Sidgwick and Myers, like most of their academic contemporaries, were initially repulsed by the phenomenon of Spiritualism, which had spread in the 1850s and ’60s to England from the crude hinterlands of America, where it had first erupted in the spring of 1848 in Hydesville, New York. There the two Fox sisters, aged 12 and 14, began hearing raps in their little house, allegedly from a dead peddler buried in the basement. As with the poor peddler (his initials were C. B., and he claimed to have been slain by a butcher’s knife by the previous homeowner, a blacksmith named John C. Bell), these Spiritualist movements would operate with a more or less literal reading of the spirits as objectively real entities that interact with living human beings via mediums, knockings, table tippings, dreams, and the cultus of the home séance.
And then things got wilder. It was one thing when men like Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln engaged Spiritualist beliefs and confessed to precognitive intuitions of their own or their loved one’s deaths.45 It was quite another when spirits began showing up for “spirit photographs” (which usually amounted to little more than primitive double exposures) or when floating trumpets and accordions played on a literal stage in poor light, for paying patrons no less. Such scenes did not exactly instill confidence in Cambridge intellectuals.
Nor did many of the spirit messages. There were real beauties here, like the one Gauld quotes from the spirit sermon of Reverend H. Snow: “We cannot dwell minutely upon the particulars which go to make up the sum total of the vastness of immensity.”46 What made the situation even more appalling to professional writers was the fact that similar lines were being composed from the spirits of the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg, Saint Paul, and John the Baptist. Gauld dryly concludes: “Of their efforts one can only say that if the great minds of this world degenerate so much in the next the prospect for lesser fry is bleak indeed.”47
Things were not entirely bleak, however. For one thing, as numerous historians, including Gauld himself, have pointed out, these outlandish belief systems often encoded the most progressive and socially liberal visions of the time, visions that would only find realization decades later when the broader culture in effect “caught up” with what the spirits had been saying for quite some time. On some issues, moreover, the culture has yet to catch up with the nineteenth-century séances.
The Spiritualist movement, for example, was often especially liberal and ahead of its time when it came to gender and sexual issues. Discussions around both the mysteries of postmortem sexuality and the practice of an earthly ethic of free love were not uncommon in Spiritualist literature, and both the Spiritualist and especially the later occult communities were filled with heterodox sexual ideas, mystico-erotic practices, and alternative genders and sexualities. These included, among other things, the abandonment of dysfunctional marriages for “spiritual affinities” or soul-mates, sexual intercourse with Elementals or subtle beings, ectoplasm emerging from between the legs (read: from the vaginas) of female mediums, the theological identification of the Fall with sex (a quite common equation in the history of Western esotericism), ritual intercourse without orgasm or movement (a practice taught by Thomas Lake Harris and latter dubbed “Carezza”), a famous female religious leader known to her intimates as “Jack” (Madame Blavatsky), and an equally famous male leader who received his most potent magical revelation in a traumatic homosexual ritual encounter that he himself designed (Aleister Crowley).48
Then there was Eusapia. Blum explains: “She tended to wake from trances hot, sweaty, and, well, aroused. Several times, she’d tried climbing into the laps of the male sitters at the table.”49 Palladino, it turns out, was hardly alone in her paranormally aroused sexuality. The hidden history of psychical research sparks and arcs with such energies. My sense is that only a small fraction of this material has been reported, and almost none of it has been carefully analyzed and really understood. Hence Eric J. Dingwall, a prominent historian of the field, once shared with the American artist and superpsychic Ingo Swann that he possessed an entire archive of materials on what Swann calls “sexualizing energies” (which Swann sees as metaphysically related to “power energies” or psychical abilities and the “creative energies” witnessed at work in artists, writers, and thinkers). “He kept this collection quite close to his chest,” Swann explains in Psychic Sexuality: “But in correspondence to me, he indicated that a good portion of it included documents regarding sexualizing energies encountered while conducting mesmeric and psychical research. In fact, it was Dingwall who suggested that a book should be written by ‘some daring soul.’”50 Indeed.
These are finally ontological issues involving some of the deepest dialectical structures of consciousness and energy, mind and matter, spirit and sex. Then there are what we might call the ethical and political dimensions involving the very public category of gender. Most historians agree that what Ann Braude has memorably dubbed the “radical spirits” were a significant force behind the early women’s rights movement in both America and England.51 This was no doubt a function of the fact that the majority of mediums and seers were spiritually empowered women. The men may have controlled the conservative public churches, but the women were running the progressive private séances. This was, if you will, a thoroughly domestic occultism, an often wild, but nevertheless quite real and very effective democracy of the Spirit.
One of the most puzzling aspects of Spiritualism, and indeed of psychical and paranormal phenomena in general, is the confusing ways the seemingly genuine phenomena were unmistakably mixed up with the fraudulent shenanigans, and often in the very same individual—we are back to the fantastic and the key moment of hesitation before a marvel encountered as fiction or fact. Nor does it seem to be a simple matter of either-or, as the true believers and professional skeptics both have it. Rather, it is almost is if the real needs the fake to appear at all, as if the fact relies on the fiction to manifest itself, only to immediately hide itself again in the confusion of the fantastic hesitation that follows. Put a bit differently, it is not as if the appearance of the sacred can be reduced to a simple trick, as if the shaman is just a sham. It is as if the sacred is itself tricky. Even the well-documented medical placebo, after all, is a fake that has real effects. What to do? I am reminded here of something the contemporary physicist and psychical researcher Russell Targ once shared with me, namely, that he first became aware of the reality of telepathy when, as a young stage magician in New York, he realized that he was receiving genuine telepathic information from within the mentalist trick he was performing on stage. The trick was a trick, but it was also, somehow, catalyzing the real deal.52 This I take as emblematic of the whole problem of the fantastic and the impossible.
One of the classic historical cases of this paradoxical phenomenon is the aforementioned Neapolitan superpsychic, Eusapia Palladino.53 By all accounts, Eusapia was astonishing. And a cheater. At one point, the S.P.R. refused to study her any longer, since they had a policy not to study anyone who was caught cheating. The policy may have been a reasonable one, but it was not a particularly wise one, and for all the reasons already outlined. After all, Eusapia also did completely impossible things that were judged by the best minds of the time to be quite genuine. In one uncanny scene, with her hands and feet all held tightly by the researchers (remember ol’ Sidgwick practicing on the floor?), a chair in the room moved about and the researchers were touched or even pushed from behind. And then this eerie sight: “Looking upwards, Mrs. Myers could see against the ceiling, which was illuminated by light from the note-taker’s candle, several kinds of protrusion from Eusapia’s body.”54 Like a Hindu goddess, Eusapia grew numerous arms, weird plasmic protrusions whose shadows on the ceiling Mrs. Myers described as resembling a dressed arm (complete with sleeve and cuff), the neck of a swan, and a stump.
Geezus.
The eminent French physiologist Charles Richet, who participated in extensive experiments with Palladino, was convinced of her powers, cheating or no cheating. During one such experim
ent, he claimed to have held one of her phantom hands for a full twenty-five seconds.55 It was impossible moments like these with what were called “physical mediums” that led Richet to coin a new word: ectoplasm (another paranormal term of elite intellectual origins). It was the same moments again that led William James to muse in his 1896 presidential address about the society’s absurd situation. He was particularly flabbergasted by the “phenomena of the dark-sitting and rat-hole type (with their tragic-comic suggestion that the whole order of nature might possibly be overturned in one’s own head, by the way in which one imagined oneself, on a certain occasion, to be holding a tricky peasant woman’s feet).”56 In other words, Eusapia.
Palladino, however, was hardly the first physical medium. Indeed, the scene around Myers and his colleagues in England of the 1870s, as they began to venture out into local séances and spirits, manifested the exact same fantastic confusion of fact and fiction, of physics and farce. Consider, for example, the English sensation Daniel Dunglas Home. Home could do things like play accordions without the use of his hands, float out of and back through a second-story window (before three witnesses), and stretch his body as if it were rubber. He was certainly convincing enough. The Roman Catholic Church charged him with witchcraft. An anthropologist had a more rational solution: he seriously suggested that Home was a werewolf with absolute powers over the minds of men. The press, on the other hand, adored him. The eminent scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society William Crookes was not exactly scoffing either. In 1871, he created a sensation when he published an essay, partly about his experiments with Home, in the Quarterly Journal of Science. This essay, and others like it later published in Crookes’s Researches into the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874) would play a major role in attracting other intellectuals to the subject, including Lord Raleigh, William Barrett (who would later lead the charge to found the S.P.R.), Arthur Balfour (a star student of Henry Sidgwick’s who was later to become prime minister), and Sidgwick himself.
It was into this heady mix of the factual and the fraudulent that Frederic Myers stepped with more than a little verve. Two events lured him in. The first took place in the fall of 1873, when Myers had a convincing encounter with what he later described as “my first personal experience of forces unknown to science.” We are not told what these forces were—indeed, Myers explicitly refuses to tell his readers “the special phenomena which impressed me”—only that he experienced them.57 Gauld has put the various pieces together and come up with a plausible scenario. He points out that Myers’s diary entry for November 20, 1873, reads: “John King shakes hand.” He also points out that Eveleen Myers later described her husband attending a séance with a certain “C. Williams” about this same time. Gauld explains how “a big, hairy hand came down from the ceiling. Myers seized it in both of his; it diminished in size until it resembled a baby’s hand, and finally melted in his grasp.”58
The second event happened on May 9, 1874, when the Spiritualist preacher William Stainton Moses showed his notebooks to Myers and his close colleague Edmund Gurney. Myers was extremely impressed with both the medium and the notebooks. Soon he was encouraging his friends to start up an informal study group around such phenomena. A few years later, William Barrett conceived the idea of gathering together a group of scientists, scholars, mediums, and Spiritualists in order to pursue experiments on psychical phenomena together. On January 6, 1882, he called the first meeting, at 38 Great Rusell Street in London. The group met again on February 20, this time officially forming the Society for Psychical Research.
Sidgwick was elected president. Six working committees were formed: on thought-reading, Mesmerism, the magnetic researches of Karl von Reichenbach (who, in 1845, had published an influential book on a blue cosmic vital force he called “od” or the “odic force”59), apparitions and haunted houses, physical phenomena, and finally a Literary Committee, whose goal was to collect and organize all the data. As Gauld explains in some detail, the latter committee easily did the most work. In 1883 alone, the six-member committee wrote more than ten thousand letters, traveled to numerous witnesses in order to interview them, and double-checked their stories in libraries and record offices.60 Gurney and Myers did most of this work. Even before the S.P.R. was founded, Myers alone had attended 367 séances by his own count.61 Gurney was known to write up to fifty or sixty letters a day. He became honorable secretary in 1883 at the age of thirty-six, a post that he held until his death at the age of forty-one, in June of 1888, by an accidental overdose of chloroform.62
The society’s Proceedings—for which major figures like James, Freud, Jung, Theodore Flournoy, and William McDougall all wrote—began publication in 1882. Its Journal began issues from February of 1884. That same year, Barrett traveled to the U.S., where he helped form an American branch of the society in January of 1885. William James, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, and Richard Hodgson, a student of Sidgwick’s who had come over from England to help, would come to play the major roles on this side of the Atlantic. Myers and James would become close friends.
Those are the institutional and personnel facts. The society’s research methods are worth commenting on as well. In a fascinating move, the society members decided that it made the most sense not to go to a far away country where such beliefs and experiences were allegedly still common, but to stay at home and anthropologize their own English countryside and cities. They worked with the Enlightenment principle of a shared humanity or psychic substratum and a subsequent conviction that, if these experiences were possible in the past or in other cultures, they must be possible in the present in their own culture as well (HP 1:7). Accordingly, they did not get on a boat and float to Asia or Africa. They put ads in London newspapers requesting that readers send them written accounts of unusual or inexplicable events suggestive of postmortem survival. In popular parlance, they advertised for ghost stories.
And they received lots of them. Early in 1884, for example, Gurney guessed that he had written about 1,600 letters in the last two months, fifty-five that day alone.63 The first fruit of this work was the 1886 appearance of the volume Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Myers, and Frank Podmore. The book contained 702 documented cases, focusing on what they came to call “crisis apparitions,” that is, spontaneous hallucinations of a loved one who in fact dies within twelve hours on either side of the apparition. The book advances the thesis that such hallucinations are essentially telepathic messages sent from the dying agent to the visionary recipient. Myers’s Human Personality would appear seventeen years later. As is amply witnessed in both big books, the society’s methods were primarily ethnographic and empirical, not to mention epistolary. They checked their stories, required signed affidavits from witnesses, and threw out or marked as such any cases that could not be sufficiently verified. Most could not be, with the general pattern of reliable cases settling at around 5 percent of the total data collected.
In this same empirical spirit, the society also functioned as a court of professional skeptics for famous public cases. The society studied the famous founder of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, for example. It even sent one of its own, Richard Hodgson, all the way to India to examine the details of her shrine from which “miraculous” letters were said to materialize. Hodgson discovered double-sided drawers opening up into the Madame’s bedroom and obtained damning confessions from her servants. In her recent history of the S.P.R., Deborah Blum explains how “Hodgson had scarcely left the building before it mysteriously burned to the ground, turning its secrets into ashes. He’d no doubt that she had ordered the destruction of evidence.”64 The society subsequently declared Blavatsky a patent fraud and said so in its own published Proceedings of 1885. Hodgson’s dramatic debunking extended to 174 pages of text.65 One wonders, though, if Blavatsky was not more complicated and interesting than that, if she resembled Eusapia more than a simple stage magician. I wonder anyway.
In any case, Hodgson would become famous among his colleagues for such unf
linching and exhaustive demolishings. And so Gurney could write to James about their mutual friend with these words: “His qualities are absolutely invaluable; & psychical research ought to insure his life for about a million pounds. . . . He combines the powers of a first-rate detective with a perfect readiness to believe in astrology. (Don’t quote this, as it might be misunderstood. I should pity the astrologer whose horoscopes he took to tackling.)”66 Not everyone, of course, was happy about such radical suspicions. The society, for example, suffered a very early and very serious split when the Spiritualist camp among them, including Stainton Moses, took great offense at the way the researchers were treating Spiritualism, that is, critically. The Spiritualists left in protest, leaving the society more or less under the control of what Gauld has called “the Sidgwick group,” that is, Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, Hodgson, and Podmore.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 8