10 - Mediumship And The Survival Question

During November and December of 1908, three distinguished members of the Society for Psychical Research, chaperoned by their secretary, sequestered themselves in the Hotel Victoria in Naples, Italy, with Eusapia Palladino, a well-known medium.

One of the investigators, Mr. Everard Feilding, who had previously stated that he did not believe in paranormal phenomena of any kind, later wrote of the sittings in a report for the Proceedings of the S.P.R.

According to Feilding, the phenomena of Eusapia Palladino usually began with the levitation of the table around which they sat. "Finally," wrote Feilding, "it would leave the ground entirely and rise to a height of a foot or two rapidly, remain there an appreciable time and then come down."

The most extreme precautions on the part of the investigators would not hinder the medium's powers of levitation in the slightest. She had no hooks on her person or any sort of mechanical device. If the men would press on the table, it would bob up again, as though suspended on some highly elastic material.

"We were constantly touched on the arm, shoulder or head by something which we could not see," Feilding reported. When they were absolutely certain that Eusapia's hands were secured on the table in front of her, the investigators would be grasped "by hands, living hands with fingers and nails."

Once one of these materialized hands seized one of the investigators and nearly tossed him from his chair. A tea table in a corner of the room rose to shoulder height and set itself in the middle of the séance table.

Tambourines jumped on the researchers' laps; bells lifted themselves from the table and began to ring loudly.

All of these manifestations, and an almost countless number of other phenomena, were accomplished in light adequate enough for the investigators' secretary to take shorthand notes on each astonishing moment with the incredible Eusapia Palladino.

How did the poorly educated woman from Naples accomplish these dramatic manifestations? Was she truly in contact with the spirits of the deceased, or had she learned to harness the energy of an unknown level of the transcendent self? If Eusapia was indeed calling upon the shades of departed and recognizable personalities, if a host of other sincere and honest mediums are truly able to contact the dead, then the survival question has been answered.

But why are we so reluctant to accept the "proofs" of the seance parlor? Is it because we have learned that the human mind is capable of projecting a segment of its psyche unhampered by time and space? Or that one level of the psyche may be able to give "birth" to new personalities? Or that another level of the subconscious may telepathically gain knowledge of the departed from a sitter's mind while yet another level dramatizes that knowledge into an exact imitation of the departed's voice and appearance? It is one of the great paradoxes of "psi" research that the more we have learned about the range and power of the mind, the less credence we tend to give "proof" garnered for the most important question of all: Does man survive death?

Just how important and valuable are the proofs offered us from the séance rooms?

A few years ago, a young editor of a spiritualistic publication wished to present evidence of the spiritist credo that would convince even the most skeptical of the

validity of mediumistic phenomena. The young man resolved to photograph several of the most accomplished mediums at work as they met in one of their large summer camps for an annual convention of spiritists. Not wishing to disturb the mediums as they went into trance and produced their ectoplasmic materializations, the journalist snapped his photographs with infra-red flash and special film.

When the photographs were developed, the young editor was shocked to see that the very mediums whose work he had long accepted as genuine were producing their manifestations of the departed by means of trickery. Roll after roll of the film indicated the same disconcerting fact: the mediums at this particular spiritualist camp were all frauds. The editor printed the photographs, and after sweeping up the scattered fragments of his shattered ideal, called for a reform movement in Spiritualism.

No area of human relationships is so open to cruel deceptions as is that of purporting to contact deceased loved ones in return for substantial monetary reward. No basic need of the human condition attracts so many charlatans and frauds as does that particular desire to retain a permanent relationship with a loved one. Yet, to maintain that all mediums are fraudulent in their practice would be to employ the same perverse illogic that maintains that all tellers abscond with bank funds, all policemen accept bribes, all medical doctors are quacks, and all lawyers are ambulance-chasers. From pulpit to peddler, each walk of life has a few bad apples in its barrel. I have interviewed and sat with mediums who were sincere, conscientious, completely frank and honest, and who produced information and knowledge which could not have been gained by any but paranormal means.

Most mediums feel that they can get along without parapsychologists very well. The successful medium does not need to prove anything to his followers - they already believe in his abilities. The tests of the "psi" researcher are tedious and set up to be administered by objective and unemotional personnel. The laboratory certainly does not offer the mood and atmosphere to be found in the séance parlor, and the bright lights are not as conducive to the trance state as is the dimly lighted room. Such laboratory controls are, of course, necessary to unmask the charlatan, but, because mediumistic powers cannot always be turned on and off like an electric light some otherwise sincere mediums have been caught in crude attempts at trickery, because they felt such a desperate need to "prove" their powers.

Eusapia Palladino was one of those who would resort to clumsy tricks in an effort to please the investigators when her otherwise astonishing powers would fail to respond to her will. Hereward Carrington, one of the investigators who examined her, wrote later that when Palladino produced a good séance without any chicanery (and the researchers quickly detected her every time that she did try to employ trickery) the phenomena were 100 per cent genuine. Forty years later, Carrington once again wrote that his personal conviction remained unshaken. "... in Eusapia Palladino's seances, genuine physical phenomena of an extraordinary character occurred which (if duly appreciated) would throw an entirely new light upon biology, psychology, and the whole structure of mechanistic science."

After a lifetime devoted to "psi" research, with a special emphasis on the phenomena of mediumship, Carrington concluded that "98 per cent of all such phenomena are fraudulent." But we share Carrington's excitement, when confronted by mediums such as Palladino, that we are left with an uncharted Unknown, as indicated by that researcher-resistant two per cent!

Carrington began a series of tests with another remarkable medium, Eileen J. Garrett, who went on to become a true "medium's-medium." Willing to subject herself to scientific investigation early in her career, Mrs. Garrett was tested by leading universities and scientific groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Mrs. Garrett has always been "on the fence" with regard to the phenomena she produces. This generous woman has literally offered herself to science in a sincere effort to learn more about her "spirits" and to determine whether or not they are what they claim to be. A persistent and highly qualified researcher in her own right, Mrs. Garrett is President of the Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., in New York City and editor of Tomorrow, a journal of "psi" research.

Mrs. Garrett is a trance medium, which means that her control, "Uvani," cannot speak through her lips until she has passed into unconsciousness. "Uvani" claims to be a native of Asia Minor who lived about one hundred years ago. All mediums have their spirit guides or controls, most of whom claim to be American Indians or other primitive people. When I once asked a medium why so many mediums were controlled by a "Shooting Star" or a "Redwing," I was told that the Indians maintained an essential relationship with natural forces and an undogmatic approach to the Creator, which is lacking in spirits who arrive from a more civilized era and locale.

Is this spirit guide an entity from the "other side," or is he a level of the medium's transcendent self acting the role?

On the evening of July 8, 1913, "Patience Worth," who claimed to be the spirit of a seventeenth century Englishwoman, became a "control" for Mrs. Pearl Lenore Curran, a young woman in St. Louis, Missouri. Mrs. Curran was not a practicing medium, nor did she have any interest in spiritualism, yet during a period of three years, "Patience Worth" dictated to her a stream of proverbs, lyric poetry, plays, and a number of intricately constructed novels.

Mrs. Curran's formal education had ended with the eighth grade. She seldom read, had never traveled, and was completely unfamiliar with literary people or people of a scholarly bent. At no time in her life had she ever given any indication of a latent creative gift. Yet, of one of the spirit-dictated novels, a reviewer for the New York Times wrote: "Notwithstanding the serious quality and the many pitifulnesses and tragedies of the story it tells, the book has much humor of a quaint, demure kind, a kind of humor that stands out as characteristic of all her work and her personality ... the plot is contrived with such skill, deftness, and ingenuity as many a novelist in the flesh might well envy."

In an anthology of "best" poetry for the year 1917, "Patience Worth" had five poems selected, as against three of Amy Lowell's, three of Vachel Lindsay's, and one by Edgar Lee Masters.

Was Patience Worth a spirit or a secondary personality of Mrs. Curran's? To her many questioners, investigators, and skeptics, the entity issued a poetic counter-challenge in disgust at their constant harping that she prove her existence.

A phantom? Well enough
Prove thee thyself to be.
I say, behold, here I be -
Buskins, kirtle, cap, and pettyskirts,
And much tongue.
Weel, what hast thou to prove thee?

Her point is fairly enough taken. What proof of survival will we accept?

If an honest medium were to tell us that he has contacted the spirit of a close friend or relative who has passed away, what evidence would satisfy us that the "spirit" was indeed who he claimed to be? If a discarnate voice reaches us via a long-distance telephone line, we accept the information that it is our friend calling from Alaska, because we know that he is alive and well. If, however, the same voice were to issue from the mouth of an entranced medium three years after our Alaskan friend had died, how would we determine whether or not the voice was truly that of the departed personality?

I think that we should decide to be quite cunning and ask the spirit voice questions to which only our friend would know the answer. Intimate, highly personal questions, which would require a memory shared to be properly answered. Perhaps we would deliberately give an incorrect date or name to see if our spirit would notice the error and correct us. We should certainly be on the guard for peculiar mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of thought and speech which were representative of our friend's personality. We should also test the spirit's reactions to ideas and issues about which we knew our friend had strong opinions.

If the spirit passes all of our subtly devised tests with a score of 100 per cent, do we accept this as proof of our friend's survival after death? And what if, as a bonus, the spirit has told us where he hid a certain packet of letters when he was still alive, which, upon our investigation, we find to have been correct information. Do we still maintain our doubt? Or do we, because of our study of "psi" phenomena, rather believe that some telepathic level of the medium's subconscious has penetrated a certain level of our own mind to gain past information about our friend, and that his clairvoyant powers have given us the information about the letters. As we have already observed, it is a great paradox of "psi" research that our ever-increasing knowledge of the limitlessness of Mind has made conclusive proof of survival all the more difficult to secure.

Medium Eileen Garrett, who has said that she is not one "who assumes that the gift of mediumship necessarily brings with it greater insight into the phenomena of that mediumship," authored "The Ethic of Mediumship" for the Autumn, 1960, issue of Tomorrow. Mrs. Garrett advises that the medium "will do well to withdraw herself from the ideas thrown out by the inquirer; she must regard herself as a mechanism, clear and simple, through which ideas flow." According to this accomplished medium, those with the gift of mediumship should put themselves into a "receptive mood" which will enable them to "accept the flow of events and ideas to be perceived and known."

"If the medium allows herself to be thus used, things will happen of themselves - a technique old as wisdom itself, and not contradictory to Zen. One allows the feminine or perceptive principle of the unconscious to emerge and thus one is not swamped by the demanding consciousness of the self or the inquirer. This instructive feminine element is, according to Jung, the common property of all mankind. It cannot be coerced, it must be respected and nurtured."

To Mrs. Garrett, mediumship is not a "breaking-down of the personality, but a state of wholeness." She regards the tendency of "enthusiastic sitters to regard the medium as priest or priestess" as the "major danger area in mediumistic activities."

Mrs. Garrett wisely concludes that "... Communication with the 'other world' may well become a substitute for living in this world. Understanding that this world, in which we live, has priority in this existence, is at the core of mediumship ethics."

Hereward Carrington concluded, as a result of extensive analysis of mediumship techniques, that an intelligently influenced mechanism was somehow involved in producing the physical phenomena of the seance room.

In an essay written in 1946, Carrington said: "What seemingly happens is that a form of unknown energy ... issues from the body of the medium, capable of affecting and molding matter in its immediate environment. At times this is invisible; at other times it takes forms and becomes more or less solid, when we have instances of the formation of so-called ectoplasm. It is this semi-material substance which moves matter and even shapes it into different forms."

According to Carrington's observations, this "ectoplasm" issues from various parts of the medium's body - from the fingertips, the solar plexus, and the sexual organs. "It represents a psychic force," wrote Carrington, "as yet unknown to science, but now being studied by scientific men as part and parcel of supernormal biology."

Carrington was certain that this energy had a biological basis and was dependent upon the physical body of the medium for its production - regardless of whether it was directed by the subconscious mind of the medium himself or by the mind of a discarnate personality.

The case of Laura Edmunds seems difficult to account for by offering either a theory of a suddenly developed secondary personality or any kind of conscious or unconscious mental activity. When Miss Edmunds began to speak Greek, it truly seemed as though she had been momentarily possessed by a disembodied entity.

The daughter of a judge of the New York Supreme Court, Laura Edmunds was a quiet, polite girl, who shyly served tea to the guests who dropped by the family home on Sunday afternoons.

On the Sunday that Mr. Evangedides brought a letter of introduction to Judge Edmunds, Laura became suddenly distraught. When she was introduced to the Greek, who had never met any member of the family before, she grabbed his arm and began to talk to him in his native tongue.

Mr. Evangedides turned ash white with shock, and his cup dropped from trembling fingers to shatter on the floor. Tears stung his eyes as he stared at the entranced girl in disbelief.

"She says my son is dead!" the Greek shouted. "In the voice of Botzaris, my dear friend who is dead, she tells me that my son has died!"

The man begged forgiveness and left the Edmunds home at once. Laura shook her head slowly and blinked her eyes as if awakening from a deep sleep. She had no knowledge of what she had said to Mr. Evangedides. With only a "finishing school" education, the girl had no acquaintance with any language other than her own. The next day, Mr. Evangedides notified Judge Edmunds that the terrible news had been confirmed. He was sailing home for Greece at once.

While recovering from a serious illness, Violet Parent, a simple, untutored woman, the wife of a California grocery clerk, had visions of the early mission fathers and their Indian converts. According to Mrs. Parent, the spirits told her where they had buried several crosses and caches of money. Her husband recorded the locations his wife babbled out in her delirium, and later, when she had recovered, the couple and a number of their neighbors went to the spiritually proclaimed spots and dug up several crosses.

Shortly after Mrs. Parent's death, the author, Hamlin Garland, learned of the incident. Together with Mr. Parent and a medium, Mrs. Sophia Williams, Garland unearthed an additional thousand crosses. These artifacts were located in fifty widely separated spots scattered over an area over 600 miles long by 300 miles wide. The spirits' directions were always accurate and to dig was to uncover another of the buried crosses. Each of the designated spots was in a remote, overgrown area where the soil had been undisturbed for years.

Did Mrs. Parent and, later, Mrs. Williams truly receive information concerning the crosses from the spirits of long-dead mission fathers and their Indian converts? Or, again, was it some clairvoyant faculty of mind at work? Certainly trickery seems to be completely ruled out. It is most difficult to conceive of the semi-invalid Mrs. Parent saving up enough money from her husband's meager paycheck to purchase over one thousand antique crosses, then traveling over several hundred miles of rough terrain to dig more than a thousand holes in fifty different areas so that she might claim that "spirits" had told her a secret.

What is the verdict of "psi" researchers concerning the proofs for survival of personality? For the present, the question of survival evidence must be answered by the individual's own interpretation of the knowledge that has been accumulated.

Dr. J.B. Rhine has epitomized the current thinking on survival evidence in these words: "The outcome of the scientific investigation of mediumship is best described as a draw. Hardly anyone would claim that all the investigations of seventy-five years or more have had the effect of disproving the claim that if a man shall die he shall in some manner or other be capable of 'living again.' On the other hand, no serious scientific student of the field of investigation could say that a clear, defensible, scientific confirmation of the hypothesis has been reached."