Communication with the dead: Taylor excerpt #12

Greg Taylor writes: While the idea that certain people can ‘talk’ to the dead is a popular one in modern pop culture, the practice has been an intrinsic part of human culture since the dawn of time. The archaeological record and historical literature contain many references to apparent communication with the spirit world. In the Biblical Old Testament, the ‘Witch of Endor’, mentioned in the First Book of Samuel, was “a woman that divineth by a ghost”: what we today call a ‘spirit-medium’, or more simply just ‘medium’. In China, spirit-mediums are known as wu, or ji-tong, and their historical origin can be traced back at least 4000 years. In Japan, the itako were blind, usually female, shamans from northern Japan who were said to have the ability to communicate with the dead. And the original word shaman, which most of us know today, is taken from the Evenki people of northern Siberia, and denotes a person who, among other duties, could act as a vehicle for making contact with deceased ancestors.

The word ‘medium’ is self-explanatory: it refers to a person who acts as the medium, or conduit, for communication between the spirit world and ours. It’s important to note that there are different types of medium. Physical mediumship is where the communicating spirit is believed to interact with the physical world: objects are moved/appear, lights are seen or wind is felt, and sometimes the dead even seem to appear in physical form. Mental mediumship, on the other hand, is concerned with communication through the mind of the medium. And mental mediumship itself is often divided into two particular types: trance and non-trance.

Trance mediums will typically, at the beginning of the session (‘sitting’), slip into an altered state, and their normal personality is displaced by an intruding intelligence – apparently that of a deceased person – that takes over the medium’s mind and body. The trance personality then communicates with those present (‘sitters’), sometimes by holding conversations through the medium’s voice, or sometimes via writing and general gestures. Often a certain trance personality comes to be the main ‘control’ of the medium, acting as the intermediary between sitters and those on ‘the other side’.

John Edwards

 

 

Non-trance mental mediumship includes the sub-group most are familiar with today: similar to well-known television mediums, like John Edwards or Theresa Caputo, they remain conscious during communication, but get feelings, hints and visions from the deceased communicator. They might receive the letter of a name or be shown an object that is a metaphor for some important facet of the sitter’s relationship with the spirit; communication through this type of medium is often based in symbols and impressions. 

Another type of non-trance mental mediumship is that where conscious control of just part of the body is relinquished, allowing communicators to take control – the most well-known example of this is the Ouija Board. Another similar method is what is known as automatic writing, where the medium relinquishes conscious control of their writing arm to the communicating personality.

Scientists and skeptics tend to dismiss mediumship out of hand as not being worthy of investigation and, to be fair, there are a few good reasons for that sentiment. Mediumship is an area that has had, throughout its history, more than its fair share of charlatans and con men. When people lose loved ones, they are often left emotionally devastated, and will give anything to feel connected to their lost family members and friends one more time – and are therefore vulnerable to being exploited by dubious characters.

Fake physical mediums lean heavily on the techniques of stage magicians, and also often on a requirement of the ‘spirits’ to have a dark room before they will manifest their powers. The high number of fraudulent physical mediums, and the need for manifestations to occur in an environment not conducive to observation and scientific testing, has meant that very little hard evidence has been gathered on physical mediums – and what evidence has been collected, is often simply the uncovering of fraudulent techniques. That is not to say there aren’t some very interesting cases of physical mediumship that remain a mystery (see, for example, the Icelandic medium Indridi Indridason), but for the purposes of gathering strong evidence for the survival of consciousness we will concentrate in this essay on mental mediums.

As such, it’s worth being aware of the techniques used by fake mental mediums. One of the most prominent is ‘cold reading’, or ‘fishing’: the medium starts with vague, educated guesses and then focuses on only the positive responses from the sitter, becoming more specific as the sitter continues to ‘bite’ on the successes and offer useful feedback. Fake mediums also use what is termed the ‘Forer Effect’ to their advantage. This is the tendency for people to ascribe a personal connection to vague, very general statements that apply to most people (also known as ‘Barnum statements’, in reference to a quote by the famous entertainment businessman P.T. Barnum: "we've got something for everyone”). Statements like “you tend to be critical of yourself” and “you pride yourself as an independent thinker” feel personal, but actually describe most people.

Fake mediums also employ techniques of stage magicians and mentalists in order to achieve amazing effects, such as ‘muscle reading’. Muscle reading takes advantage of the ideomotor effect, where very slight involuntary reactions to questions can be picked up through physical contact, often by holding a person’s hand or wrist. And ‘hot reading’ is the willful collection of information about the sitter prior to meeting with them. Fake mediums might search through obituaries, town records, social media accounts and so on for specific information that they can later ‘miraculously’ pull out of thin air at the sitting.

The infiltration of mediumship by frauds and con men has meant that to pursue scientific research in the field, and attempt to publish papers on mediumship experiments, seems often to be taking the short route to professional suicide. However, there have been individuals and groups over the years who, intrigued by the evidence – like those scientists who saw something curious in reports of anomalous meteor sounds – have taken the bit between the teeth and looked at the subject in a scientific manner. 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.