Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  But if ‘Phinuit’, ‘Feda’, ‘Uvani’ and the rest are simply personality fragments of the medium, how is it possible to take them seriously? The clue may lie in the case of Louis Vivé, whose alter-ego was also clearly his ‘right-brain self’. We have seen that the right brain is basically what Thomson Jay Hudson meant by the ‘subjective mind’, and what Myers meant by the ‘subliminal mind’. If they are correct, the right brain is the source of psychic powers, or at least a kind of receiver and amplifier. Under hypnosis, the left brain is put to sleep, and the right is able to exercise these powers without the unnerving critical scrutiny of the left. Wallace and Barrett became interested in the paranormal because they observed hypnotised subjects who could share their own sensations — that is, whose right brains could telepathically pick up their feelings. If this theory is correct, then ‘Feda’ and the rest were pure right-brain entities who may have been able to ‘pick up’ messages from ‘spirits’.

  This could also explain their failures. After ‘Phinuit’, Mrs Piper was controlled by a whole group of spirits who claimed to be the same ones who had dictated to Stainton Moses. But when asked about their names — which they had secretly communicated to Stainton Moses — they gave the wrong answers. One psychologist — Stanley Hall — invented a niece called Bessie Beals and asked Mrs Leonard’s ‘control’ to get in touch with her. The ‘control’ obliged, and the fictitious Bessie Beals passed on all kinds of messages. The right brain — or subjective mind — is enormously suggestible; it can conjure up a ‘spirit’ as easily as a hypnotised person can conjure up an illusion that someone is sitting in an empty chair. The fact that ‘Phinuit’ was able to give so much accurate information about George Pellew, including facts unknown to the ‘sitters’, argues strongly that he was a real ‘spirit’, making use of Mrs Piper’s right brain as a telephone line.

  We have not yet finished with Myers. In fact, we might say that the part played by Myers after his death — or by someone who called himself Myers — was more important than the part he played during his life.

  Myers had often remarked that one of the few ways for ‘communicators’ to prove beyond all doubt that they were spirits of the dead would be to give separate bits of a message to several mediums, so they only made sense when fitted together. That would completely rule out telepathy, cryptomnesia or right-brain leg-pulling. If we are to believe the evidence of the celebrated series of communications known as the Cross Correspondences, this is precisely what happened.

  Myers died on 17 January 1901. A few years before his death, he had handed Oliver Lodge a message in a sealed envelope; it was to be kept sealed until some spirit purporting to be Myers should claim to repeat the message.

  Two of Myers’s closest friends at Cambridge were Dr Arthur Verrall, a classical scholar, and his wife Margaret, a lecturer in classics at Newnham College. After Myers’s death, Margaret Verrall decided to try automatic writing, to see if she could establish contact with Myers. She was a rationalist and a sceptic, but she thought it worth a try. Her hand was soon scribbling its way across the page, but the messages seemed muddled and fragmentary. Then one day there came a message in rather poor Latin, signed ‘Myers’. From then on, the messages flowed more freely. And one of them contained the statement: ‘Myers’s sealed envelope left with Lodge … It has in it the words from the Symposium about love bridging the chasm.’ The message was hastily conveyed to Lodge, who opened the envelope. To his disappointment, it contained nothing about Plato. It said: ‘If I can revisit any earthly scene, I should choose the Valley in the grounds of Hallsteads, Cumberland.’ Then someone recalled that Myers had referred to the Symposium — Plato’s dialogue about love — in a privately printed book called Fragments of an Inner Life. It had been written as a memorial to Annie Marshall, wife of Myers’s cousin Walter, with whom Myers had been in love. Annie had committed suicide by drowning herself in Ullswater, and had lived in Hallsteads, Cumberland. So there was a connection between the sealed message and Plato’s Symposium.

  Soon after this, Richard Hodgson was holding a seance with Mrs Piper in Boston, and he suggested that Mrs Piper’s ‘control’ — now a spirit called Rector — should try to appear to Margaret Verrall’s daughter Helen, holding a spear. (Helen Verrall was also a gifted psychic.) ‘Rector’ misheard and asked: ‘Why a sphere?’ Hodgson corrected him, and ‘Rector’ agreed to try the experiment for the next week. Three days later, Margaret Verrall received a message that included the Greek word ‘sphairos’ (sphere) and the Latin Volatile ferrum’ (flying iron) Virgil’s description of a spear. Next time Hodgson sat with Mrs Piper, ‘Rector’ said he had carried out the suggestion, and showed Mrs Verrall a ‘sphear’.

  Before we go any further, it must be admitted that most of the ‘evidence’ of the Cross Correspondences is just as infuriatingly vague and ambiguous as this. It has never been published complete, and if it was, it would occupy several large volumes. It is undoubtedly the most convincing evidence of ‘survival’ ever obtained by mediums, and also the most boring. A sceptic might well ask why, if Myers wanted to prove he was still alive, he could not have told Mrs Verrall that his sealed message referred to Hallsteads in Cumberland, instead of talking misleadingly about Plato’s Symposium, and why, if he wanted to establish a connection between Mrs Piper and Margaret Varrall, he did not write in English: ‘Hodgson asked me to show you a spear.’ One possible answer may lie in a statement made by ‘Myers’ in one of the scripts:

  The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulties of sending a message — is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass which blurs sight and deadens sounds — dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary.

  Stainton Moses had also been told that the spirits who wrote out messages were a kind of secretary or amanuensis:

  The intelligences who are able to [practise] … direct writing … are few. Most frequently the actual writing is done by one who is accustomed to manifest in that way, and who acts … as the amanuensis of the spirits who wish to communicate. In many cases several spirits are concerned …

  In a moment of exasperation, William James suggested another explanation for the vagaries of the ‘spirits’:

  I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that, although ghosts and clairvoyances and raps and messages from spirits … can never be fully explained away, they can also never be susceptible of full corroboration.

  Or, to put it another way, it looks as if the ‘spirits’ have been ordered to provide just enough evidence to convince those who are willing to be convinced, but never enough to win over the sceptics. This notion — which we might call James’s Law — must have crossed the mind of everybody who has taken an interest in the paranormal. The evidence is abundant and plentiful, but it always leaves room for doubt.

  Having said that, it must be admitted that some of the evidence of the Cross Correspondences is very convincing indeed. At an early stage, Mrs Verrall received a sentence: ‘Record the bits, and when fitted together they will make the whole.’ Soon after this, Rudyard Kipling’s sister, Alice Fleming (who lived in India), decided to try automatic writing, and quickly received a message which read: ‘My Dear Mrs Verrall [it sounds as though Myers had got his ‘secretaries’ mixed up] I am very anxious to speak to some of the old friends — Miss J — and to A W. This referred to Alice Johnson, Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, and to Arthur W. Verrall, Mrs Verrall’s husband. The message then went on to give a description of Arthur Verrall, and ended the message: ‘Send this to Mrs Verrall’s, 5, Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge.’ This was Mrs Verrall’s correct address, but Alice Fleming had no way of knowing this. She knew Mrs Verrall’s name — having read Myers’s Human Personality — but nothing else; she had never been in Cambridge. Mrs Fleming duly contacted Margaret Verrall at 5 Selwyn Gar
dens, and became another in the group of mediums who took down the Cross Correspondences. (She called herself Mrs Holland, because her family disapproved of psychical research.) Most of Alice Fleming’s early messages were signed ‘F’ — a signature Myers frequently used.

  On another occasion, Alice Fleming received a detailed description of a room. It was later recognised as a very exact description of Margaret Verrall’s sitting room. There was only one inaccuracy; the description said there was a bust in the corner. When Mrs Verrall mentioned this to a friend, the friend said: ‘But surely you have got a bust in the corner of your room?’ Mrs Verrall had some kind of filter, which looked — in the dark corner — very much like a bust on a pedestal.

  Later, other ‘communicators’ joined in the game, and claimed to be Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. But the conundrums remained incredibly complicated. One of Mrs Piper’s ‘sitters’ asked ‘Myers’ if he would indicate attempts to transmit Cross Correspondences by drawing a triangle enclosed in a circle. A week later, Margaret Verrall received a message which ended with a triangle inside a circle, as well as a triangle in a semicircle. Two months later, ‘Myers’ spoke through Mrs Piper and stated that he had given Mrs Verrall a circle and tried to draw a triangle, but ‘it did not appear’. Here we seem to have the typical muddle caused by sheets of frosted glass and obtuse secretaries.

  Even this simple case has more complications. Just after the suggestion that ‘Myers’ should use a triangle in a circle, Mrs Verrall produced a script that began: ‘… an anagram would be better. Tell him that — rats, star, tars and so on … or again tears, stare.’ Five days later, Mrs Verrall’s script began with an anagram: Aster (Latin for star) and teras (Greek for wonder). It also talked about hope, and quoted Browning. Two weeks later, Mrs Piper’s script said: ‘I referred also to Browning again. I referred to Hope and Browning … I also said star.’ A week after this, Helen Verrall (the daughter) received a script that began with a drawing of a star, and included a reference to Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin. But most readers might be forgiven for feeling that such complicated puzzles defeat their own purpose.

  In 1908, another amateur medium joined the group. She was Winifred Coombe-Tennant, who was related to Myers by marriage (Myers’s wife was the sister of Mrs Coombe-Tennant’s husband). She began receiving messages signed by Myers and Gurney. Then, in 1909, the script explained that Myers and Gurney were trying a new experiment — to make the words enter Mrs Coombe-Tennant’s mind spontaneously. Soon she was not only ‘picking up’ words that floated into her mind, but receiving clear impressions of the personalities who were sending them; she could sense whether it was Myers or Gurney immediately. The conversations were telepathic; on the first occasion, Myers’s voice — inside her head — asked ‘Can you hear what I am saying?’, and she replied mentally ‘Yes.’ The written scripts continued, and often included words that she had ‘heard’. Later, ‘Myers’ asked her to bring Sir Oliver Lodge along to her automatic writing sessions. Mrs Coombe-Tennant disliked the idea, but finally gave way. Then Gurney asked if G. W. Balfour could also come along — he had been a friend of Gurney’s, and knew a great deal about philosophy. The result was often tiresome for Mrs Coombe-Tennant. She had to sit there, acting as ‘secretary’ in philosophical discussions that she did not understand. After Balfour had given a lecture at Cambridge, ‘Sidgwick’ started a discussion with him about the mind-body relationship, epiphenomenalism and interactionism. Although Mrs Coombe-Tennant (or, as she preferred to be known, Mrs Willett) was intelligent, she had no idea of what they were talking about, and at one point, as ‘Sidgwick’ tried to put words into her mind, she lost her temper and exploded: ‘I can’t think why people talk about such stupid things!’ Her irritation is far more convincing than any amount of ‘corroboration’.

  Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willett scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for ‘life after death’. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney and Sidgwick went on communicating after death. The problem remains: why did they not adopt some straightforward suggestion — like the idea of using a triangle in a circle — that would make them far more simple — and therefore more convincing to sceptics? The answer — if we can accept James’s Law — is that they were not out to make wholesale conversions. Which is, of course, just the kind of answer that will make the sceptics shrug contemptuously …

  ‘Myers’ was nothing if not persistent. In November 1924, an Irish medium, Geraldine Cummins, was invited to tea with a retired captain and his wife; her friend Miss E. B. Gibbes was also invited along. Geraldine Cummins, daughter of Professor Ashley Cummins, had tried automatic writing for the first time a year before, and found that she was a natural medium. The captain and his wife were hoping to contact friends through the ‘ouija board’*, a glass on a smooth surface, surrounded by the letters of the alphabet; when fingers of the sitters are laid lightly on top of the glass, it may move from letter to letter, spelling out words. On this occasion, the board quickly spelled out the name ‘Frederick Myers’ and asked: ‘Do you know my friends?’ Asked which friends, he replied Barrett and Balfour. He then explained that he wanted to establish a ‘cross correspondence’. The captain and his wife were rather disappointed to have Myers communicating instead of their own friends, so the session came to an end. But ‘Myers’ continued to communicate, and a week later announced his presence at another of Miss Cummins’s automatic writing sessions. Asked about the problems of communication, he explained that their method was to ‘impress’ the ‘inner mind’ of the medium with the message, and that the inner mind would then send it on to the brain. ‘The brain is a mere merchanism. The inner mind is like soft wax, it receives our thoughts … but it must produce the words that clothe it. That is what makes cross-correspondence so very difficult.’ This certainly seems to explain why the Cross Correspondences often sound so muddled.

  Myers soon announced an interesting project — to try to communicate through Mrs Leonard’s ‘control’ ‘Feda’ immediately after communicating through Geraldine Cummins. He suggested that the subject of the message should be telepathy and the views of his friend Lord Balfour. Miss Gibbes pointed out that this was not a good idea, because she had recently been at a public meeting at which Balfour had spoken about telepathy, and it had been reported in the press. So it could be objected that the medium was already thinking about the subject. ‘Myers’ agreed, and said that in that case, he would talk about the book he had intended to write before his death — a book expressing his conviction that life after death had been proved beyond all doubt.

  The next day, Miss Gibbes hurried along to see Mrs Osborne Leonard, making quite sure she dropped no hint about her purpose in coming. ‘Feda’, Mrs Leonard’s ‘control’, said that there were several spirits hanging around waiting to communicate. Miss Gibbes said she had somebody special in mind — an important man. At this, ‘Feda’ announced that an elderly man was present. Trying to ‘pick up’ his name, she could only get the impression of a capital M. The man, she said, was showing her poetry, which was one of his main interests — ‘he seems to have been rather clever in understanding old poets — Virgil particularly’. She then added the important comment: ‘He is keeping an appointment with you.’ Soon after this, she announced the man’s Christian name: ‘Fred — I keep getting Fred.’ (Myers was known to his friends as Fred.) And she added that Miss Gibbes had been in touch with Fred on the previous day.

  The next time ‘Myers’ appeared at a session with Geraldine Cummins, he apologised for not coming over very clearly, and explained that he had had problems with ‘Feda’, who was too ‘lively’ (he obviously meant scatterbrained) and that there were too many other thoughts buzzing around the room at the time. When Miss Gibbes said she thought he had ‘come over’ very well, ‘Myers’ replied; ‘Good, you surprise me.’ All the same, he said, he felt the session had be
en a failure. What he had wanted to get across was that he had intended to write a book declaring his total belief in life after death. But ‘Feda’ had simply not picked up what he was trying to say. Miss Gibbes’s feeling was that in spite of this, the attempt to communicate through two mediums on two different days had been extremely successful. It is difficult not to agree with her. These sessions are also important because they give us a clear idea of the infuriating problems apparently faced by ‘spirits’ in trying to make contact with the living — rather like someone trying to make himself heard over a very bad telephone line, with continual interruptions from ‘crossed lines’.

  The books that grew out of these communications — The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality — will strike some readers as fascinating, and some as utterly tiresome rubbish. The following is a typical sentence:

  The purpose of existence may be summed up in a phrase — the evolution of mind in matter that varies in degree and kind — so that the mind develops through manifestation, and in an ever-expanding universe ever increases in power and gains thereby the true conception of reality.

  It sounds the kind of meaningless waffle churned out by fake messiahs. But on closer examination, it not only makes sense, but very good sense. This notion that mind is attempting to ‘insert’ itself into matter is common to all forms of evolutionary vitalism, from Hegel to Shaw. It goes on to state that matter varies in degrees and kind — implying that it may be either solid or beyond the range of our senses. (Elsewhere, ‘Myers’ states that it is all a question of rates of vibration — a view that has been made commonplace by modern physics.) The mind develops through this process of inserting itself into matter, and slowly develops power and a deeper sense of reality. When we look at it again, we can see that the original impression of vagueness is due to the lack of punctuation, which gives it an air of ambiguity. According to ‘Myers’, the ‘spirit’ who communicates has to use the medium’s own intellectual apparatus (and, presumably, her vocabulary). And this, presumably, is why so much ‘spirit communication’ gives an impression of feeble-mindedness. (‘Myers’ is the first to admit that many ‘spirits’ are feeble-minded.)