It is the thing for which every preceding phase – my gradual religious development, my books, which gave me an introduction to the public, my modest fortune, which enables me to devote myself to unlucrative work, my platform work, which helps me to convey the message, and my physical strength, which is still sufficient to stand arduous tours and to fill the largest halls for an hour and a half with my voice – have each been an unconscious preparation. For thirty years I have trained myself exactly for the role without the least inward suspicion of whither I was tending.
Even so, Conan Doyle’s full-scale conversion to spiritualism was an unusually protracted one. In January 1880, when he was 20 and struggling as a medical assistant in Birmingham, he attended a public lecture with the title ‘Does Death End All?’, writing afterward that it was ‘a very clever thing … though not convincing to me’. Doyle later reported that he had ‘had the usual contempt which the young educated man feels towards the whole subject which has been covered by the clumsy name of Spiritualism’, a subject he then saw as a litany of fraudulent mediums, spurious phenomena, and other ‘bogus happenings’ that had duped the public.
During the 1880s, Doyle published a number of stories that took a light-hearted, if not openly sceptical view of the supernatural. In his 1883 ‘Captain of the Pole-Star’, he allows his fictional hero, like him a young doctor, to refer mockingly to ‘the impostures of Slade’, a popular American medium who claimed to receive paranormal messages on a small slate blackboard he held in his hands. Later that year came Doyle’s story ‘Selecting a Ghost’, in which a wealthy shopkeeper seeks to audition prospective spooks to haunt his mansion. This was ‘rank comedy’, he perhaps unnecessarily informed his editor.
When Doyle started his first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in March 1886, he had several goals, both artistic and material, but psychic instruction wasn’t among them. Some thirty-five years later, Doyle was still at pains to keep his personal beliefs separate from those of his fictional detective. ‘This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain,’ Holmes remarks in the somewhat macabre tale of ‘The Sussex Vampire’. ‘The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.’
Gradually, however, Doyle was moving towards a new and unorthodox belief in the powers of mind over matter. We’ve seen that he engaged in apparent displays of table-tapping, clairvoyance and telepathy while still a young doctor in Southsea. In 1887 Doyle underwent an early spiritualist epiphany when a medium advised him not to buy a particular book, as he was then privately thinking of doing, which he took as proof of some ‘profound power’ at work. Less than a month later, Doyle published a letter in Light, one of the then half-dozen popular British psychic magazines. Acknowledging that he was a ‘novice and inquirer’ in the field, he noted, however, it was ‘absolutely certain that intelligence [can] exist apart from the body’. The message from the local medium had apparently convinced him of life’s ultimate meaning. With his characteristic gift for the lucid phrase, and his boundless self-confidence, Doyle assured the readers of Light of the ‘unimpeachable logic’ of his position. ‘After weighing the evidence,’ he wrote, ‘I could no more doubt the existence of the phenomena than I could doubt the existence of lions in Africa, though I have been to that continent and have never chanced to see one.’
This was also the period in which the seemingly conventional author, with his superbly cognitive fictional hero, was exploring the laws of karma and reincarnation, among other aspects of Eastern philosophy, and closely following the time travel theories of Madame Blavatsky and her fellow Theosophists. As a doctor, Conan Doyle made no secret of his interest in the uncharted potential of the human mind. In fact, as we’ve seen, a degree of spiritualistic belief was de rigueur for many late Victorian scientists, including another of the leading lights of natural selection, Professor Thomas Huxley.
Huxley may have been the man to coin the term ‘agnostic’. Although believing in the Bible’s ‘core moral teachings [and] uplifting use of language’ – and the possibility that ‘Christ’s etheric body’ had become visible to the disciples after his crucifixion – Huxley ‘unequivocally endorsed’ several mediums. The idea that such men somehow actively threatened the established Christian Church, which promptly saw its theological authority replaced by a blancmange of pantheism, mysticism, and greeting-card sentimentality has not stood the test of historical inquiry. Even the writings of a self-confessed ‘spookist’ like Huxley contain affirmations of the ‘palliative’ and ‘universal’ aspects of organised religion, such as divine protection, infallible justice, and, of course, life after death. The later nineteenth-century obsession with angels, which influences Christmas cards to this day, seems to have broadly satisfied both religious traditionalists and those seeking a more occult meaning of life.
Conan Doyle’s early researches into the paranormal weren’t, therefore, an unheard of or illogical activity for a young doctor whose recent family history seemed to imply a distressing connection between religious fervour and insanity. Nor had Doyle yet abandoned – if he ever did so – his more rational and conventionally reasoned approach to life. An 1883 exchange of letters in the British Journal of Photography suggests that he was still fully alive to the possibility of mediumistic fraud. In reply to a W. Harding Warner, who wrote to advance his claim that certain men have ‘radiating from them a light [that] can be photographed’, Doyle replied:
Will Mr Warner consent to throw a ‘photosphere or luminous halo’ round this Delphic utterance of his? From so-called facts he draws inference which, even if they were facts indeed, would be illogical, and upon these illogical inferences draws deductions which, once more, no amount of concession would render tenable.
Ten years later, Doyle began work on a novella he called The Parasite, which featured several passages juxtaposing reason and the occult. That he still reserved judgement on the supernatural as a whole can be seen when a character in the book attends an obviously rigged séance. ‘I like none of these mystery-mongers,’ he remarks, before going on to denounce the sort of medium who gulls her customers by ‘slapping a surreptitious banjo’.
Well before the First World War saw Doyle’s final leap of faith, therefore, he had already critically explored many of the boundaries of human perception. Though not yet ready to embark on the last and most controversial of his public crusades, nor was he a man to ignore new theories or beliefs about God’s purpose, any more than he was an author content to stick with a winning formula to the end of his career. Writer, physician, ferocious moralist, provocateur, an associate of both royalty and underworld lowlifes, the animating force behind major changes to the judicial system in England and Scotland, Doyle was one of the great progressive minds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a dynamic figure linking the disparate worlds of crime, the arts, social reform, British nationalism and, increasingly, the enigmatic practices of the séance room.
Doyle’s metaphysical researches took different forms over the years. In January 1887, even before A Study in Scarlet appeared in print, he’d enrolled as a Freemason and been inducted into the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. Since Doyle’s application for membership came just two days after he sat down with some friends in the darkened dining room of a nearby house, where after half an hour of silence the table had suddenly begun to rap up and down in a code they interpreted as a message from the beyond, it’s possible he thought his initiation as a Freemason might in some way contribute to his burgeoning knowledge of the occult. In his first appearance in a short story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, Sherlock Holmes remarks, ‘There is a wonderful sympathy and Freemasonry among horsy men’. In ‘The Red-Headed League’, published in the same year, Holmes immediately identifies a client as a Mason based on the small pin he wears in his lapel.
There’s a more extensive example in 1893’s ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, in which the Musgrave family’s eldest son successively undergoes initiation into a cryptic call-and-response routine much
like a Masonic catechism. In the spring of 1900, while doing his bit for the British cause in the Boer War, Doyle attended meetings at an improvised Masonic Lodge set up in a field close to the front line at Bloemfontein. He was not the only visiting author to do so. A later issue of Masonic Illustrated magazine reported, ‘Whilst at the seat of war, Brother Conan Doyle frequented the never-to-be-forgotten scratch lodge in the Free State with Brother Kipling’.
It’s been speculated that the Masons’ secretive routines appealed to Doyle’s sense of mystery, as well as to his lifelong quest for acceptance on his own merits, and not just as an author of popular fiction. The man of real talent who longs to be recognised for something else is a recurring and often endearing figure in the arts. Doyle, who described himself as a teacher to the magician Harry Houdini and came to think of himself as a significant philosopher, would never concede an intellectual argument. It seems fair to say that his Masonic activities were a part of the same restless nature that had long struggled with the conflict between the claims of a conformist society and an intransigent individual. He took nothing mainstream on trust. Doyle eventually branded Houdini’s position on the occult a form of ‘Catholicism’ – a new ideological insult – which implied that the ‘little man’ (who happened to be Jewish) was in thrall to the reactionary forces of orthodox religion while, by contrast, he, Doyle, espoused the concept of continuous mental revolution.
In May 1914, Conan Doyle and his family set sail on the RMS Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic, for New York. It was his first Atlantic crossing in twenty years. He had chosen this moment in his nation’s destiny to accept an invitation from the Canadian government to make a goodwill tour of its national parks. On 28 June, as the visitors were enjoying the view at Niagara Falls (which Doyle thought might be a suitable place to drop Holmes), Gavrilo Princip succeeded in his second attempt at murdering the visiting archduke in Sarajevo. When Conan Doyle arrived home on 19 July, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in the throes of presenting Serbia with an unconditional ultimatum. The outbreak of full-scale hostilities came two weeks later. Although the military authorities denied his request for an army commission, Doyle was far from idle during the conflict, emerging in 1918 no longer as a potential recruit but as a spokesman and missionary for what he called the ‘new revelation’.
While psychiatrist-biographers have written of Conan Doyle’s ‘identity crisis in middle age’, and even his apparent ‘male menopause’, the best course appears to be to treat any claim to an overall psychological analysis with caution, and instead to study the facts. Doyle was never subject to a blinding light, nor to a single philosophical tipping point in his embrace of the occult. It was not an overnight conversion.
There were several factors at work in finally transforming him from what he termed an ‘uncommitted student of the psychic’ into a full-time propagandist on the subject. The continuing losses both of family members and of hundreds of thousands of ordinary troops would have preyed on a far less inquisitive mind. ‘Where were they?’ Doyle later wrote. ‘What had become of these splendid young lives? They were no longer here. Were they anywhere? The question was [by] far the most pressing in the world.’
It’s arguable that on successive visits to war-torn France, Doyle underwent his own inner desolation among the ruins, and emerged to raise questions about ‘the fleeting nature of matter’, and ‘reveal the eternal values beyond all the shows of time and sense – the things which are indeed lasting, enduring through the ages in a glorious and majestic progression,’ as he put it in a public lecture in October 1917, before going on to declare, ‘I am now finally satisfied with the truth [of spiritualism], and have not been hasty in forming my opinions’.
On another level, of course, Conan Doyle was on an altogether faster track than he suggested. It’s often said that he turned to the séance room only after the war-related deaths of his son Kingsley and his brother Innes. In fact, both these individuals were still alive when Doyle publicly came out as a believer. It’s true that he’d involved himself in psychic affairs on and off for some three decades, during which time he grew steadily more antagonistic in his attitude to orthodox religion. But what finally drove Doyle into the occultist camp was neither a climactic revelation following his years of diligent research, nor a breakdown in his normal critical faculties. The trigger-point was both more banal and yet infinitely stranger than that. It came in the form of the Doyles’ wartime houseguest, Lily Loder-Symonds, the ‘sensitive’ who lost three of her brothers in combat and subsequently took to channelling messages sent to her from the spirits of dead soldiers.
‘Since the War,’ Doyle wrote with characteristic self-confidence in his 1918 book The New Revelation:
I have had some very exceptional opportunities of confirming all the views which I had already formed as to the truth of the general facts upon which my views are founded. These opportunities came through the fact that a lady who lived with us, as Mrs L.S., developed the power of automatic writing.
As we’ve seen, the sickly and widowed Loder-Symonds was at best a somewhat elusive figure who appears to have left little historical record behind her. We know that she was a childhood friend of Jean Conan Doyle, and that she had been one of the bridesmaids at the Doyles’ wedding in 1907. A witness to that event remembered her as:
A stout but comely lady in her youthful middle age, bespectacled, her gaze icy blue and penetrating … Mrs Symonds’ jaw was firm, with lips tightly locked. Even on an occasion such as this, smiles did not come readily.
Beyond that, it’s known only that Lily had once played the harp at competitive level and, like Jean herself, had a mystic outlook on life, apparently believing that the Great War had been prophesied to her as long ago as 1901 by a music teacher known for his psychic abilities. At Windlesham, it was remembered that she knocked on wood, threw salt over her shoulder, and carried a good-luck penny. At a low point in her fortunes, she’s said to have begun to read the astrological ‘word of the week’ in a mass circulation magazine. Increasingly frail from around the middle of 1915, Loder-Symonds came to pass much of her time propped up in bed with her hand poised over a writing pad, then watching – either in detachment or an apparent trance – as the pen moved across the page in front of her, seemingly of its own accord, bringing her and her sitters news from their dead loved ones.
Conan Doyle, it should be noted, did not entirely abandon his critical reserve when first confronted with these startling psychic manifestations under his own roof. ‘Of all forms of mediumship,’ he later wrote:
… [automatic writing] seems to me to be the one which should be tested most rigidly, as it lends itself very easily not so much to deception as to self-deception, which is a more subtle and dangerous thing … In the case of L.S. there is no denying that some messages proved to be not true. Especially in the matter of time, they were quite imprecise.
If Loder-Symonds truly was taking dictation from forces in the spirit world, they would seem to have been only modestly gifted as forecasters of future world events. Following the May 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, for example, Lily’s pen had produced the words, ‘It is terrible, terrible, and will have a great influence on the War’ – particularly, she later added, in drawing the United States into the conflict. While the loss of 1,198 passengers and crew was self-evidently a tragedy of the first order, it could be argued that Loder-Symonds’ spirits erred in their conclusions about the event. In fact, it would be a further two years before America entered the war on the Allied side. Could it be that, like many mediums before and after her, Lily was able to take certain facts and then draw plausible inferences from them in an integrated ‘prophecy’ that was nothing more than reasonably informed speculation dressed up in spiritualistic clothes? While the ‘sensitive’ continued to speak about current or imminent world events, much of what she predicted also appeared in the newspaper delivered each morning to her sickbed.
On the other hand, later in 1915 Loder-Symonds would sit down with
her hosts in the darkened parlour at Windlesham and apparently communicate there with Jean’s brother, Malcolm Leckie, who had died at Mons in the early days of the war. Conan Doyle never revealed publicly what had come through on that occasion, but he later wrote of it as ‘evidential’. ‘I seemed suddenly to see that this subject [spiritualism] with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of force outside the rules of science,’ he wrote, but was ‘something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond’.
Of course, it’s also true that early death is often seen as a kind of martyrdom, and Lily Loder-Symonds’ in 1916, at the age of 42, arguably gave her mediumship an appeal for Doyle it might not otherwise have enjoyed. At around the same time, a claim increasingly argued for a connection between spiritualism and several new scientific philosophies in areas like relativity theory and electromagnetism, which combined to suggest that man’s understanding of the universe was far from complete. This particular link seemed to strengthen when Oliver Lodge’s son, Raymond, was lost in the trenches. Lodge’s subsequent public conversion to the idea of a visible afterlife, on which he wrote a bestselling book, lent an intellectual respectability to a topic that was soon being debated on the front pages of both the British and American newspapers.
Whatever the causes, the result was that at stages over the terrible winter of 1916–17, Conan Doyle finally came out as an apostle of the New Revelation. It was now clear to him, he wrote, that this knowledge was not for his benefit alone, ‘but that God had placed me in a very special position for conveying it to that world which needed it so badly’.
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 31