by Colin Wilson
For whatever reason, the Fox sisters began a Spiritualist explosion. People discovered that all they had to do was to sit in a darkened room, preferably with a ‘medium’ present—someone who had already established a communication with the spirits—and the manifestations would usually follow immediately. No apparatus was required, except possibly a few musical instruments. In the Rochester area, more than a hundred ‘mediums’ appeared in the year 1850. In Buffalo, New York, two brothers and a sister named Davenport attended a seance at which the Fox sisters produced their manifestations, and decided to try it themselves—in fact, inexplicable raps and bangs had sounded in their home in the year 1846, two years before the Hydesville manifestations. When Ira, William and Elizabeth Davenport sat in a darkened room, with their hands on a tabletop, the table began to move, raps were heard all over the room, and when Ira picked up a pencil his hand began to write automatically. A few nights later, with witnesses present, all three children were seen to levitate into the air. At their fifth ‘seance’, Ira was instructed—by means of raps—to fire a pistol in the corner of the room. As it exploded, it was taken from his hand, and by the light of the flash, a figure of a man was seen holding it. He vanished a moment later, and the pistol fell to the floor. The man introduced himself—through the code of raps—as John King; he was one of the first examples of a ‘control’ (or master of ceremonies), who acted as intermediary between the medium and the ‘spirits’. ‘John King’ was soon taking over the brothers directly and speaking through their mouths. The Davenport brothers went on to become even more famous than the Fox sisters.
In Dover, Ohio, a well-to-do farmer named Jonathan Koons discovered his own talents as a medium by sitting in a dark room and going into a trance. The ‘spirits’ who spoke through him told him that all his eight children were gifted mediums. They instructed him to build a special house made of logs, sixteen feet by twelve, to be used exclusively for spiritualist activities. There were large numbers of musical instruments—drums, triangles, tambourines, a banjo, an accordion, a harp, a guitar, and so on. The room was dimly lighted by sheets of wet paper smeared with phosphorus. When the mediums—usually Koons and his 18-year-old son Nahum—were seated at a small table—with the audience on benches—Koons would play the violin, and the spirits would soon join in, producing the effect of a full orchestra. Witnesses also speak of a heavenly choir joining in. The racket was impressive, and could be heard a mile away. A voice would then deliver a homily, using a speaking trumpet, which floated in the air. A spirit hand floated round the room, touching people and shaking their hands. People came from all over the county to witness these marvels, and the spirits impressed everyone by producing information about strangers that none of the audience could have known.
This was, in fact, one of the most convincing things about the ‘spirits’; they seemed to have access to all kinds of information. In Boston, the wife of a newspaper editor, Mrs W. R. Hayden, startled the wife of the English mathematician, Augustus de Morgan, by giving her detailed messages from dead friends about whom she could not possibly have known. The result was that Mrs de Morgan invited her to England, where she held seances under ‘test conditions’ in the de Morgans’ home. She was loudly ridiculed by the English newspapers, who were convinced that this latest American craze must be based on fraud and deception (which the British were too sensible to swallow), but she convinced most of those who actually saw her. And respectable members of the British middle classes who tried ‘table-turning’ to while away the long evenings were amazed to discover that it actually worked. One journalist wrote a few years later: ‘In those days you were invited to “Tea and Table Moving” as a new excitement, and made to revolve with the family like mad round articles of furniture.’ Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert tried it at Osborne, and the table moved so convincingly that the queen had no doubt whatever that no trickery was involved—she decided that the answer must lie in some form of electricity or magnetism.
The French were more than prepared to adopt this new form of entertainment, for half a century of controversy about Mesmer—who had taught that healing, clairvoyance and other such mysteries were due to a mysterious force called ‘Animal Magnetism’—had accustomed them to strange phenomena; by 1851, table-turning had become the latest craze. And the spirits soon made a highly influential convert. He was a 50-year-old educationalist named Denizard-Hyppolyte-Leon Rivail, who was to become famous under the name Allan Kardec. Rivail had been a pupil of the celebrated educator Pestalozzi, and he had opened his own school at the age of 24. He had written popular books on arithmetic, grammar, spelling, how to calculate in your head, and educational reform, and given immensely successful courses of free lectures on astronomy, chemistry, physics and anatomy. He was also an enthusiastic student of phrenology and Animal Magnetism.
It was in May 1855 that Rivail attended a hypnotic session with a certain Madame Roger, who was placed in a trance by her ‘magnetiser’, M. Fortier, and was able to read minds and perform other puzzling feats. There Rivail met a certain Madame Plainemaison, who told him that even stranger phenomena were taking place regularly at her house in the rue Grange-Bateliere. Rivail agree to go, and was amazed by what he saw. The tables did more than merely ‘turn’; they also jumped and ran about the room. The disciple of Mesmer felt that these phenomena challenged the powers of reason to which he had devoted his life, and he determined to try to get to the bottom of it. At Madame Plainemaison’s, he met a man named Baudin, who told him that his two daughters practised automatic writing. The young ladies seem to have discovered their powers accidentally, in the course of entertaining their friends with table-turning; they were, says one commentator, ‘of a worldly and frivolous disposition’. This did not deter the serious-minded Rivail, who proceeded to ask the table major philosophical questions. Asked if mankind would ever understand the first principles of the universe, it replied, ‘No. There are things that cannot be understood by man in this world.’ When Rivail asked if matter had always existed, the table replied (perhaps a trifle wearily), ‘God only knows.’
It was obvious to Rivail that the entities who were communicating were genuine spirits, not the unconscious minds of the young ladies. (Even in those days, the concept of the unconscious was accepted.) In fact, the communicators identified themselves as ‘spirits of genii’, and said that some of them (but not all) had been the spirits of those who had been alive on earth.
With excitement, Rivail realised that this material had an impressive inner-consistency, and that the total pattern revealed a philosophical scheme that embraced the whole universe. Other friends who had been collecting ‘automatic scripts’—including the playwright Sardou—handed over their own material to Rivail—more than fifty notebooks. And Rivail was told to bring all this material together into a book, which should be called The Spirits’ Book. The spirits even gave Rivail the pseudonym under which he should publish the work: Allan Kardec; both of these names—according to the spirits—were names he had borne in previous incarnations.
The message of The Spirits’ Book is easily summarised. Man is a fourfold being, made up of body, ‘vital principle’ (aura), intelligent soul and spiritual soul—the divisions we have already encountered in the Seeress of Prevorst. Spirits are intelligent beings, who constitute the ‘population of the universe’. Man is a spirit enclosed in a physical body. The destiny of all spirits is to evolve towards perfection. There are three basic categories of spirit: the ‘low spirits’, who are trapped in materiality, the ‘second degree spirits’, whose moral nature has evolved to the point where they experience only a desire for good, and the ‘perfect spirits’, who have reached the peak of their evolution. The ‘low spirits’ range from evil spirits who are activated by malice to mere ‘boisterous spirits’ who enjoy getting into mischief. These latter are also known as poltergeists. After death, a spirit spends some time in the spirit world, and is then reincarnated on earth or some other world. The purpose of earthly life is to enable
the spirit to evolve. To some extent, the spirit is able to choose the trials it will undergo in its next life. (This means that it is pointless to bemoan our lot, since we have chosen it ourselves.)
The Spirits’ Book appeared in 1856, and created a sensation. Kardec became the founder-figure of the French spiritualist movement, and his works attained immense influence. But he died of a heart attack only thirteen years after the book was published, at the age of 65, and his influence was soon being widely questioned by the movement. Rivail was totally committed to the doctrine of reincarnation, the slow perfection of the spirit through a series of rebirths, which can be traced back to ancient India. But most of the ‘spirits’ who spoke through mediums at seances had nothing to say about reincarnation. So Rivail was inclined to be critical about trance mediums, while the trance mediums and their followers denounced Rivail as a dogmatic old man. After Rivail’s death, his influence waned, and within a few years he was half-forgotten.
Now in Paris, in 1860, there was a particularly violent poltergeist in the Rue des Noyers; it smashed every window in the place, hurled all kinds of objects around the house (including many which the occupants had never seen before), and finally drove the unfortunate people out of the house. Rivail decided to try to find out what exactly had happened. His medium’s ‘control’ (the spirit who acts as master of ceremonies) explained that the disturbances were the work of a mischievous spirit. And, at the request of the control (a spirit called Saint Louis), the poltergeist of the Rue des Noyers was summoned. He appeared to be in a bad temper, and asked irritably: ‘Why do you call me? Do you want to have some stones thrown at you?’ Rivail now asked the spirit: ‘Was there anyone in the Rue des Noyers who helped you play tricks on the inmates?’ Certainly, replied the spirit, it had had an excellent ‘instrument’. It added, ‘For I am merry and like to amuse myself sometimes.’ Who was it? Rivail asked. ‘A maidservant.’
‘Was she unaware you were making use of her?’
‘Oh yes, poor girl—she was the most frightened of them all.’
Rivail asked how the spirit managed to throw various objects about the place, and received the interesting answer: ‘I helped myself through the electric nature of the girl, joined to my own . . . thus we were able to transport the objects between us.’
Rivail asked the spirit who it was. It replied that it had been dead about fifty years, and had been a rag-and-bone-man. People used to make fun of him because he drank too much, and this was why he decided to play tricks on the inhabitants of the Rue des Noyers. He indignantly denied that he had done these things out of malice; it was merely his way of amusing himself.
This spirit seemed to belong to a class described in The Spirits’ Book: ‘They are ignorant, mischievous, unreasonable, and addicted to mockery. They meddle with everything and reply to every question without paying attention to the truth.
So, according to Kardec, poltergeists are mischievous spirits who draw their energy from certain ‘vulnerable’ human beings.
In all but one respect, Kardec’s ‘spirit teaching’ agreed basically with those of most other spiritualists since Swedenborg; but that one aspect, reincarnation, was to prove a source of severe contention within the French spiritualist movement. The Spirits’ Book had already been anticipated by a work called Arcanes de la vie future dévoilée—Secrets of the Future Life Unveiled, by Alphonse Cahagnet, published in 1848 (and a second and third volume later). Cahagnet was a cabinet maker who had become fascinated by ‘somnambulism’ (hypnotism) in his mid-30s; he placed various subjects in a hypnotic trance—the most impressive being a woman called Adèle Maginot—and recorded what they told him of life after death. Adèle was so remarkable because her messages from the dead—and sometimes from living people who had disappeared—were so full of convincing evidence. Cahagnet started a journal called The Spiritualist Magnetiser, and this was later transformed into The Spiritualist Revue, edited by Z. Piérart. But Cahagnet, who was a follower of Swedenborg, did not believe in reincarnation. And the French spiritualist movement was soon split by a bitter war of words between the followers of Cahagnet and the followers of Kardec. Kardec was critical of trance mediums—like Adéle—because they had nothing to say about reincarnation, and Cahagnet and his followers regarded automatic writing with suspicion and disdain. But Kardec, who had heart problems, died in 1869, only thirteen years after The Spirits’ Book was published, while Cahagnet lived and flourished until 1885, publishing many more influential books. So it was Kardec’s version of spiritualism that gradually faded away as the movement became increasingly powerful. It was only in Brazil—a country whose witch-doctors frequently called on the spirits for magical aid—that Kardec’s version of spiritualism took root, and where it still flourishes today as one of the country’s major religions. We shall examine this at length in Chapter 9.
It may be as well, at this point, to pause and ask the question: What does it all mean? There is something about ‘spiritualism’ that is peculiarly irritating. It is one thing to accept that some people possess strange powers of clairvoyance, and quite another to swallow ‘spirit teachings’ that sound like the ramblings of an uninspired Sunday school teacher. It is not that the doctrines of Swedenborg or Kardec are in themselves unacceptable. The notion that man possesses a ‘vital body’, an astral body and an ego-body seems reasonable enough; some may even learn, through self-observation, to distinguish between the promptings of the ‘low self’ and the detached observations of some higher part of us that looks down ironically on our sufferings and humiliations. But when Kardec tells us that God created spirits, and then set them the task of evolving towards perfection, it sounds boringly abstract. Why did God bother to create spirits in the first place? Why did he not create them perfect in the first place? And surely spirits ought to have something better to do than to communicate with their living relatives through ‘mediums’ and deliver anti-climactic messages about the joys of the afterlife and the trivial problems of the living? If we compare the revelations of spiritualism with those of science or philosophy, or the visions of the great mystics, they seem oddly banal . . .
This explains why spiritualism aroused such instant hostility among scientists and philosophers. Spiritualism was like a volcanic explosion of belief; the scientists replied with a blast of scepticism that was like cold water. And the combination of boiling lava and cold water produced an enormous cloud of steam that obscured everything. It was not that most scientists disbelieved the evidence: they refused even to look at it. T. H. Huxley expressed the general feeling when he remarked: ‘It may all be true, for anything that I know to the contrary, but really I cannot get up interest in the subject.’
Such an attitude can hardly be defended as scientific. For anyone who has an hour to spare, the evidence is seen to be overwhelming. There are hundreds—thousands—of descriptions of out-of-the-body experiences, of poltergeists, of ‘apparitions of the dead’, of accurate glimpses of the future. Any reasonable person ought to be prepared to come to terms with these, not to dismiss them with the comment: ‘I really cannot get up any interest in the subject.’
Can we come to terms with them without making any commitment to life-after-death or the existence of ‘spirits’? Just about. Consider, for example, the haunting of Willington Mill. One interesting point that emerged was that the male apparition walked across the room several feet above the ground, at the level of the window-sill. This suggests that it was walking on a floor that had now been demolished. And we know that the millhouse was built on the site of an older house. It looks as if the ‘tape recording’ theory (see p. 211) can explain this particular ghost. We also observe that the house was at the bottom of a valley, next to a stream, and therefore almost certainly damp. T. C. Lethbridge suggested that ghosts are ‘recordings’ on the electrical field of water, and are found most frequently in damp places . . .
We may also note the comment of the local historian that although the mill was built around 1800, no haunting was recorded f
rom that time until the disturbances experienced by Mr Proctor’s family—a family of young children. Later in the 19th century, investigators of poltergeist phenomena observed that children are usually present, and that one of them often seems to be the ‘focus’ of the disturbance—indeed, we may recall that the Rev. Samuel Wesley noticed that his daughter Hetty trembled in her sleep before ‘Old Jeffrey’ began banging around. Split-brain physiology has taught us that we have two people inside our heads. Perhaps ‘Old Jeffrey’ was some kind of manifestation of Hetty Wesley’s unconscious mind or right brain?
Thomson Jay Hudson has some surprising things to say about Spiritualism in The Law of Psychic Phenomena. He admits that the things that happen in the seance room are undeniable, but he claims they are not produced by the spirits of the dead. What produces the phenomena is ‘essentially a human intelligence, and neither rises above nor sinks below the ordinary intelligence of humanity’. And this is why spiritualism is so oddly boring and disappointing—because it is, as Nietzsche would say, ‘human, all too human’. ‘. . . We have already seen what remarkable powers the subjective mind possesses in certain lines of intellectual activity, and with what limitations it is hedged about; and we find that the intellectual feats of mediums possess all the characteristics belonging to subjective intelligence—the same wonderful powers and the same limitations,’