by Colin Wilson
In fact, these words are not by Rudolf Steiner; they are from the ‘script’ written by ‘Myers’, and published by Geraldine Cummins as The Road to Immortality. It emphasises Steiner’s repeated assertion that it is a mistake to take the ‘facts’ too literally. To do so is to leave out of account a ‘fifth dimension’ that confers meaning on them.
*‘Descriptive Sketches of the Spiritual World’, lectures given at Bergen on 10 and 11 October 1913.
*Under the name Whately Smith.
*See my Mysteries, Part 1, Chapter 1.
*American Society for Psychical Research, 1966.
*University of Virginia Press, 1975–80.
*Widler Penfield, Mysteries of the Mind, 1975, Chapter 6.
*In Strange Powers, 1973.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Decline and Rebirth
The sufferings of the First World War had the effect of making thousands of converts to spiritualism — and, paradoxically, of convincing more people than ever before that it was nonsense. The man who must bear a large part of the responsibility for these contrary effects was Sir Oliver Lodge.
In November 1916, Lodge’s Raymond, or Life and Death was published, and caused an immediate sensation — although not quite of the kind Lodge had hoped for. Ever since 1909, when Lodge had produced a book called The Survival of Man — admitting his belief in life after death — scientists had felt that he had ‘let down the side’. But at least in that book he had discussed the experimental evidence and maintained a rigorous scientific detachment. But to devote a four-hundred-page book to arguing that his son had come back from the dead looked like emotional self-indulgence. Raymond made an easy target for hostile reviewers — particularly a passage in which Raymond explained that the ‘other side’ is not all that different from our earth. Most people, he said, wore white robes, although many would have preferred to wear a suit. They could also eat if they wanted to, or even have a cigar or a whisky and soda. ‘There are laboratories over here and they manufacture all sorts of things in them.’ It sounded too silly for words. One psychologist called Charles Mercier was quick off the mark with a thoroughly hostile book called Spiritualism and Sir Oliver Lodge. But most scientists felt simply that Lodge had become a little cracked, and that the kindest thing would be to ignore him.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle encountered the same hostility in 1918 when he confessed his conversion to Spiritualism in a book called The New Revelation. During the war, the Doyles had looked after an ailing young woman called Lily Loder-Symonds, who amused herself in her sickbed by practising automatic writing. The Doyles were convinced that it was simply her subconscious mind speaking. Then one day there came a message: ‘It is terrible. Terrible. And will have a great influence on the war.’ On that day, a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania and over a thousand passengers were drowned, many of them American. The sinking prepared the way for America’s entry into the war. From then on, the Doyles took the automatic writing more seriously. In April 1915, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law Malcolm Leckie died at Mons. One day, as Doyle was sitting by Lily Loder-Symonds’s bedside, watching her produce automatic writing, he was startled to recognise Malcolm Leckie’s handwriting. Doyle began to ask questions, and ‘Leckie’ replied. Doyle asked him a particularly difficult question — about a private conversation they had had before the war. The reply specified precisely what he and Leckie had discussed. Yet Doyle had mentioned it to no one else — not even his wife. From then on, he had no doubt of the reality of life after death.
His conversion caused even more embarrassment than that of Sir Oliver Lodge. Distinguished friends, such as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and King George V, felt that he was displaying a childish credulity. Many people asked mockingly: ‘What would Sherlock Holmes have said?’ In fact, when the final volume of Sherlock Holmes stories — The Case Book — appeared in 1927, it received an unprecedentedly cold reception; the middle-class public felt that its idol had revealed feet of clay. The last novel about the great Professor Challenger — The Land of Mist — in which Challenger is converted to Spiritualism — was received with widespread derision. Doyle’s biographer states that Doyle’s support of Spiritualism prevented him from receiving a peerage.*
One of the saddest stories of anti-spiritualist prejudice concerns an architect called Frederick Bligh Bond. In 1907, the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey were bought by the nation, and Bligh Bond was appointed to take charge of the excavations. Bond was a devotee of Catherine Crowe’s Night Side of Nature, and decided that his task would be greatly simplified if he could contact some of the long-dead monks of the abbey and ask them where to dig. A friend named John Allen Bartlett was able to produce automatic writing. In November 1907, Bond and Bartlett sat on either side of a table, with Bartlett holding a pencil and Bond’s hand resting very lightly on top of it. Bond asked questions, and Bartlett’s hand wrote out the answers. When Bond asked where a missing chapel had been situated, Bartlett’s hand drew a plan of the abbey with the chapel on it. The ‘communicator’ called himself ‘Gulielmus Monachus’ — William the Monk. And when Bond’s team dug in the position indicated, they found the chapel. His employers — the Church of England — were delighted. They continued to be delighted as Bond made find after find, including another chapel. Bond took care to tell no one that most of his information came from William the Monk and various other communicators who called themselves ‘the Watchers’. Finally, in 1917, he decided that his success had justified itself, and told the whole story in a book called Gate of Remembrance. The Church was horrified, and Bond found himself out of a job. He was not even allowed within the precincts of the abbey, and the abbey book shop was ordered not to sell his guide book to Glastonbury.
There is an ironical footnote to this story. In 1936, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, decided that it was time for the Church of England to make up its mind about Spiritualism. So he appointed a commission to look into it, and to decide whether the doctrines of Spiritualism were consistent with Christianity. The commission took three years to report. Their conclusion was that not only was Spiritualism not opposed to Christianity — after all, Christians believe in a life after death — but that the evidence for ‘survival’ was extremely powerful. The archbishop was apparently so embarrassed by these conclusions that he dropped the report into a drawer, where it lay forgotten for more than thirty years; it was finally published in the mid-1970s.
We have already observed this phenomenon: the feeling that there is something morbid and degenerate about a preoccupation with life after death. It is a perfectly valid reaction. Healthy people feel naturally that we should turn our attention to the fascinating problems of life and the physical universe rather than to death. Yet we can also see that such criticism is totally irrelevant where Lodge and Doyle were concerned. Doyle would have been an idiot not to be impressed when the automatic writing told him something that was known to no other living person. Lodge would have been a very poor scientist if he had failed to recognise that the Raymond group photograph* constitued strong prima facie evidence that his son had survived death. It is important to remember that Lodge and Doyle had been members of the Society for Psychical Research for more than two decades before they finally became convinced of ‘survival’; the same applied to James Hyslop and Sir William Barrett. Crookes himself only came to accept ‘survival’ in 1917, after a seance at which he became convinced that his dead wife was speaking to him. These men were convinced by evidence, not by wishful thinking.
This in itself tells us why spiritualism failed to convince the masses. If it took twenty years to overcome the doubts of men who were interested in the problem, it would obviously take centuries to convince those who weren’t.
It must also be admitted that Raymond Lodge’s remarks about cigars and whisky and soda — not to mention white robes — probably did more harm to spiritualism than the exposure of a dozen fake mediums. And, in various forms, the problem has continued to be a bugbear ever since. T
here is a slight element of absurdity in the whole notion of life after death — a touch of the preposterous that was exploited in H. G. Wells’s ‘Inexperienced Ghost’ and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. And most of the books about life after death fail to avoid this touch of absurdity. In 1928, the Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas produced his book Life Beyond Death With Evidence, an impressive account of his ‘contacts’ with his deceased father and sister through mediums. But when his father begins to describe the world he lives in, there is an effect of bathos:
We have roads, but the surface is unlike the stoned or macadamised roads of England … The appearance is something like natural soil, but without mud or anything disagreeable …
We have London, but it is not your London … There is some likeness in the parks and beautiful buildings, but with us they are all finer … I have seen no snakes or lions here … We have horses, dogs and cats but very few monkeys …
After all this, it is difficult to feel the appropriate emotion when the father and sister describe an interview with Jesus, who, predictably, radiates ‘a great majesty, together with great sweetness and humility’.
In the 1930s, a medium named Jane Sherwood began to practise automatic writing, and received lengthy Communications from a certain ‘G. F. Scott’ describing the life beyond; these were published as The Psychic Bridge and The Country Beyond. ‘Scott’ later revealed his true identity — as T. E. Lawrence — and dictated another book about his own personal experiences of life after death. A spirit called Mitchell, who had taken upon himself the role of Lawrence’s mentor, tells Lawrence that he has lived a monk-like existence, and that he ought to go and experiment with all the experiences he has missed on earth. For example, women. ‘Go on a proper spree.’ Lawrence is taken on a kind of brothel tour. ‘These girls are not prostitutes … they are women who have missed sexual experiences during their earth life and need to work out this lack before they can progress …’ And Lawrence, who on earth had shown homosexual tendencies and a taste for being flogged, bursts into lyrical prose: ‘We two have wandered happily in an enchanted land exploring the delights of an intimate companionship crowned by the magic of union …’*
If it were obvious that Jane Sherwood and Drayton Thomas had been deceived — either by their own unconscious minds or by spirits with a penchant for leg-pulling — these passages would not be such an embarrassment. But Jane Sherwood’s The Country Beyond has been described by Raynor C. Johnson — a leading authority on mysticism — as ‘one of the best attempts to convey to us valid impressions of the conditions we shall all have to meet some day when we have finished with our physical bodies’. And Drayton Thomas’s book is one of the most impressive arguments for ‘survival’ ever published; his ‘father’ was able to accurately forecast items he would find in the newspapers the following day — items which (as enquiry revealed) had not even been set up in print at the time.
It seems that these awkward paradoxes are inherent in the nature of spiritualism. Students of the paranormal find them no more off-putting than poetry lovers find Wordsworth’s occasional descents into bathos. They are simply another aspect of ‘James’s Law’. But for many potential converts between the wars, they formed an insuperable barrier to belief. Laboratories and brothels in the sky could simply not be taken seriously.
There were several other causes for the decline of spiritualism in the 1920s and 1930s. The days of the great mediums — such as Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Leonore Piper — seemed to be at an end. There were still many remarkable mediums — Mrs Leonard, the Schneider brothers, Helen Duncan — but their achievements were not so spectacular. In the cynical and disillusioned frame of mind engendered by the Great War, exposures and denunciations received far more publicity than successful experiments with mediums. The magician Harry Houdini made a career from attacking spiritualism in the 1920s; his book A Magician Among the Spirits denounced mediums as ‘human vultures’. When investigating the American medium Margery Crandon, there is evidence that Houdini cheated by hiding a ruler in a specially designed cabinet, so she could be accused of using it to ring a bell. (Houdini’s assistant later admitted that he had hidden the ruler in the cabinet on Houdini’s orders, and added: ‘There’s one thing you’ve got to remember about Mr ‘Oudini — for ‘im the truth was bloody well what he wanted it to be.’) In fact, even the serious investigators often seemed to be on the side of the sceptics. After a series of experiments with the Austrian medium Rudi Schneider, Harry Price denounced him in a Sunday newspaper instead of simply making an unfavourable report to the Society for Psychical Research. (It became clear later that his motive was pique because Schneider had agreed to work with some rival investigators.) And when Helen Duncan was charged with cheating and fined ten pounds, Price wrote a book attacking her. In due course, Price himself would be denounced for trickery in his most famous investigation — the haunting of Borley Rectory …
In the Society for Psychical Research, the sceptics became known as the High ’n Dries. In the Society’s early days, Frank Podmore had been its only High ’n Dry. By the late 1920s, some of the Society’s most influential members, including its Research Officer E. J. Dingwall and its librarian Theodore Besterman, were High ’n Dries. The ‘wets’ — or even the faintly damps — hardly stood a chance. Dingwall went to America to investigate Margery Crandon, and was apparently thoroughly satisfied with her genuineness — large quantities of ectoplasm were extruded from somewhere between her thighs, and reached out to touch Dingwall in the form of a hand — but when he came to write up his investigations six months later, he had changed his mind, and made it clear he thought she was a fraud. The result of such controversies was that the Society was split by internal dissensions, and ceased to perform the task it was founded to carry out. One result was that when reports of an amazing Brazilian medium, Carlos Mirabelli, who floated up into the air, dematerialised and reappeared in another room, and caused dead people to materialise in broad daylight, reached the Society in 1927, it was in too much disarray to send a competent investigator, and Mirabelli’s remarkable phenomena were never confirmed. The days when the Society could despatch a man like Richard Hodgson to the other side of the world at a few weeks’ notice were long past.
There was one major breakthrough in psychical research — or, as it now came to be called, paranormal investigation — in the 1930s. A gambler walked into the office of Dr Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University in 1934 and told Rhine he was convinced he could influence the fall of the dice. As the two crouched on the floor, it dawned on Rhine that this might be a method for proving psychokinesis — ‘mind over matter’ — in the laboratory. Eighteen series of statistical tests were conducted over eight years, and they showed one fascinating result: that when people were ‘fresh’, they could influence the fall of the die; as they went on and became tired and bored, they got worse at it. Rhine’s methods may have been dull compared to the experiments of Crookes with Dunglas Home or Richet with Eusapia Palladino, but he effectively proved the paranormal powers of the human mind in the laboratory.
This was undoubtedly an enormous step forward; it demonstrated the correctness of that central argument of Catherine Crowe and Frederick Myers: that the powers of the human mind are greater than we suppose. But it came no closer to answering the question that the Society for Psychical Research was founded to investigate: is there life after death? Then, in the late 1930s, another series of statistical experiments brought this one stage nearer.
Dr Samuel George Soal was a mathematician at the University of London, and he was unimpressed by Rhine’s results. In 1936, a well-known photographer named Basil Shackleton walked into Soal’s office and announced: ‘I haven’t come to be tested, but to demonstrate telepathy.’ He could, he claimed, guess his way through a whole pack of playing cards and get most of them right. Soal tested him, but was disappointed; Shackleton’s first score was ten out of twenty-five, but after that, he got steadily worse; on the seventh test he only got three out of t
wenty-five. Shackleton said he needed a drink to get his powers working; but even after a drink, his score was still disappointingly low.
In 1939, a conversation with another researcher, Whately Carington, gave Soal a new idea. Carington had been involved in a series of ‘picture guessing’ experiments, and he had noticed a curious phenomenon: some of his subjects were guessing the next picture. Soal went back and looked at some of his own results. First of all, he looked at the results produced by a London housewife named Gloria Stewart, and found that she had frequently guessed the next card. Soal went on to look through results produced by other subjects, but found nothing very interesting. Then, by chance, he came upon Basil Shackleton’s results. Here the ‘displacement’ score was even more striking than in the case of Gloria Stewart; again and again, Shackleton guessed either the previous card or the next card, instead of the one Soal was asking him to concentrate on. Soal asked Shackleton to take part in another series of experiments. They went on for two years, and demonstrated beyond all doubt that Shackleton was frequently able to guess the next card — a card that Soal himself had not yet seen. So this was not telepathy; it was precognition: the faculty apparently demonstrated by Drayton Thomas’s father when he was able to predict what would be in the newspapers the next day.
It is true, of course, that precognition does not ‘prove’ life after death. But if it really exists, it proves there is something fundamentally wrong with our commonsense, materialistic view of the universe. We can find room for telepathy and psychokinesis in the scientific picture of reality. But the future has not yet taken place; consequently, there is no possible ‘scientific’ way in which it can be known. To explain precognition, we need to take a leap into some completely new type of explanation: for example, some fourth or fifth dimension, of the kind suggested by Whately Carington in A Theory of the Mechanism of Survival. When Soal demonstrated precognition, he had taken the most important step towards ‘proving’ life after death since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research.