Medium wave
Mary Lutyens
The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Ruth Brandon (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) According to this lucid and for the most part absorbing book, the history of spiritualism was paved with bad intentions; all the early mediums from 1848 (except for the most famous, D. D. Home, who was never exposed) were discovered to be, or later confessed to having been, fraudulent. Home himself was suspected of fraud and Ruth Brandon gives plausible explanations of how his tricks could have been perform- ed, and what she cannot explain is at- tributed conveniently to hypnotism. The mediums' motives were mischievousness, financial gain or the love of power and notoriety or, in the case of poor, low-class girls, the opportunity to meet gentlemen in a 'respectable' way who would not other- wise have come near them. One of the two earliest mediums, the American, Margaret Fox, all but captured in marriage the celebrated patrician explorer Dr Elisha Kane although he believed her to be a
fraud. The story of the Fox sisters with which this book begins, and who were vir- tually the founders of spiritualism by discovering as children that they could pro- duce 'spirit rappings' by cracking their big- toe joints, is an enthralling one. A later English medium, Florence Cook, was in- vestigated by Sir William Crookes, F. R. S., who, we are told, went on proclaiming her honesty after she had been unmasked simp- ly because he was her lover. But many emi- nent men of different nationalities, in- cluding William James, took up the case of these seemingly simple innocent girls as well as of male mediums.
Magicians were more expert in detecting fraud than scientists trained to keep an open mind when investigating any new phenomenon. Houdini, the greatest of all escapologists, and J. N. Maskelyne became the mediums' most feared antagonists, challenging them to perform tricks they could not perform themselves. Yet Houdini longed to believe in life after death, and in this connection an unlikely friendship ex- isted for some time between him and Conan Doyle. They eventually quarrelled when Houdini refused to believe that messages 'brought through' by Lady Doyle in spirit writing came from Houdini's dead mother.
It was the scientific investigators rather than the converts among the general public who demanded more and snore proof in the way of concrete manifestations from the competing mediums. (Ruskin, for instance, for whom a séance was arranged soon after the death of Rose La Touch in 1877, was content simply when the medium described a girl who looked like Rose standing beside him, and was left, in his own words, 'Like a flint stone changed suddenly into a firefly'.) But when manifestations were forthcom- ing, widows expected to be clasped in the arms of their husbands, materialised out of 'ectoplasm'. The wretched mediums had to produce these tangible phantoms. Female mediums were particularly successful in creating them in that they had an extra orifice in which to conceal the yards of muslin required for such mianifestations. Swallowing and regurgitating the muslin was another trick. Among the fascinating fake photographs reproduced in this book is one showing Margery Credon producing ectoplasm from her nostril which gave me a horrible pain in my sinus imagining all that material being packed up in there before a séance.
Ruth Brandon does not consider the possibility of a fraudulent medium possess- ing at the same time genuine psychic powers. Although Mme Blavatsky was caught cheating at a seance she could hardly have written Isis Unveiled without supernatural aid of some sort. Half way through the book this massacre of the mediums began to pall and I turned to Elizabeth Jenkins's The Shadow and the Light as a counter-weight. Published in 1982 it is a skilful defence of D. D. Home, a charmer in those integrity the author has
complete faith.
The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 by F. W. H. Myers, poet and essayist who had been a Cambridge professor, and Henry Sedgewick, Cam- bridge professor of Moral Philosophy, was started for the purpose of scientific in- vestigation. It does not appear in the book that Sedgewick's wife, Nora, the first Prin- cipal of Newnham College, Cambridge, was Arthur Balfour's sister. When first Lord of the Treasury in 1892, Balfour wrote to his brother-in-law, 'Will you tell Nora that 1 have accepted the Presidency of the Society for Psychical Research and that 1 do not care a hang for my political reputation?' This action of Balfour's gave tremendous prestige to the Society.
W. T. Stead, Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle are key figures in the history of spiritualism with whom Ruth Brandon deals admirably. The narrative is not con- tinued much beyond the 1914-18 war, dur- ing which the longing for spiritualistic reassurance was immeasurably intensified. When the evidence of the survival of Sir Oliver Lodge's son was published in 1916 in Raymond many scoffed when reading that cigars and 'whisky sodas', manufactured out of 'essences, and ether, and gasses', were available in the spirit world. Unbelievers always scoff at the absurd trivialities 'brought through', but isn't it just such little homelinesses that the bereav- ed long for? To know that their loved ones have disappeared into a completely unrecognisable dimension would be of no comfort to them. I am not accusing the mediums of falsely giving them such com- fort (I believe that the medium of today, if engaged through one of the recognised psychic organisations, is at least wholly honest); 1 am suggesting that the newly dead may exist for a short spell in a sphere not unlike our own in which `sensitives' can still contact them and relay their trivial messages which is all they are able to con- tribute in words. It is so palpably obvious that once they have entered a new dimen- sion there are no words in which they can possibly describe their state. Surely it is far more plausible that they should be able to produce a delicious scent or revive a dead plant as described by Rosamond Lehmann in The Swan in the Evening, the beautiful account of her communications with her daughter who died.
The 'passion for the occult' was, as Ruth Brandon says, the passion for renewed belief in immortality after the simple faith of generations had for so many been destroyed by Darwinism and the advance of science. She asks in her last chapter . . why should religion need such desperate and painstaking proof? Is not this the realm of the act of faith?' Of course it is. Far stranger than that comparatively few people should believe in mediumistic communica- tion is that millions and millions still hold to their belief in such miracles as transubstan- tiation and the Resurrection. Faith is more potent than proof and will always confound logic.
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