THE SUBTLE ART OF CLAIRVOYANCE
Spiritualists distinguish between physical phenomena and psychic
phenomena. The use of this distinction is obvious. When a man reads some
such history of the movement as Podmore's, and then the works of
Truesdell, Robinson, Maskelyne, Carrington, and others who have time
after time exposed the ways of mediums, he is very ill-disposed to
listen to stories of materialization, levitation, spirit photographs,
spirit messages, spirit music, spirit voices, or anything of the kind.
He knows that each single trick has been exposed over and over again. So
the liberal Spiritualist urges him to leave out "physical" phenomena and
concentrate on the "psychic." It is a word with an aroma of refinement,
spirituality, even intellect. It indicates the sort of thing that
respectable spirits _ought_ to do. So we will turn to the psychic
phenomenon of clairvoyance.
Here at once the reader's resolution to approach the subject gravely is
disturbed by the recollection of a recent event. Many a reader would,
quite apart from the question of consolation, like to find something
true in Spiritualism. He may feel, as Professor William James did, that
the mass of fraud is so appalling that, for the credit of humanity, we
should like to think that it is the citizens of another world, not of
ours, who are responsible. He may feel that, if it is all fraud, a
number of quite distinguished people occupy a very painful position in
modern times. He would like to find at least something serious;
something that is reasonably capable of a Spiritualist interpretation.
But as soon as he approaches any class of phenomena some startling
instance of fraud rises in his memory and tries to prejudice him. In
this case it is the "Masked Medium."
A recent case in the law courts has brought this to mind. In 1919, when
the _Sunday Express_ was making its grave search for ghosts, in order to
rebuke the materialism of our age, it offered £500 for a
materialization. A gentleman, who (with an eye on the police) genially
waived the money offer aside, offered to bring an unknown lady and
present a materialization, and some startling feats of clairvoyance in
addition. A sitting was arranged, and the lady, who wore a mask, gave a
clairvoyant demonstration that could not be surpassed in all the annals
of Spiritualism. Her ghost was rather a failure; though Lady Glenconnor,
who has the true Spiritualist temperament, recognized in it an "initial
stage of materialization." But the clairvoyance was great. The sitters,
while the lady was still out of the room, put various objects connected
with the dead (a ring, a stud, a sealed letter, etc.) in a bag. The bag
was closed, and was put inside a box; and the lady, who was then
introduced, described every object with marvellous accuracy. Sir A. C.
Doyle said that the medium gave "a clear proof of clairvoyance." Mr. Gow
said that he saw "no normal explanation."
And it was fraud from beginning to end, as everybody now knows.
Clairvoyance must be distinguished from prophecy, which Spiritualists
sometimes claim. Prediction means the art of seeing things which do not
exist, and it is therefore not even mentioned in this book. Clairvoyance
means the art of seeing things through a brick wall (or any other opaque
covering). Now this was an admirable piece of clairvoyance. Even
Spiritualists present were suspicious, because the lady was quite
unknown. Yet they could not see any suggestion of fraud or any "normal
explanation." Did they turn back upon their earlier experiences of
clairvoyance, when the fraud was confessed, and ask if those also may
not have been due to trickery? Not in the least. Everything is genuine
until it is found out--and, sometimes, even afterwards.
Mr. Selbit, the conjurer who really conducted the performance, is
naturally unwilling to give away his secret. He acknowledged immediately
after the performance, as Mr. Moseley describes in his _Amazing Séance_,
that he had fooled the audience. The masked lady was an actress with no
more abnormal power than Sir Oliver Lodge has. Mr. Stuart Cumberland
suggested at the time that, when the assistant went to the door to call
the medium, he handed the box to a confederate and received a dummy box.
He thought that the medium would then have time to study and memorize
the contents of the real box (including a sealed letter in dog-German)
before she entered the room. From the account, which is not precise
enough, I can hardly see how she would have time for this. But Mr.
Selbit acknowledged that a dummy box _was_ substituted. He says that a
person entered the room in the dark, took the box from the table and
substituted a dummy, and afterwards impersonated the ghost. This is
most important for us. The room had been searched, and such acute
observers as Mr. Stuart Cumberland and Superintendent Thomas, of
Scotland Yard, were on the watch; yet a confederate got into the room.
After this an ordinary Spiritualist séance is child's play. A long and
minute description of the objects in the bag, which must have been
spelled letter by letter in parts, on account of the difficult wording
of the sealed letter, was in some way telegraphed or communicated to the
girl under the eyes of this watchful group. It would be scarcely more
marvellous to suppose that Mr. Selbit, after studying the contents of
the box, took her place before their faces and they never knew it!
The reader will not fail to see why I have minutely pointed out the
features of this recent case. It is, in the first place, an example of
"psychic," not "physical," phenomena; and it was conjuring pure and
simple. It was, further, "most successful and convincing," as Sir A. C.
Doyle pronounced; yet there was not a particle of abnormal power about
it. Finally, it was done in the presence of three keen critics, as well
as of leading Spiritualists; yet the fraud was not discovered. To invoke
the "supernormal," after this, the moment some ordinary individual fails
to detect fraud, is surely ludicrous.
Now let me put another warning before the reader. It is notorious that
Spiritualists are particularly, even if innocently, apt to mislead in
their accounts of their experiences. Unless the experience is recorded
on paper at once, it is almost worthless; and even then it is often
quite wrong. There is such a thing as "selection" in the human mind.
When two people, a Spiritualist and a sceptic, see or read the same
thing, their minds may get quite a different impression of it. The mind
of the Spiritualist leaps to the features of it which seem to be
supernormal, and slurs or ignores or soon forgets the others. The mind
of the sceptic does the opposite. You thus get quite inaccurate accounts
from Spiritualists, though they are often quite innocent. One once asked
me to explain how a medium, two hundred miles from his home, in a place
where no one knew him, could tell his name and a good deal about him. By
two minutes' cross-examination I got him to admit that he had been
working for some weeks in this district and was known to a few
fellow-workers. No doubt one of these had given a medium information
about him, and then induced him to visit her. These indirect methods are
very effective.
A very good example is Sir A. C. Doyle himself. In the debate with me he
made statement after statement of the most inaccurate description. He
said that Eusapia Palladino was quite honest in the first fifteen years
of her mediumship; that he had given me the names of forty Spiritualist
professors; that the Fox sisters were at first honest; that I did not
give the evidence from his books correctly; that Mr. Lethem got certain
detailed information the first time he consulted a medium; that in Mme.
Bisson's book you can see ectoplasm pouring from the medium's "nose,
eyes, ears, and skin"; that Florrie Cook "never took one penny of
money"; that in the Belfast experiment the table rose to the ceiling;
and so on. His frame of mind was extraordinary. But I will give a far
more extraordinary case which will make the reader very cautious about
Spiritualist testimony.
About forty years ago, when the old type of ghost story was not yet
quite dead, Myers and Gurney, who were collecting anecdotes of this
sort, received a particularly authentic specimen. It was a personal
experience of Sir Edmund Hornby, a retired Judge from Shanghai. A few
years earlier, he said, he had one night written out his judgment for
the following day, but the reporter failed to call for a copy. He went
to bed, and some time after one o'clock he was awakened by the reporter,
who very solemnly asked him for the copy. With much grumbling Sir Edmund
got up and gave him the copy. He remembered that in returning to bed he
had awakened Lady Hornby. And the next morning, on going to court, he
learned that the reporter had died just at that hour, of heart disease
(as the inquest afterwards found), and had never left the house. He had
been visited by the reporter's spirit.
Here was an experience of most exceptional weight. Who could doubt
either the word or the competence of the Chief Judge of the Supreme
Consular Court of China and Japan? The story was promptly written up in
the _Nineteenth Century_ ("Visible Apparitions," July, 1884), and
sceptics were confounded. But a copy of the _Nineteenth Century_ reached
Shanghai, where the incident was said to have taken place, and in the
same monthly for November there appeared a letter from Mr. Balfour,
editor of the _North China Herald_ and the _Supreme Court and Consular
Gazette_. It proved, and Sir E. Hornby was compelled to admit, that the
story was entirely untrue. It was a jumble of inaccuracies. The reporter
had died between eight and nine in the morning, not at one, and had
slept peacefully all night. There had been no inquest. There was no
judgment whatever delivered by Sir E. Hornby that morning. There was
not even a Lady Hornby in existence at the time! Sir Edmund Hornby
sullenly acknowledged the truth of all this, and could mutter only that
he could not understand his own mistake.
After this awful example we think twice before we take the testimony of
Spiritualists at its face value. Sir A. C. Doyle, in particular, is
especially guilty of such confusions, to the great advantage of his
stories. During the Debate, as I said, he told of a wonderful Glasgow
clairvoyante, who was consulted by a Mr. Lethem (a Glasgow J.P.), who
had lost a son in the War. She at once told Mr. Lethem, Sir Arthur says,
his son's name, the name of the London station at which he had said
farewell, and the name of the London hotel at which they had stayed.
This sounded very impressive indeed. But I happened to have read Mr.
Lethem's articles (_Weekly Record_, February 21 and 28, 1920), and I
have them before me. Mr. Lethem was a well-known man in Glasgow, and was
known to be "inquiring." Now it was _eight months_ after his son's death
that he met this clairvoyante, yet all she could tell him was his son's
name and appearance. It was, he confesses, "not much" and "not strictly
evidential." It was at a _later_ sitting that she gave the other
details. Sir A. C. Doyle has fused the two sittings together and made
the experience more impressive. The medium had time to make inquiries.
There is a further detail which Sir A. C. Doyle does not tell. The
brother of the dead officer asked, as a test question, the name of the
town where they had last dined together. It took "more than a year" to
get an answer to this!
Thus a quite commonplace and easily explained feat of a medium is
dressed up by Sir A. C. Doyle as supernormal. He does this repeatedly in
his books. In the _New Revelation_ he says, quoting Sir Oliver Lodge's
Raymond, that a medium described to Sir Oliver a photograph of his son,
"no copy of which had reached England, and which proved to be exactly as
_he_ described it." Here he has done the same as in the case of Mr.
Lethem--fused together several successive sittings. The first medium
consulted by Sir Oliver Lodge made only a very brief statement. It was
wrong in three out of four particulars; and the fourth was a very safe
guess (that Raymond had once been photographed in a group). The
particulars which so much impressed Sir O. Lodge were given much later,
and by a lady medium; and by that time there were plenty of copies of
the photograph in England! Sir O. Lodge gives the various dates.
Sir William Barrett and Sir O. Lodge are just as slipshod. I have amply
shown this in the case of Lodge in my _Religion of Sir O. Lodge_ (and
_Raymond_ is even worse than the books I analysed), and Sir W. F.
Barrett's _On the Threshold of the Unseen_ is just as bad. I have
previously said how he tells his readers that it would take "the
cleverest conjurer with elaborate apparatus" to do what the Golighers do
at Belfast; and I showed that one limb of one member of the circle of
seven mediums would, with the help of a finger or two perhaps, explain
everything. Sir William also says (p. 53) that the London Dialectical
Society "published the report of a special committee" strongly in favour
of Spiritualism. On the contrary, the London Dialectical Society
expressly refused to publish that egregious document. He says (p. 72),
in describing the Home levitation case, that "nothing was said
beforehand of what they might expect to see," and "the accounts given by
each [witness] are alike." These statements are the reverse of the
truth. The book contains many such instances.
Here is another, which is expressly concerned with the greatest of all
"clairvoyantes," Mrs. Piper, and the most critical Spiritualist of
modern times, Dr. Hodgson. In the Debate Sir A. C. Doyle introduces him
(p. 21) as "Professor Hodgson, the greatest detective who ever put his
mind to this subject." He is fond of turning the people he quotes into
"professors." It makes them more weighty. Hodgson was never a professor,
but he was an able man, and he exposed more than one fraud like Eusapia
Palladino. But I have been permitted to see a letter which puts Dr.
Hodgson himself in the category of over-zealous and unreliable
witnesses; and as this letter is to be published in the form of a
preface to the second edition of Dr. C. Mercier's book on Spiritualism,
I am not quoting an anonymous document.
Mrs. Piper, the great American clairvoyante, the medium whose
performances are endorsed as genuine even by men who regard Spiritualism
as ninety-eight per cent. fraud, began her career as a "psychic" in
1874. At first she was controlled, in the common Spiritualist way, by
"an Indian girl." Then the great spirits of Bach and Longfellow and
other illustrious dead began to control her. Next a deceased French
doctor, "Phinuit," took her in hand, and she did wonderful things. But
when people who were really critical began to test Phinuit's knowledge
of medicine, and inquire (for the purpose of verification) about
Phinuit's former address on earth, he hedged and shuffled, and then
retired into obscurity, like the Indian girl and Longfellow. Her next
spirit was "Pelham," a young man who modestly desired to remain
anonymous. For four years "George Pelham," a highly cultivated spirit,
gave "marvellously accurate" messages through Mrs. Piper, and the world
was assured that there was not the slightest doubt about his identity.
He was a very cultivated young American who had "passed over" in 1892.
Mr. Podmore, who, in spite of his high critical faculty, was taken in by
this episode, thinks that telepathy alone can explain the wonderful
things done. He does not believe in ghosts. Mrs. Piper's "subconscious
self," he thinks, creates and impersonates these spirit beings, and
draws the information telepathically from the sitters. But he says that
the impersonation was so "dramatically true to life," so "consistently
and dramatically sustained," that "some of G. P.'s most intimate friends
were convinced that they were actually in communication with the
deceased G. P."[12] It is true that when the dead G. P. was asked about
a society he had helped to form in his youth he could give neither its
aim nor its name, and Podmore admits that Mrs. Piper hedged very badly
in trying to cover up her failure. But on other occasions the hits were
so good that we have, if we do not admit the ghost theory, to take
refuge in telepathy and the subconscious self.
There is no need even for this thin shade of mysticism. Podmore was
misled by Hodgson's account. "G. P." meant, as everybody knew, George
Pellew. Now a cousin of Pellew's wrote to Mr. Clodd to tell him that, if
he cared to ask the family, he would learn that all the relatives of the
dead man regarded Mrs. Piper's impersonation of him as "beneath
contempt." Mr. Clodd wrote to Professor Pellew, George's brother, and
found that this was the case. The family had been pestered for fifteen
years with reports of the proceedings and requests to authenticate them
and join the S. P. R. They said that they knew George, and they could
not believe that, when freed from the burden of the flesh, he would talk
such "utter drivel and inanity." As to "intimate friends," one of these
was Professor Fiske, who had been described by Dr. Hodgson as
"absolutely convinced" of the identity of "G. P." When Professor Pellew
told Professor Fiske of this, he replied, roundly, that it was "a lie."
Mrs. Piper had, he said, been "silent or entirely wrong" on all his test
questions.[13]
I am, you see, not choosing "weak spots," as Sir A. C. Doyle said, and
am not quite so ignorant of psychic matters, in comparison with himself,
as he represented (_Debate_, p. 51). I am taking the greatest
"clairvoyante" in the history of the movement, and in precisely those
respects in which she was endorsed by Dr. Hodgson and the American S. P.
R. and Sir O. Lodge and all the leading English Spiritualists. She
failed at every crucial test. Phinuit, who knew so much, could not give
a plausible account of his own life on earth, or how he came to forget
medicine. When Sir O. Lodge presented to Mrs. Piper a sealed envelope
containing a number of letters of the alphabet, she could not read one
of them, and declined to try again. She could not answer simple tests
about Pellew. She gave Professor James messages from Gurney after his
death (1888), and James pronounced them "tiresome twaddle." When Myers
died in 1901 and left a sealed envelope containing a message, she could
not get a word of it. When Hodgson died in 1905 and left a large amount
of manuscript in cipher, she could not get the least clue to it. When
friends put test questions to the spirit of Hodgson about his early life
in Australia, the answers were all wrong.
Mrs. Piper fished habitually and obviously for information from her
sitters. She got at names by childishly repeating them with different
letters (a very common trick of mediums), and often changed them. She
made the ghost of Sir Walter Scott talk the most arrant nonsense about
the sun and planets. She was completely baffled when a message was given
to her in Latin, though she was supposed to be speaking in the name of
the spirit of the learned Myers, and it took her three months to get the
meaning (out of a dictionary?) of one or two easy words of it. She gave
a man a long account of an uncle whom he had never had; and it turned
out that this information was in the _Encyclopædia_, and related to
another man of the same name. In no instance did she ever give details
that it was _impossible_ for her to learn in a normal way, and it is for
her admirers to prove that she did _not_ learn them in a normal way,
and, on the other hand, to give a more plausible explanation of what
Dr. Maxwell, their great authority, calls her "inaccuracies and
falsehoods."
The truth is that the phenomenon known as "clairvoyance" rests just as
plainly on trickery as the physical phenomena we have studied.
Margaretta Fox explained decades ago how they used to watch minutely the
faces of sitters and find their way by changes of expression. "I see a
young man," says the medium dreamily, with half-closed but _very_
watchful eyes. There is no response on the face of the sitter. "I see
the form of a young woman--a child," the medium goes on. At the right
shot the sitter's face lights up with joy and eagerness, and the fishing
goes on. Probably in the end, or after a time, the sitter will tell
people how the clairvoyant saw the form of her darling child "at once."
In some cases the medium is prepared in advance. Carrington tells us
that he was one day strongly urged to give a man, who thought that he
had abnormal powers, a sitting. He decided at least to give him a
lesson, and made an appointment. The man came with friends at the
appointed hour, and they were astonished and awed when Carrington, as a
clairvoyant, told them their names and other details. He had simply sent
a man to track his visitor to his hotel and learn all about him and his
friends. Other cases are just as easy. When Sir O. Lodge and Sir A. C.
Doyle lost their sons, the whole mediumistic world knew it and was
ready. But mediums gather information about far less important sitters,
because it is precisely these cases that are most impressive. It is
quite easy to get information quietly about a certain man's dead
relatives, and then find an intermediary who will casually recommend him
to see Mrs. ----. I do not suggest that the intermediary knows the
plot, though that may often be the case.
In other cases the medium tells very little at the first visit. The
"spirit" is dazed in its new surroundings. It takes time to get adjusted
and learn how to talk through a medium. And so on. You go again, and the
details increase. You have, of course, left your name and address in
making a fresh appointment. Some clever people go anonymously. Lady
Lodge went thus and heard remarkable things; but Sir O. Lodge admits
that her companion greatly helped the medium by forgetting herself and
addressing her as "Lady Lodge." You may leave your coat in the hall, and
it is searched. When Truesdell consulted Slade in New York, he wickedly
left in his overcoat pocket a letter which gave the impression that his
name was "Samuel Johnson." The first ghost that turned up was, of
course, "Mary Johnson."
Still more ingenious was the "clairvoyance" of the famous American
medium Foster, one of the impostors who duped Robert Dale Owen and for
years held a high position in the movement. While he was out of the room
you wrote on bits of paper the names of your dead relatives or friends,
and you then screwed up the bits of paper into pellets. Foster then came
in, and sat near you. He dreamily took the pellets in his hand, pressed
them against his forehead, and then let them fall again upon the table.
Slowly and gradually, as he puffed at his everlasting cigar, the spirits
communicated all the names to him.
Such tricks can be fathomed only by an expert, and they ought to warn
Spiritualists of the folly of thinking that "fraud was excluded."
Truesdell, the great medium hunter, the terror of the American
Spiritualist world in the seventies, had a sitting with Foster and paid
the usual five dollars. He was puzzled, and consented to come again. On
the second occasion Foster could tell him, clairvoyantly, the name of
his hotel and other details. He had had Truesdell watched in the usual
way. At last the detective got his clue. Foster's cigar was continually
going out, and in constantly re-lighting it he sheltered the match in
the hollow of his hands. Truesdell concluded that he was then reading
the slips of paper, and the rest was easy. In pressing the pellets to
his forehead Foster substituted blank pellets for them and kept the
written papers in his hand. So the next time Truesdell went, and Foster
had touched one of the six pellets and read it, Truesdell snatched up
the other five pellets and found them blank. Foster genially
acknowledged that it was conjuring, but he continued as a priest of the
Spiritualist movement for a long time afterwards.
Another clairvoyant feat is to read the contents of a sealed envelope,
provided the contents are not a folded letter. We shall see in the next
chapter how the contents of a folded and sealed letter are learned. I
speak here of the simple clairvoyant practice of taking a sealed
envelope which contains only a strip of written paper, pressing it to
the forehead and reading the contents. You need not pay half-a-guinea to
a Bond Street clairvoyante for this. Sponge your envelope with alcohol
(which will soon evaporate and leave no trace) and you can "see through
it."
Some readers may expect me to say a word here about "clairaudience." The
only word I feel disposed to say is that it is one of the worst pieces
of nonsense in the movement. Clairvoyance means to read the contents of
a sealed letter, or to see spirits which ordinary mortals cannot see. It
is half the stock-in-trade of the ordinary medium. You pay your guinea
or half-guinea, and the gifted lady sees your invisible dead friends and
describes them. Sometimes she is quite accurate, "on information
received." Generally the performance is a tedious medley of guesses and
grotesque inaccuracies. As is known, Mr. Labouchere quite safely
promised a thousand-pound note to any clairvoyante who would see the
number of it through a sealed envelope. The French Academy of Science
had invited clairvoyants, and thoroughly discredited the claim, years
before.
Yet the imposture goes on daily, all over England and America, and some
now offer the novelty of "clairaudience," or hearing spirit voices which
we ordinary mortals cannot hear. It is the same fraud under another
name. When some clairaudient comes along who can hear the spirits of
Myers, and so many other deceased Spiritualists answer the crucial
questions they have never yet answered, we may become interested. Until
then a new addition to this world of cranks, frauds, decadents, and
nervous invalids is not a matter of much importance.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] _The Newer Spiritualism_, p. 180.
[13] Mr. Clodd, as will be read in the preface to the second edition of
Dr. Mercier's book, sent a copy of this letter to _Light_. The editor
declined to publish it. So Sir A. C. Doyle may justly plead that he knew
nothing about it. Will he ask why?