Mental mediumship: Nahm excerpt #4

Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes: All cultures had or still have their seers, healers, or shamans who communicate with the deceased. In Western cultures, mental mediums typically provide written or spoken information that is supposedly conveyed by deceased communicators. Frequently, such mediums sit around a table together with other sitters, and these communicators speak or write using the body of the mediums. Many mediums fall into trance, thus uncoupling the usual control over their body from their conscious awareness. The crucial question in mental mediumship is: Do the supposed communicators reveal veridical knowledge about the deceased, and can it be excluded that the medium learned such information via normal information channels? In this regard, the following three facets of mental mediumship are often regarded most compelling:

· Astonishing quality and quantity of accurate information conveyed by seemingly purposeful communicators via extraordinarily gifted mediums

· Drop-in-communicators

· Cross-correspondences

In the psychical research literature, several mental mediums have been regarded as extraordinarily gifted, especially Leonora Piper (1857–1950). She was investigated by numerous different researchers of high academic standing and was even observed secretly by private detectives to ascertain that she didn’t acquire her knowledge via mundane information channels. Nevertheless, the information she provided about deceased individuals who communicated through her still proved to be accurate, and she was never caught cheating.

In cases of drop-in communicators, a purportedly deceased individual who is a complete stranger to everyone present at a mediumistic sitting begins to communicate through a medium. The communicator “drops in” unexpectedly. A renowned and apparently well-documented case of this sort took place in Iceland.

The case concerned a personality called Runki. He provided sufficient information at the sittings to be identified as a person who had really lived. Runki described several details of his life and occurrences concerning his death that proved to be correct. The most bizarre detail concerned a thighbone of his: He stated it hadn’t been buried along with the rest of his corpse after his death sixty years ago. Now, he wanted it back and gave indications where it was to be found. Indeed, the laborious attempts of the sitters to find a bone matching Runki’s descriptions were finally successful, and he was satisfied.

Cross-correspondences concern a specific experimental design that involves more than one medium. They are supposed to demonstrate that the transmissions are carefully planned by self- aware entities in the afterlife realm, coordinating these experiments in a manner that would be hardly possible for the subconscious minds of the mediums and/or the sitters to achieve on their own. They are like a puzzle, as the following example shows. It involves three mediums who lived in Boston, New York, and Niagara Falls.

Around the same time in the evening of March 3, 1928, one medium wrote the letters “El.”, the second medium “C.A.”, and the third medium received the impression of “M”. When all notes were put together along with the additional information provided, it became clear that the ostensible communicator from beyond intended to communicate the word “camel” via these three mediums.

The most famous cross-correspondences were recorded on thousands of pages by members of the Society for Psychical Research from 1901 to 1932. They involved five primary mediums, among them Mrs. Piper, plus a few other mediums who played a minor role.

The investigability of mental mediumship is theoretically “high”. The mediums usually work in light and can in theory be observed and documented by investigators at will. But for many decades, extraordinarily gifted mediums, drop-in communicators, and cross-correspondences haven’t been investigated, presumably because suitable mediums and researchers were simply not available. Hence, from a contemporary perspective, the investigability of the most compelling aspects of mental mediumship is only “relatively low” (2). The same goes for its current practical repeatability, which is also “relatively low” (2). Consequently, even recent treatises about the survival question routinely discuss the same paradigmatic historical cases such as those listed above (Mrs. Piper, Runki’s leg, cross-correspondences). Nevertheless, the quantitative strength of this historical material alone is already “high” (4).

Psychical researchers of the past have provided sufficient documentation to show that, in some cases, substantial amounts of precise information can be conveyed via mediums for considerable time periods by a given communicator, and emotional and other behavioral idiosyncrasies of the supposedly deceased individual can contribute to generating a quite vivid and realistic impression of them. The qualitative strength of mental mediumship is, however, only “relatively high” (3).

On the positive side, the possibilities of fraud and misinterpretation by eyewitnesses can be reduced to a reasonable minimum under appropriate investigative conditions. The documented transmissions may thus be difficult to explain in mundane terms. Moreover, the high-quality facets of mental mediumship such as drop- in-communicators and cross-correspondences also pose more challenges to models relying on living-agent psi than, for example, the brief perception of an apparition.

However, because all communication with ostensible interlocutors from the beyond must be conducted via a medium serving as intermediary, and because these mediums are often in trance, even veridical information provided by these ostensibly deceased individuals is still prone to being attributed alternatively to 1) the retrieval of latent forgotten knowledge, or 2) a psi-conducive dissociated state of the medium that enables the retrieval of information clairvoyantly or telepathically, but without entailing a factual deceased communicator. Therefore, the qualitative strength of mental mediumship cannot be regarded as “high”. But its relevance for the question of survival after bodily death is self-evidently “high” (4).

 

Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.