CHAPTER XI

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.