Occultism and Common Sense Part 13

A conviction of fraud having entered the minds of the sceptically inclined, the exposure of a certain Parisian photographer, Buguet, shook the faith of the credulous. Buguet enjoyed in London an extraordinary success. Many leading people sat to him and obtained "spirit photographs," by them clearly recognisable, of their deceased relations. No less than forty out of one hundred and twenty photographs examined by Stainton Moses were p.r.o.nounced by the sitters to be genuine likenesses of spirits, and baffled the scrutiny of the sceptics.

Nevertheless Buguet was arrested and charged by the French Government for fraudulent production of spirit photographs. At his trial Buguet disconcerted the whole spiritualistic world by confessing, he said that the whole of his spirit photographs were obtained by means of double exposure. To begin with, he employed three or four a.s.sistants to play the part of ghost. Nevertheless, in spite of his confession, in spite of the trick apparatus confiscated by the police, at Buguet's trial witness after witness, people high in the social and professional world, came forward to testify that they had not been deceived, that the spirit photographs were genuine. They refused to doubt the evidence of their own eyesight. One M. Dessenon, a picture dealer, had obtained a spirit portrait of his wife; he had been instantly struck with the likeness, and had shown it to the lady's relatives, who exclaimed at once on its exactness. The judge asked Buguet for an explanation. The prisoner replied that it was pure chance. "I had," he said, "no photograph of Madame Dessenon." "But," cried the witness, "my children, like myself, thought the likeness perfect. When I showed them the picture, they cried, 'It is mamma!' I have seen all M. Buguet's properties and pictures, and there is nothing in the least like the picture I have obtained. I am convinced it is my wife." As a result, many spiritualists, including Stainton Moses and William Howitt, refused to consider the case one of fraud. They regarded Buguet as a genuine medium who had been bound to confess to imaginary trickery. Yet after this spirit photography as a profession has not flourished in this country.

There is one professional who is responsible for many ghost pictures.

But in his productions appear unmistakable signs of double exposures.

You see the pattern of the carpet and the curtain of the study visible through the sitter's body and clothes. In one instance at all events, where the ghost represents a well-known statesman, the head has obviously been cut from the photograph and the contour draped to hide the cut edges. But the phenomena of spirit photography are abundant enough in private circles.

I have before me as I write a number of reputed spirit photographs obtained by private persons both with and without the aid of a professional medium. In one sent me by a gentleman resident at Finsbury Park, which is a very impressive specimen of its kind, the fact of a double exposure is obvious to the least experienced in dark-room matters. Notwithstanding, the photographer has apparently made a speciality of this kind of work.

"In my collection [he writes] of over two thousand specimens are portraits of Atlantean priests, who flourished about 12,000 years ago, Biblical patriarchs, poets, Royalties, clerics, scientists, literary men, etc., pioneer spiritualists, like Emma H. Britten, Luther Marsh, Wallace, and John Lamont. The latest additions are, I am happy to say, my kind old friend Mrs Glendinning, and a worthy quartette of earnest workers in Dr Younger, Mr Thomas Everitt, Mr C. Lacey, and David Duguid."

One of the most curious instances of a ghost photograph occurred in the summer of 1892. Six months previously a lady had taken a photograph of the library at D---- Hall. She kept the plate a long time before developing it, and when developed it showed the faint but clearly recognisable figure of a man sitting in a large arm-chair. A print from the photograph was obtained and shown, when the image was immediately recognised as the likeness of the late Lord D----, the owner of D---- Hall. What was more, it was ascertained that Lord D---- had actually been buried on the day the photograph was taken. A copy of the photograph was sent to Professor Barrett, who examined it and reported (1) that the image is too faint and blurred for any likeness to be substantiated; (2) that the plate had been exposed in the camera for an hour and the room left unguarded; (3) that actual experiments show that an appearance such as that on the plate could have been produced if a man--there were four men in the house--had sat in the chair for a few seconds during the exposure, moving his head and limbs the while.

Another ghost picture described by Mr Podmore was probably caused in a similar way. A chapel was photographed, and when the plate was developed a face was faintly seen in a panel of the woodwork, which the photographer recognised as a young acquaintance who had not long since met with a tragic death. "In fact," writes Mr Podmore, "when he told me the story and showed me the picture, I could easily see the faint but well-marked features of a handsome melancholy lad of eighteen. A colleague, however, to whom I showed the photograph without relating the story, at once identified the face as that of a woman of thirty. The outlines are in reality so indistinct as to leave ample room for the imagination to work on; and there is no reason to doubt that, as in the ghost of the library, the camera had merely preserved faint traces of some intruder who, during prolonged exposure, stood for a few seconds in front of it."

In spite of all the damaging _exposes_ and these discouraging explanations many intelligent persons the world over will still go on believing in the genuineness of spirit photography. Let me give a few examples of their testimony. M. Reichel, to whom allusion has already been made, states that at one of Miller's _seances_ in America, held on 29th October 1905, those present suddenly heard a great number of voices behind the curtain:

"Betsy told us that sometimes there are Egyptian women and sometimes Indians who come in a crowd to produce their phenomena. On October 29th and again on November 2nd I sent for a San Francisco photographer, Mr Edward Wyllie, to see what impression would be made on a photographic plate by the beings who appeared. Some remarkable pictures were taken by flashlight. Besides the fully materialised forms, there were shown on the photographs several spirits who could not be seen by the physical eyes.

"In one of the latter figures I instantly recognised an uncle of mine, whom I had made acquainted with spiritualism about twelve years previously, through the a.s.sistance of another medium."

A correspondent sends me an interesting account of investigating materialised spirits in daylight:

"Miss Fairlamb (afterwards Mrs Mellon) was the medium, and the photographs of 'Geordie' and others taken in the garden in broad daylight were quite successful. The conditions must have been most harmonious, as 'Geordie' afterwards, when twilight came on, walked about the lawn, and even ventured into the house, returning to the tent, which served as a cabinet, with an umbrella and ha.s.sock in his hands."

Dr Theodore Hausmann, one of the oldest physicians in Was.h.i.+ngton, U.S.A., has devoted many years to this particular phase of mediums.h.i.+p.

He places himself before his camera in the study and photographs his spirit visitors, who have included his father, son, and President Lincoln. The opening paragraph in an article he wrote is as follows:--

"Grieving parents, the bereaved widow and mother, will only be too happy if they can see the pictures of those again who were so dear to their hearts, and whose image gradually will vanish if nothing is left to renew their memories."

There have been many touching letters from relatives of grateful thanks, who imagine themselves in this way to have received portraits of their dear ones who have pa.s.sed away.

In a work which I have come across in which spiritualism is by no means supported Mr J. G. Raupert acknowledges:

"That as regards spirit photographs, he 'obtained many striking pictures of this character, under good test conditions, and attended by circ.u.mstances yielding unique and exceptionally valuable evidence.... The evidence in favour of some of these psychic pictures is as good as it is ever likely to be, and, respecting some of these obtained by the present writer, expert photographic authorities have expressed their verdict. Sir William Crookes has obtained them in his own house under personally imposed conditions, and many private experimenters in different parts of the world have been equally successful."

This from an avowed opponent is striking testimony to some kind of manifestation which is not, in intent, at least, fraudulent.

CHAPTER XIII

CLAIRVOYANCE

It was natural that out of all these mystic practices--those I have already indicated and the others I am about to indicate--a cult or religion should have been moulded. To this cult has been given the name of spiritualism (or spiritism, as some of the newer devotees prefer to call it). Its great outstanding feature and essential mystery is, of course, physical mediums.h.i.+p. The creed of the believer in disembodied spirits is that the medium acts as the pa.s.sive agent for certain physical and intellectual manifestations which do not belong to the role of the visible, tangible world in which we live. One of the forms of those manifestations is clairvoyance; others are materialisation--_i.e._ the actual incarnation of spiritual forms--physical manifestations such as table rapping, levitation, slate writing, etc., trance utterances and spirit photography.

From the physical phenomena to the intellectual phenomena of clairvoyance.

Clairvoyance literally means clear seeing; but in spiritualism it has a technical meaning, and may be either objective or subjective. In the terminology of the cult, objective clairvoyance is described as "that psychic power or function of seeing, objectively, by and through the spiritualism sensorium of sight which pervades the physical mechanism of vision, spiritual beings and things. A few persons are born with this power; in some it is developed, and in others it has but a casual quickening. Its extent is governed by the rate of vibration under which it operates; thus, one clairvoyant may see spiritual things which to another may be invisible because of the degree of difference in the intensity of the powers."

Further, "subjective clairvoyance is that psychic condition of a person which enables spirit intelligences to impress or photograph upon the brain of that person, at will, pictures and images which are seen as visions by that person, without the aid of the physical eye. These pictures and images may be of things spiritual or material, past or present, remote or near, hidden or uncovered, or they may have their existence simply in the conception or imagination of the spirit communicating them."

Putting aside, however, all "supernatural" explanation, let us consider how we can best account for the fact, if fact it be, of clairvoyance.

What we see is this: that under given conditions the mouth of a man or woman by no means above, and often below, the intellectual average utters, and the hand writes of, matters absolutely outside the normal ken of the minds of such a man or woman. Evidence for this phenomena is, to put it bluntly, staggering. If, unknown to a living soul, your wife or sister accidentally dropped half-a-sovereign down a deep well, and whilst she was still continuing to hug her little secret to her bosom you were present at a clairvoyant sitting where the medium in a trance informed you of the circ.u.mstances, you would no doubt be astounded.

Well, the manifestations of a conjurer are occasionally astounding. No matter how our reason is baffled at first, it behoves us not only to seek a natural explanation of the fact but also to ascertain and authenticate the fact itself. But a man may not implicitly trust his senses.

I soon found that merely having been a witness of a mysterious phenomenon no more qualified me for pa.s.sing judgment upon it, or even furnished me with a more advantageous standpoint from which to deliver my opinions, than a man who has first seen the ocean and even tasted it can explain why it is salt. No, a man after all, unless he is equipped with unusual facilities, had best stick to the recorded testimony of the cloud of witnesses. Amongst these witnesses, who are also acute and experienced investigators, are Lord Rayleigh, Mr Balfour, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace, Dr Hodgson, Frederic Myers, Professor Hyslop, M. Camille Flammarion, Professor Richet, Professor William James, Professor Janet, Mr Frank Podmore and Professor Lombroso. I think it fair to a.s.sume that these men represent the white light of human intelligence of the decade. They have made a special study of the matter, and they all seem to be agreed that in the case of trance lucidity and clairvoyance the normal mind of the writer or speaker is not at work. Yet there certainly would seem to be an operating intelligence, having a special character and a special knowledge.

What, then, is that operating intelligence? By what means does it obtain its special knowledge? Sir Oliver Lodge formulates two answers to the second question.

1. By telepathy from living people.

2. By direct information imparted to it by the continued, conscious, individual agency of deceased persons.

These he regards as the chief customary alternative answers. But there is a wide, perhaps an impa.s.sable, gulf between these two alternatives.

We can here do no more than glance at the nature of the evidence.

The mystery of mediums.h.i.+p has probably received more attention from M.

Flournoy, Professor of Psychology in the University of Geneva, than from anyone else, not excepting Janet and Hodgson, and our English investigators. Certainly his opportunities for studying at close quarters subjects of a more normal type than the Salpetriere patients are unparalleled. M. Flournoy's most famous case is that of Helene Smith.

"Helene [he writes] was as a child quiet and dreamy, and had occasional visions, but was, on the whole, not specially remarkable. She is, to all outward appearances at the present time, healthy even to robustness. From the age of fifteen she has been employed in a large commercial establishment in Geneva, and holds a position of some responsibility. But it is in 1892 that her real history begins. In that year she was persuaded by some friends to join a spiritualistic circle. It soon appeared that she was herself a powerful medium. At first her mediums.h.i.+p consisted in seeing visions, hearing voices, and a.s.sisting in tilting the table, whilst still retaining more or less consciousness and subsequent memory of her experiences.

Shortly after M. Flournoy's admission to the circle, in the winter of 1894-95, Miss Smith's mediums.h.i.+p advanced a stage, and she habitually pa.s.sed at the _seance_ into a trance state, retaining subsequently no memory of her visions and doings in that state. Her development followed at first the normal course. She delivered messages of a personal character to her sitters, purporting to emanate from deceased friends and the like. She offered numerous proofs of clairvoyance. She was from time to time controlled by spirits of the famous dead. Some of her earliest trances were under the guidance and inspiration of Victor Hugo. Within a few months the spirit of the poet--too late, indeed, for his own post-mortem reputation, for he had already perpetrated some verses--was expelled with ignominy by a more masterful demon who called himself Leopold. The newcomer was at first somewhat reticent on his own past, and when urgently questioned was apt to take refuge in moral plat.i.tudes.

Later, however, he revealed himself as Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro. It then appeared that in Helene herself was reincarnated the hapless Queen Marie Antoinette, and that others of the mortals represented Mirabeau, Prince of Orleans, etc....

"It is Helene's extra-planetary experiences, however, which have excited most attention, and which furnished to the attendants at her circle the most convincing proofs of her dealings with the spiritual world. In November 1894, the spirit of the entranced medium was wafted--not without threatenings of sea-sickness--through the cosmic void, to arrive eventually on the planet Mars. Thereafter night after night she described to the listening circle the people of our neighbouring planet, their food, dress, and ways of life. At times she drew pictures of the inhabitants, human and animal--of their houses, bridges, and other edifices, and of the surrounding landscape. Later she both spoke and wrote freely in the Martian language. From the writings reproduced in M. Flournoy's book it is clear that the characters of the Martian script are unlike any in use on earth, and that the words (of which a translation is furnished) bear no resemblance, superficially at least, to any known tongue. The spirits--for several dwellers upon Mars used Helene's organism to speak and write through--delivered themselves with freedom and fluency, and were consistent in their usage both of the spoken and the written words. In fact, Martian, as used by the entranced Helene, has many of the characteristics of a genuine language; and it is not surprising that some of the onlookers, who may have hesitated over the authenticity of the other revelations, were apparently convinced that these Martian utterances were beyond the common order of nature."

All his powers M. Flournoy bent to elucidate the mystery. He made up his mind that Helene must somewhere have come across one of the works containing Flammarion's speculations concerning Mars. The landscapes were suggested by j.a.panese lacquer and Nankin dishes. As for the language, it is just such a work of art as one might form by subst.i.tuting for each word in the French dictionary an arbitrary collocation of letters, and for each letter a new and arbitrary symbol.

The vowel and consonant signs are the same as in French; so are the inflections, the grammar, the construction. (Take, for example, the negative ke ani=ne pas, the employment of the same word zi to express both la "the" and la "there.") If it is childish as a work of art, it is miraculous enough as a feat of memory. But the reader has not forgotten what the subliminal self is capable of achieving as regards time appreciation mentioned in an early chapter. When, however, it comes to Helene's telepathic and clairvoyant powers, M. Flournoy, in spite of his long investigation, can find no explanation of the supernormal to fit the case. Her mediums.h.i.+p since 1892 included manifestations of all kinds. They began with physical phenomena, but they soon ceased. Her clairvoyant messages during trance are certainly of a remarkable character. Her reception of distant scenes and persons, of which she was apparently unacquainted, has been carefully investigated and authenticated by numerous persons of reputation. It is this aspect of spiritualism which has of recent years commanded most attention from trained observers. The trance utterances of such well-known clairvoyants as the late Stainton Moses, Mrs Thompson, and Mrs Piper have been subjected to rigid and precise inquiry, and on the whole it is on this type of evidence that the strongest arguments of the genuineness of spiritualism really rests. It is at once the most impressive, the most interesting, and the most voluminous.

Of Stainton Moses I have already spoken. This medium was, as we have seen, a man of character and probity, English Professor at the University College School for eighteen years, a man who was never detected in the slightest fraud, and who died in 1892 regretted by a host of intimate friends. Stainton Moses left a ma.s.s of published testimony to his pretended communications from the spirits of deceased persons. He attached great importance to the evidence for spiritualistic doctrines. Altogether the "controls" or communicators numbered thirty-eight. Some of these Moses or other members of the circles had known in life; others--such as Swedenborg, Bishop Wilberforce, and President Garfield--were historical personages. Besides these there was a cla.s.s of individuals of no particular importance, and apparently unknown to the medium and his friends. Yet it is worthy of remark that the spirits by whom Moses was "controlled" never withheld any data which would faciliate verification. For instance, at one _seance_ a spirit put in an appearance by raps, giving the name "Rosmira." She said that she lived at Kilburn and had died at Torquay on 10th January 1874. She said that her husband's name was Ben, and that his surname was Lancaster. It turned out that a fortnight before the whole particulars were to be found in the "Death" notices in _The Daily Telegraph_. "Mr Moses' spirits," comments Mr Podmore in his "History of Spiritualism," habitually furnished accurate obituaries, or gave such other particulars of their lives as could be gathered from the daily papers, from published biographies, or from the _Annual Register_ and other works of reference. All the spirits, indeed, gave their names, with one exception--an exception so significant that the case is worth recording. _The Pall Mall Gazette_ for 21st February 1874 contains the following item of intelligence:--

"A cabdriver out of employment this morning threw himself under a steam-roller which was being used in repairing the road in York-place, Marylebone, and was killed immediately."

"Mr Moses was present at a _seance_ that evening, and his hand was controlled, ostensibly by the spirit of the unhappy suicide, to write an account of the incident, and to draw a rough picture of a horse attached to a vehicle. The name of the dead man, it will be seen, does not appear in the newspaper account, and out of the thirty-eight spirits who gave proofs of their ident.i.ty through the mediums.h.i.+p of Mr Moses this particular spirit alone chose to remain anonymous."

But a great part of Moses' mediumistic career was taken up with trance utterances purporting to come from various spirits. These writings, couched in clear, vigorous English, seems to flow readily "without any conscious intervention on the part of the mortal penman." In fact, so far was this so that he was able to read a book, or otherwise occupy his mind, during their production.

The claims of the celebrated medium Mrs Thompson were carefully investigated by a competent observer, Mrs A. W. Verrall, the wife of an eminent Cambridge scholar, and herself of no mean scholastic attainments.

I will endeavour to summarise Mrs Verrall's conclusions as follows:--

Mrs Verrall says that Mrs Thompson was unable to ascertain the correct statements of facts which have been grouped under the four following heads:--

(_a_) Things known to the sitter and directly present in his consciousness.

(_b_) Things known to the sitter but not immediately present in his consciousness.