ABOUT MEDIUMS
Just as any one believing all actions to be the result of fully
conscious motives may regard the hysteric as a simple fraud, so he may
dismiss the medium and the clairvoyant in the same easy way and consider
the matter settled. But we find men in positions which lend authority
not only vouching for the honesty of the medium but sometimes taking an
active part in the production of the phenomena for which the explanation
of fraud is regarded as sufficient; as a result this explanation fails
to convince and we meet many people who believe there must be 'something
in it'. So there is: there is the same graduated series, from the simple
cheat to the complete Dissociate, that we saw in the consideration of
hysteria, but in addition there is a fervent desire to believe, and the
Dissociate, instead of being regarded as a victim of disease, is treated
as a person gifted with supernatural powers.
Let me describe my first experience of a medium. Friends had told me of
his gifts and had met my incredulity with 'How do you explain this?'
followed by some story of supernatural revelation. I could not explain,
but accepted an invitation to meet the miracle-worker and, perhaps, be
converted. His method of demonstrating communication with the spirit
world was to sit in a meditative attitude with one hand before his eyes,
whilst watching between his slightly separated fingers the assembled
believers so as to note the effect of his revelations, which were
apparently presented to him by the spirits in two forms. Descriptions of
the spirit world came through freely, one might call them fluent but
incoherent, whilst revelations such as my friends had promised came in a
halting and uncertain trickle. The enthusiastic accounts had not
prepared me for such a poor show. I had pictured him saying something
like--'Your grandmother's name was Georgina; she died at the age of
seventy-two, after an illness lasting three days; she was a good
horsewoman and disliked Mr. Gladstone'. Instead of this the procedure
was: 'I hear a name, is it George? (No bite)--Georgina? (a look of
intelligence)--you have a friend named Georgina--a young girl--no, not a
young girl, she was older, a relative, yes, a relative'--and so on.
Finally Georgina is discovered to be a grandmother of one of those
present, and is described sufficiently well to be recognised as the
grandmother on the father's side, though, curiously, Georgina was the
name of the maternal grandmother. What could be more convincing? Of
course spirit communication is difficult and such a mistake only proves
the genuineness of the article; but the description of the grandmother
was built up on certain characteristics of the father, who was present,
and the source was obvious to any one not blinded by the desire to
believe.
One incident shows that the medium had received some education in the
superficial signs of disease. An elderly lady with a rather puffy face,
which had raised in me a suspicion of kidney disease, was told by him:
'It is strange, but I _must_ tell you for your own sake. You have
trouble with your kidneys.' He was wrong and so was I, but if events had
proved us right the credit would have been his.
Then my turn came and the spirits told about my own disposition, which I
had unfortunately revealed by a single observation before the real
business began, and the exulting glances of the audience told me the
first score had gone to the medium. Then more intimate stuff came
through; names were presented and I nibbled at one: 'Yes, I know him',
with a stress on the 'I'. More revelations--he was my enemy (here a nod
from me), I had suspected it for a long time, but right would conquer,
and I must not fear. Then a relative came into the play, and a look of
sadness drew forth the surprising news that she was dead but her spirit
was watching over me. Next came the phrase, heard once before in the
seance, 'I see a far-off land', and the believers brightened up again.
Quick came the news, 'You have been abroad,' and I couldn't deny it.
Thus the game went on; when a hint could be picked up it was used at
once or later, to be cast back as a spirit revelation. As the game
developed I gave hints in plenty, whilst my friends showed their joy at
seeing a sceptic receive convincing proofs of the spirit powers.
The seance being ended, my first task was to persuade the believers that
the revelations vouchsafed to me bore little relation to the truth; 'But
you said they were true.' 'Yes, and they were not.' 'Then you were
really telling lies.' 'Yes, and he believed them and so did the
spirits.' 'Well, of course, if you deceive the spirits like that how can
you expect the truth in return?' So the rationalisations went on and the
logic-tight compartments were protected from injury.
In this show we see a fine example of receptivity, like that of the
hysteric who watches the doctor to learn what symptoms he expects to
find; and just as the doctor may suggest absurd symptoms and find them
present, so I was able to suggest falsehoods and have them reflected as
revelations. But the believer would never do that; he is eager to fit
every phrase to some fact within his knowledge, those that cannot be so
fitted being forgotten as soon as the next lucky shot occurs, and in his
eagerness he helps along the medium and provides him with more material.
Lest it may be thought that this experience is not typical, I will use
the light given by it to examine some of the spirit news given in
_Raymond_.
But we must first understand who are the _dramatis personae_ of a seance.
Since the time of the Witch of En-dor the expert medium has had a
familiar spirit which speaks through him to this world and at the same
time is in contact with the spirit world. The psychological explanation,
if the medium is a true Dissociate and not a conscious fraud, is that
the results of the dissociated stream are perceived by its owner as
something of external origin. In the same way a lunatic whose
dissociated stream produces voices will project them externally and
believe them to be warnings or commands from an outside source; the
table-turners, water-diviners, and watch-swingers follow the same
reasoning, though their results are purely motor; and when ideas come up
from the cut-off stream the individual cannot recognise them as mental
products of his own, but feels impelled to credit them to another
personality. I am reminded of a charming little girl whose one desire
was to please her parents but who often gave way to the mischievous
tendencies of a healthy child; whenever that happened she produced an
imaginary 'Naughty John' who broke toys and cut off little girls' hair.
That is how the dissociated medium proceeds: unable to rate at their
proper value the ideas which present themselves, he invents a familiar
spirit who serves as their ostensible origin. The familiar thus called
into being can draw upon the unconscious of the medium for the material
to build up fantasies about another world. The spirits of the dead are
part of these fantasies, so that we finally have the medium, the
medium's split-off personality, often with a name of its own, and the
spirit that meets the demand of the moment.
The secondary personalities in Sir Oliver's mediums are Feda and
Moonstone, and in the dialogue Feda tells what Raymond is doing or
saying, occasionally carrying on asides of her own. All this seems very
complicated, but an explanation is necessary in order to understand what
follows.
The medium (or, in this case, Feda) tells Sir Oliver Lodge (see pp. 250
_et seq._), 'It's a browny-coloured earth, not nice green, but
sandy-coloured ground. As Feda looks at the land, the ground rises sharp
at the back. Must have been made to rise, it sticks up in the air....
The raised up land is at the back of the tent, well set back. It doesn't
give an even sticking up, but it goes right along, with bits sticking up
and bits lower down.' Of this the scientific Sir Oliver says: 'The
description of the scenery showed plainly that it was Woolacombe sands
that was meant.' The reader will have no difficulty in fitting this
description to any sands he likes, but the believer wants it to be
Woolacombe, and Woolacombe it is.
Then, the medium having discovered that O. J. L.'s family had a tent by
the water, O. J. L. asks: 'Is it all one chamber in the tent?' Answer:
'He didn't say that. He was going to say no, and then he stopped to
think. No, I don't think it was, it was divided off.'
Next a yacht appears out of the spirit world, and O. J. L. asks: 'What
about the yacht with sails, did it run on the water?' The medium needs
time to think, and the answer comes: 'No' (Feda (_sotto voce_): Oh,
Raymond! don't be silly!) he says, 'No. (Feda: It must have done.) He is
showing Feda like a thing on land--yes, a land thing. It's standing up,
like edgeways. A narrow thing. No, it isn't water, but it has got nice
white sails.'
O. J. L. 'Did it go along?'
'He says it _didn't_! He's laughing! When he said "didn't" he shouted
it.' Feda should have said, 'He laid particular emphasis on it.'
The first question is capable of two interpretations and the answer is
ambiguous, though the ambiguity is further 'evidence' to Sir Oliver,
because he remembers that a double-chamber tent had been turned into a
single-chamber one.
The second question may be compared with 'Did you feel that?' in the
production of hysterical anaesthesia (see Chapter VIII). The hysteric
reasons, consciously or unconsciously:--It is natural to feel a pin
prick, but the doctor is looking for signs of disease and he must expect
to find a numbness or he wouldn't ask the question, so the answer is
'no'.
When Sir Oliver asks concerning a yacht, 'Did it run on the water?' the
reasoning is similar, and the word 'run' helps, for no yacht runs on the
water; if the yacht sailed on the water the question would not be asked,
therefore the answer here was 'no', but the medium maintained a clever
ambiguity whilst feeling her way.
The third answer was a cleaner guess, but wrong.
He says: 'All this about the tent and boat is excellent, though not
outside my knowledge'.... Then he adds, concerning the boat, 'I believe
it went along the sands very fast occasionally, but it still wouldn't
sail at right angles to the wind as they wanted it.... On the whole it
was regarded as a failure, the wheels were too small; and Raymond's
"didn't" is quite accepted.'
And Raymond's 'did' would have been as readily accepted and put in the
same chapter headed 'Two evidential sittings.'
Contrast these halting scraps to the following (p. 249): 'He wants to
tell you that Mr. Myers says that in ten years from now the world will
be a different place. He says that about fifty per cent. of the
civilised portion of the globe will be either spiritualists or coming
into it.'
No hesitation here, but no possible verification either, nor any hint
that a hundred per cent. of the uncivilised people of the globe are
already spiritualists.
Sir Oliver's imagination does not keep pace with his readiness to fit
revelation to fact. After the tent, the water, and the yacht,
comes--'rods and things, long rods. Some have got little round things
shaking on them like that. And he's got strings, some have got strings.
"Strings" isn't the right word, but it will do. Smooth, strong,
string-like.'
Of this Sir Oliver says: 'The rod and rings and strings mentioned after
the "boat", I don't at present understand. So far as I have ascertained
the boys don't understand either at present.' Surely an out-of-door
family like this includes at least one fisherman; why not think out who
he is and score another bull's-eye to the medium?
A delightful example of Sir Oliver's anxiety to help the medium occurs
on page 256:--
O. J. L.: 'Do you remember a bird in our garden?'
(Feda (_sotto voce_): 'Yes, hopping about').
O. J. L.: 'No, Feda, a big bird.'
'Of course not sparrows, he says. Yes he does.' (Feda (_sotto voce_):
Did he hop, Raymond?)
'No, he says you couldn't call it a hop.'
This book of Sir Oliver Lodge's shows an honesty which, together with
the circumstances under which it was written, makes critical examination
difficult; but there are similar circumstances in many a household
to-day, and the honesty of the writer leads many people, who reason that
what an eminent man honestly believes must be true, to turn to a
mind-wrecking belief in mediums instead of finding consolation in a
saner philosophy or religion.
At my first seance it strained my belief in human intelligence to find
respected friends believing the romances and guesses of a trickster to
be spiritual manifestations, and I thought that there must at least be a
more elaborate type of deceit, since believers were to be found among
our scientific aristocracy. My belief is no longer strained, but broken,
for I find in Sir Oliver's medium the same tricks, the receptivity, the
halting search for material, and the same easy flow of unverifiable
revelations that characterised the medium I first met.
Thanks to his honesty, one is able from the material supplied by this
writer to trace the source of many 'revelations', and in the rare
examples where the source is not manifest (as in the 'pedestal'
incident, p. 257) it is scarcely unfair to presume some unintentional
suppression. I say unintentional because Sir Oliver, blind to the
explanations his own book offers, is plainly incapable of wilfully
suppressing facts that tell against himself.
Spiritualism has its fashions, apparitions and materialisations having
now given place to communications with the dead, which is the 'New
Revelation'. Its newness is not so apparent when we read the story of
the Witch of En-dor. Even the occasional deportation of undesirable
mediums is not new, for Saul 'put away those that had familiar spirits,
and the wizards, out of the land' (1 Samuel, chap. xxviii.). When he
disguised himself to visit the witch she recognised him just as the
mediums recognise Sir Oliver; but the modern resemblance is best seen
when we read that Saul, after asking for Samuel, 'said unto her, what
form is he of? and she said, an old man cometh up, and he is covered
with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it was Samuel.'
Here we see the medium giving to the credulous believer just what he
wants, and the believer reaching out to accept the trivial guess as a
spirit revelation. But the remoteness of the event (even at the time the
account was written) allowed of prophecies far more to the point than
any modern medium's, though, as often happens nowadays, their fulfilment
was described by the same writer that reported them.
In one respect we have degenerated since the days of Saul; the Witch of
En-dor was not hailed as an instrument of divine power destined to
provide a new driving force for religion.