Spiritualism : Part 5

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 15 of 21)

Podmore thinks them to have been unduly suggestible and offers hallucinations as an alternative hypothesis. Stainton Moses was respected in his private life, a teacher, a clergyman and a private tutor. His specialties were the introduction of a great variety of articles - apports as they are called - at his sittings, levitation, table-tipping and automatic writing and the direct voice. His control was known as "Imperator" and this ghostly commander fills a large place in the S.p.r. literature. "Imperator" had a strong homiletic instinct (remember that Moses was a clergyman) and communicated first and last through automatic writing, a considerable exposition of the spiritualistic creed, the larger part of which could have been preached from any liberal pulpit with no other effect on the hearers than to win their assent to blameless commonplaces - or, possibly, put them to sleep.

Mrs. Piper affords the strongest evidence of what Podmore calls "Some supernormal power of apprehension" in the entire history of trance mediumship. She was for years under the constant observation of a capable group by no means unanimously sympathetic with the spiritual hypothesis, and has never been detected in fraud. She contributed a very great amount of information to her sitters which she apparently could not and did not obtain from known sources. There are no physical phenomena in connection with her work. The records of her séances fill a large place in the proceedings of the S.p.r. and the case for spiritualism could be more safely rested with her than any other medium.

But the point here is that these three - Home, Moses and Mrs. Piper - supply the larger part of material which the really trained investigators of the last forty years are at all willing to take seriously. If there have been only three mediums in forty years who have commanded the general confidence - and Podmore does not feel absolutely sure of Home - of the group whose judgment the rest of us have to depend upon, we have a situation in which the average untrained seeker dealing with the average medium can have no sound confidence at all. The whole region is shot through and through with uncertainties, deceits and alternative hypotheses.

Spiritualism a Question of Testimony and Interpretation

It is all fundamentally a matter of testimony. We have, or we have not, a body of fact for which we are in debt to observation. The observation may be first hand - as in Sir Oliver Lodge's sittings where he reports what he saw and heard. It may be second hand as the cases reported in the larger part of the authoritative literature of psychic phenomena. (Second hand, that is, for the authors and those who depend upon them.) Trustworthy observation is probably more difficult here than in any region of investigation. The whole situation is unfavorable; low lights and high emotion, the instinctive tendency to read into the facts a desired content even in watching them, the possibility of hallucinations and forms of hypnosis, all combine to render human testimony unreliable and introduce errors of observation.

Nowhere can we be less sure of our facts and even when the facts are admitted the interpretation of them still remains, and here the room for difference is equally great. At best we are dealing with forces not yet subdued to law, phenomena for which normal experience supplies no parallel. It is all a region of intimations and possible permissions, but never for a moment of inevitable conclusions. One must go slow enough in offering any opinion at all. The writer recognizes and accepts, to begin with, a preponderance of dependable testimony for physical phenomena not to be explained in terms of any force with which science is now familiar.

In this he goes beyond Podmore who would eliminate all physical phenomena from the problem, and fully as far as Carrington. But Sir William Crookes never admitted entire error in this region, and the conclusions of Geley (though he cites in part Eusapia Palladino, who is more or less discredited) point in the same direction. His studies of materialization are so vivid as to be uncanny and his photographs a series of documents which still await explanation. There would seem to be a possible exercise of personal force not dependent upon muscular pull or pressure, bodily movements operating against known laws and even the building of this mysterious force into complete or fragmentary body-like forms.

On the psychical side there is dependable evidence for information conveyed by supernormal means across considerable spaces - possibly long distances and the power to secure and report information not gained in any normal way. These are bare statements capable of great amplification. But they cover the ground.

Three Possible Explanations of So-Called Spiritual Phenomena

Admitting the facts, there are three possible explanations. First, the Demonic. There are, according to this theory, in the unseen world - wherever and whatever that may be - an order of beings akin to ourselves, either less or more highly developed, mischievous or benign. This is an old, old belief; it has pervaded animistic religions, fathered witchcraft, persisted in the belief of demoniac control, enriched folk lore, filled the friendly silences of the night with terror and haunted humanity. Now it has found its renaissance in the full blaze of Twentieth Century Science.

"It seems not improbable," says Sir William Barrett, "that many of the physical manifestations witnessed in a spiritualistic séance are the product of human-like but not really human intelligence - good or bad devilia they may be, elementals some have called them, which aggregate round the medium; drawn from that particular plane of mental and moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and moral plane of the medium." This is, with little enough alteration, the very point from which we set out in the remote dawn of our endeavor to interpret the mystery of the world about us. The only difference is that Sir William has his devil for a tipping table and the savage had his for a flowing spring. Sir William may be right but primitive man was wrong.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company