this. Hardly has he resumed his seat when the fingering and
touching begin again. At last the trick is successful. The fingers
strike the bell from above, weakly, like a child; but the task is
definitely performed. The clapper sounds.
“Brava, Minna,” shouts the audience. “Fantastic!” somebody says. But we
have no time to surrender to our sensations; for more follows. Hardly
has the Baron taken away the bell, when the basket begins to move.
Something knocks it, it totters and tips over; then it is lifted from
the floor and held high in the air. It hangs there askew and unsteady
in the red light, outlined by its illuminated ribbons, for three or
four seconds long, then tumbles to the floor.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” asks the Baron, pridefully. We
admit that we are impressed. Willy hangs sideways from his chair,
in deep trance. Certainly a man must stand in need of profound and
dreamless sleep, after so intense a dream that the events of it
are actually projected outside of him! Wait. Let me think. Let me
withdraw within myself and try to divine where may be the point, when
the magical moment, in which a dream-picture objectivates itself and
becomes a spatial reality, before the eyes of other people. Nausea.
Clearly this point does not lie within the plane of our consciousness,
or of the laws of knowledge as we know them. If anywhere, it is located
in that state in which I see this lad now before me, and which is
certainly a gate--whither? Behind the house, behind the world?... But I
admit that this is not thinking at all--only a mild form of seasickness.
To set things going again, the Baron starts up the music-box. He also
makes a change in the control. Von K. and I are released. I grope my
way in the dark to the other end of the chain and find a seat beside
Reicher, who sits next my host. I have the little table before me.
And scarcely have I taken my chair, and my neighbours’ hands, when a
fingering begins at the music-box on the table. The Baron hastens to
stop the music. And in the stillness, before my eyes, that see nothing
whatever, there is a scratching, rustling, and mysterious feeling-about
over the handle of the instrument, a trying to turn it. Ah, you deep
and immemorially light-shy creature, compact of dream and matter, what
are you doing there in front of our noses? Crick, the handle is turned,
the works go round. “Tell it to stop,” says the Baron. At my command it
stops. “Go on,” I say. And the music plays. This happens several times.
You sit there, bending forward, you command the impossible, and you
are obeyed, by a spook, a panic-striken little monster from behind the
world....
A pause. Then arises a varied activity among the light rings on the
floor. They are shoved to and fro, tossed from place to place. One
rises from the floor with its gleaming string hanging down. It is held
up, carried through space, brought to the table, where it wants to
be put down, and is, with a clumsiness which might lead one to think
that its motive force was blind. But probably the thing is timid,
afraid of being seen, afraid of venturing too far into the circle of
lamplight on the table. The ring is moved to the nearest corner of the
table, by a kind of stealthy shove that makes the felt scrape along
the wood. It just balances. At the same time the thing, in its blind,
clumsy trepidation, knocks so hard against the table that it shakes.
Tut, tut, you hole-and-corner fish out of water, why, and with what
monstrous knuckles, are you knocking like that on our good table,
before our face and eyes? Just as I am thinking this, plop, a ring
flies into my face. Something has flung it at me, it drops on my knee
and thence at my feet. What a playful monster! We all laugh. But it
is not amusement we feel, rather a sort of sinking sensation at the
chilling arrogance of this something or other which is perhaps only a
distressingly complicated kind of humbug. But, as I said, a civilized.
It did not throw the music-box in my face, but tactfully chose one of
the soft little rings. People have had their ears boxed, and other
practical jokes have been played, such as unlacing boots. Somebody had
his wristwatch taken off and carried about the room. But nobody, it is
unanimously affirmed, has ever suffered any serious harm from these
powers, and that is an indication of good sense and decent feeling.
On the other hand, they do unmistakably tend to become demoralized,
to play silly tricks and make unmotivated displays of strength. The
need of constant oversight, guidance, and direction is plain--as,
for instance, when the agency now set to work, with a good deal of
persistence, to upset the music-box standing on the table. The Baron
was alarmed for his instrument, and begged Minna to spare him the
heart-breaking annoyance which any kind of repair work costs in these
days. In vain. “It” obstinately persisted in overturning the box, on
which lay the slate and slate-pencil, likewise in danger of breaking.
Something had to be done by way of distraction, and the Baron thought
of the typewriting-machine, which stood on the floor in front of the
curtain, with paper inserted ready for use. “Write, Minna,” he said.
“Do something useful. We will listen to you, and then we shall have the
writing, to prove that we are not hypnotized, as some of your enemies
say.” The thing seems able to listen to reason, it desists from its
efforts at the box. We wait. And, on my honour, the writing-machine
begins to click, there on the floor. This is insane. Even after all we
have already seen, it is in the highest degree startling, bewildering,
ridiculous; the fantasticality of the thing is even fascinating. Who
is it writing on the machine? Nobody. Nobody is lying there on the
carpet in the dark and playing on the machine, but it is being played
on. Willy’s arms and legs are held fast. Even if he could get an arm
free, he could not reach the machine with it; and as for his feet,
even if they could reach that far they could not touch single types on
the machine, they would tread on several at once. No, it is not Willy.
But there is nobody else. What else can we do but shake our heads
and laugh? The writing is being done with the right touch, a hand is
certainly touching the keys--but is it really only one hand? No, if you
ask me, there are surely two hands; the sounds are too quick for one,
they sound as though proceeding from the fingers of a practised typist;
we come to the end of a line, the bell rings, we hear the carriage
being drawn back, the new line begins--the sound breaks off and a pause
ensues.
Then somewhat further back, in front of the dark background of the
curtain, suddenly, swiftly, and fleetingly, the following little
apparition. Something appears, a longish something, vague, and whitely
shimmering; in size and general shape like a human forearm, with closed
fist--but not certainly recognizable as such. It comes and goes,
showing itself before our eyes, lighted by a sort of flash of white
lightning that issues from its own right side and wholly obscures
whatever shape it has--then it is gone.
“There, there is a materialization for you,” says our host, pointing
to it. “I’m glad you have seen one. Wait, perhaps it will make an
impression for us.” And he pleads with Minna to put her hand into the
plate of flour on the table. But I did not for a minute believe that
she would, and she did not, we waited in vain. It was quite light on
the table, the phantom would have exposed itself all too defencelessly
to our view, and to do that did not in the least correspond to the
image I had made to myself of the shy, sly, stealthy, equivocal
character of our elusive guest: a character too insignificant to
have evil intent, on the contrary probably quite well-meaning, but
weak-minded and embarrassed.--Nothing further happened. General
fatigue, it seemed, had supervened. Willy whispered: “Merry Christmas!”
The sitting was over.
It was odd to see in the bald white light the felt ring lying there at
my feet where it had no business to be. Remarkable, too, to observe
the typed writing on the machine, a perfectly nonsensical jumble of
large and small letters; presumably it would have been different
if Willy himself knew how to type. He still lay drunk with sleep,
leaning sideways across the arm of one of the controls. I went up to
him, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him it had been a brilliant
sitting. He looked dumbly up at me with his sleepy eyes, and a
good-natured, rather sad little smile was on his face.
We moved back by groups into the library, in animated discussion over
what we had seen. Tea was served, and did us all much good. The evening
finished off with stage stories narrated by Reicher.
* * * * *
Well, now, what had I seen? Two-thirds of my readers will answer:
swindle, sleight-of-hand, deception. Some day, when our knowledge of
these matters has progressed, the field will be popularized, and they
will deny that such was their judgment. Even now, and even if they take
me for a credulous and suggestible fad-chaser, the testimony of trained
experimenters like the French scholar Gustave Geley ought to make them
less glib. Geley closes his report with the categorical statement:
“I do not merely say that there was no deception present in these
sittings; I say that the possibility of deception was ruled out.” That
is absolutely my own position. I am in that intriguing and confounded
state of mind in which reason commands us to recognize what reason on
the other hand would reject as impossible. The nature of the phenomena
I have described makes it inevitable that the idea of deception should
afterwards haunt the minds even of those who saw with their own eyes;
only to be laid, over and over, by the evidence of the senses, by the
reflection that deception was definitely impossible.
But, it will be objected, three-quarters of all the mediums _are_
swindlers, and have been exposed as such.--That is a fact, a
bewildering one; the more so that in many of these cases, I might even
say in most of them, the _dolus_, the intent to deceive, is absent.
I am convinced that even our good Willy, if he had had the chance,
would have started hocus-pocussing and so have seriously compromised
his position; for it is conceivable that in his dream he makes no
distinction between what he does with his own hand and what in “other”
ways; and being moved by the quite comprehensible desire to produce
an effect, he might, if he had been “uncontrolled,” have set to, been
discovered, and so discredited the experiments. And this would not
have been any evidence whatever against the genuineness of the occult
phenomena which were produced when he was in safe arrest.
The whole affair, however trifling it looks on the surface, is serious
enough to warrant explanations in a serious and even a solemn key.
Having seen what I saw, I consider it my duty to bear witness that in
the experiments during which I was present, any mechanical deception
or sleight-of-hand tricks were humanly impossible. Some may find such
testimony reckless; and our reason even obliges and forces us to do
so; for we do immediately twist and turn to find a middle way out, by
which we may somehow, even verbally, avoid the alternative of deception
or reality. “Delusion” is such a word; its very vagueness helps by
preventing us from seeing to the bottom of it. The two conceptions of
reality and of deception are mingled in it, and perhaps the mingling
has more justification than we know, and is less strange in nature
than it is to our downright processes of thought. I will say, then,
that what I saw had to do with an occult delusion in the domain of
organic life; with bewilderingly deep and sub-human complexes, at once
primitive and involved. These, undignified by nature and trivial in
their activity as they are, are well calculated to be offensive to
our proud æsthetic sense, but to deny their abnormal reality would be
nothing less than unreasonable obstinacy.
Furthermore, the scientific investigation of these phenomena is no
longer precisely in its infancy. Science has at least got so far as
to have invented a terminology, by means of which one can express
oneself respectably on the subject. What I saw were “telekinetic”
phenomena, phenomena of motion at a distance. This particular medium,
young Willy S., is especially strong in the production of this kind
of manifestations, which in their origins are closely related with
the occult natural phenomenon of materialization--in other words,
the temporary organization of energy outside the medial organism,
its _exteriorization_, so to speak. Among reasonable people it is
agreed that the agent which performs the tricks I have described, the
swinging of the bell, the lifting of the handkerchief, the typing, is
not a spiritistic “intelligence” by the name of Minna, neither is it
Aristotle or Napoleon, but the partly exteriorized medium himself. But
even that does not go far toward making our problem more accessible to
the reason. On the contrary, the popular, spiritualistic hypothesis
is much clearer and simpler than the scientific one; while as for the
problem of exteriorization and materialization, the longer one looks
at it, the more it reveals a complexity apparently calculated for the
express purpose of making a mock of the human intellect. Which is
not surprising--considering that after all it is bound up with the
presumably not occult problem of life itself!
“That which governs life,” Claude Bernard wrote, “is neither chemistry
nor physics, nor anything of the kind; but the ideal principle of the
life-process.” A strangely indefinite saying for a great scientist,
he being a Frenchman to boot; a saying that gropes vaguely after a
mystery, and shows that it is precisely the great world of scholarship
which never loses an inward feeling for the mystery; and that only
the rank and file run the danger of scientific darkness, unmindful
how very little complete, how much mingled with mystery--and riddles
perhaps never-to-be-solved--is all their exact knowledge of nature and
life and its functions. It is accepted as an established fact in the
world of occultism today that the effective and formative principle
at work in the psychological processes does in certain cases assume a
“teleplastic” character: in other words, it passes beyond the limits
of the organism and operates outside it, “ectoplastically.” That is,
it calls into temporary existence, out of the exteriorized, organic
basic substance (the appearance and form of which have already been
observed with some degree of exactitude), shapes, limbs, bodily organs,
particularly hands, which possess all the properties and functions of
normal, physiological, biologically living organs. These teleplastic
end-organs move apparently free in space, but so far as can be observed
have a close physiological and psychological relation with the medium,
in such a way that any impression received through the teleplasm has
its effect upon the medial organism, and vice versa. Here we see
supra-normal physiology vying with the normal to bear witness to the
unity of the organic substance. A fluid, in varying degrees of density,
leaves the body of the medium as an amorphous, unorganized mass;
takes form in various teleplastic organs, hands, feet, heads, and so
on; and after a brief existence in this form, during which, however,
it displays all the attributes of living substance, dissolves and is
reabsorbed into the medial organism. And this fluid, this substance,
this substratum of the various organic formations, is uniform,
undifferentiated; there is not such a thing as a bone-substance as
different from a muscular or visceral or nervous one; there is only the
one substance, the basis and substratum of organic life.
Probably all reasoned thinking and talking in this highly speculative
field of facts is today premature and can only seem to clarify without
doing so. But one thing is certain: we shall be thinking and talking
most inadequately about the phenomena of materialization, as about
the riddle of life in general, if we regard them from the physical
and material side alone, and not from the psychical as well. It was
Hegel who said that the idea, the spirit, is the ultimate source of
all phenomena; and perhaps supra-normal physiology is more apt than
normal to demonstrate his statement. Yes, it undertakes to place the
philosophic demonstration of the primacy of the idea, of the ideal
origin of all reality, alongside the biological demonstration of the
unity of all organic life.
Quite uninstructed, and on my own responsibility, I explained the
telekinetic phenomena as the medium’s magically objectivated dreams.
And the literature of the subject confirms my explanation; with an
awe-inspiring display of technical terms, it explains that the _idea_
of the phenomenon, present in the subconsciousness of the somnambulist,
mingled moreover with that of the other persons present, is by the aid
of psychophysical energy “ectoplastically” moved, by a biopsychical
projection, to a certain distance, and imprinted--that is to say,
“objectivated.” In other words, we call to aid an uninvestigated
_ideoplastic_ faculty possessed by the medial constitution.
Ideoplastic--a word, and a conception, of Platonic power and charm, not
without flattering unction to the artist’s ear, who will be ready from
now on to characterize, not only his own work, but universal reality as
ideoplastic phenomena. Yet a word, and a conception, of quite as turbid
depths as the word “delusion” itself, and, by virtue of its maddening
mixture of elements of the real and the dream, leading straight to the
morbid and the preposterous.
Let me give in closing one single but striking example. We are
repeatedly assured that the ideoplastic formations, for the time
during which they are present, possess all the characteristics of
actual life. When they have been in a good mood they have not only let
themselves be seen and touched, and their objective reality established
by photography and apparatus which registered their telekinetic
activities; but plaster casts have been made, hands of transcendental
origin having been persuaded to dip themselves into basins of warm
water with melted wax floating on top. In this way a mould has been
formed about the spirit member, and hardened by exposure to air. Out of
such a mould no human hand could get free without breaking the mould.
But the teleplastic organ frees itself by dematerialization, and the
experimenters pour plaster of Paris into the wax glove and thus obtain
a cast of the materialized organ, which should correspond to it in all
particulars. It is to be noted that the casts thus obtained show no
resemblance in shape or lines to the hands of the medium, or to those
of anyone else present. Now at one of Willy’s sittings the following
perfectly lunatic thing occurred (and not the only one of its kind).
The medium being under the most careful control, a shape like a hand
appeared, coming from above and behind, and showed itself above a piece
of grey clay on the little table. It had a forearm, and was lighted
by a rosy light, and it hovered about over the surface of the clay;
on which, after the sitting, six flat impressions were found, on the
previously smooth surface. But at the base of Willy’s little finger on
his left hand, and on the back of the fourth finger of the same hand,
_there were traces of clay_.
Now I ask of nature and spirit, I inquire of reason and of logic on her
throne: How, when, and from where came the clay on Willy’s fingers?
No, I will not go to Herr von Schrenck-Notzing’s again. It leads to
nothing, or at least to nothing good. I love that which I called
the moral upper world, I love the human fable, and clear and humane
thought. I abhor luxations of the brain, I abhor morasses of the
spirit. Up to now, indeed, I have seen but a few stray sparks from the
infernal fires--but that must suffice me. I should like of course to
hold, as others have held, a hand like that, a metaphysical delusion
made of flesh and blood, in mine. And perhaps there might appear to me,
as it has to others, Minna’s head, above the shoulder of the sleeping
Willy: the head of a charming girl, Slavic in type, with lively black
eyes. That, however uncanny, must be a wonderful experience.... After
all, I will have another try or so with Herr von Schrenck-Notzing;
two or three times, not more. That much could do me no harm; and I
know myself, I am a man of ephemeral passions; I shall take care that
it leads to nothing, and put the whole thing out of my mind for ever
after. No, I will not go two or three times, I will only go once, just
once more and then not again. I only want to see the handkerchief rise
up into the red light before my eyes. For the sight has got into my
blood somehow, I cannot forget it. I should like once more to crane my
neck, and with the nerves of my digestive apparatus all on edge with
the fantasticality of it, once more, just once, see the impossible come
to pass.
1923