Exotic and
strange as distinctions of parapsychological capacities of embodied minds from the agency
of discarnate spirits may appear to most moderns, they are hardly new. Such
ideas were in fact at the heart of mainstream Renaissance natural philosophy
and related Neoplatonic currents, which centred around notions of a ‘world soul’,
in which individual minds were thought to be embedded and intrinsically
interconnected with the material world on a basic ontological level. This was
also the cosmology of early modern science icons including Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo and Francis Bacon. In 1605, for example, Bacon noted that
parapsychological cognitions needed to be distinguished according to the ‘input
source’: In his discussion of psychic phenomena occurring near death and in
altered states, from which we briefly quoted in Part 1, for example, Bacon
divided ‘natural divination’ (divinatio naturalis) into ‘primitive’ divination – parapsychological
capacities of the embodied mind – and divination
by ‘influxion’ – veridical input from disembodied spirits.206
Far from being
refuted during the supposedly linear growth of scientific knowledge, it would
again be fair to say that such holistic cosmologies were squarely written out
of history by figures like Huxley and du Bois-Reymond, along with striking
continuities of associated ‘paranormal’ beliefs held by members of intellectual
elites. Notions of a ‘world soul’ would be preserved in major philosophical
systems of German idealism, a worldview which grounded much of late-eighteenth
and early nineteenth century science. These
idealist frameworks were notably formulated by F. W. J. Schelling, J. G. Fichte
and later G. W. F. Hegel – all of whom were convinced of the reality of
‘paranormal’ phenomena, especially those reported to occur in mesmerist trance
and other altered states.
For example, Hegel’s
leading philosophical antagonist was Arthur Schopenhauer, who still agreed with
Hegel that “He who nowadays doubts the facts of animal magnetism and its
clairvoyance is not to be called incredulous, but ignorant”. Schopenhauer also studied reports of
spirit apparitions, which, however, he did not interpret as evidence for personal
survival, but as indications of dramatized expressions of an impersonal and
unconscious ‘world will’. Similar notions were at the roots of the famous
Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann, who adopted
Schopenhauer’s comparisons of biological instinct with clairvoyance, and who
was a major German critic of spiritualism.
 |
Gustav T. Fetchner
|
One
scientifically eminent contemporary of Hartmann who also subscribed to the
notion of a ‘world soul’ was the aforementioned Gustav T. Fechner, whose works
would increasingly come to inspire William James’s philosophy. And it is hardly an accident that James’s
fellow psychical researcher Frederic Myers was a trained classicist. In fact,
Myers’s coinage of ‘telepathy’ in 1882 – as well as his invention of the word
‘subliminal’ – was more than informed by his studies of ancient Greek mystical
to Renaissance natural philosophical and German idealist traditions. While Skeptics typically portray Myers as a
haplessly naïve and uncritical spiritualist, his early work in fact seemed to
directly undermine the idea of spirit agency, which provoked rather fierce
attacks by actual spiritualists.
Rather than through isolated investigations of
anomalies directly suggestive of survival only – verifications of ‘spirit
identity’ in mediumship and apparitions – Myers tried to strengthen the
scientific case for survival by constructing a model of the self, in which
undisputed psychological and properly parapsychological phenomena did not face
each other as irreconcilable, but were continuous. For the case of
mediumship, for example, Myers argued that properly scientific research in this
area
will not be difficult
only, but impossible, – it will lead to mere confusion and bewilderment – if it
be undertaken without adequate preliminary conception of what our own
personalities, our own intelligences, are in reality and can actually do. The
most ardent Spiritist should welcome a searching inquiry into the potential
faculties of spirits still in the flesh. Until we know more of these, those
other phenomena to which he appeals must remain unintelligible because
isolated, and are likely to be obstinately disbelieved because they are
impossible to understand.
This quote is from
Myers’s review of James’s Principle of Psychology, where we find a general conception of
mediumship which James himself had adopted from Myers. Somewhat oversimplified, this
methodological maxim roughly goes like this:
Even veridical cases
of mediumship should initially be approached as non- pathological instances of
multiple personality. A medium is simply someone with a disposition to go into
a self-induced trance, during which expectations by a sitter wishing to communicate
with a deceased loved one are unconsciously acted out. Rather than actually
‘channelling’ the spirit in question, the entranced medium, uninhibited by the
habitual control of self-consciousness, constructs a ‘split personality’,
persuasively camouflaging as the expected ‘spirit’ by accessing a cosmic mental
nexus, in which the minds of all beings (living and dead) are constantly connected below the
threshold of everyday conscious awareness.
A similar approach
was applied in the SPR’s aforementioned early studies of veridical
‘hallucinations’, which Myers conceptualized as exceptional, dramatized
telepathic eruptions of subliminal mental interconnectedness into conscious
experience. One of the spiritualists who had absolutely no use of all this new talk
about subliminal minds and divisions of the self was the ‘other Darwin’, Alfred
Russel Wallace. But instead of attacking his fellow countryman Myers, he
singled out Carl du Prel, a German author who proposed similar ideas. Never mind that du Prel – the most
prominent German- language theorist of the unconscious mind before Freud, who
once called du Prel “that brilliant mystic” – was a devout spiritualist
himself, as he reminded Wallace in his reply.
At a time when
the medical and psychological mainstream still regarded hallucinations and
trance states as clear signs of mental degeneration, Myers and colleagues at
the English SPR, William James in the US, and du Prel in Germany belonged to
the most vocal figures who disputed such blanket diagnoses. Their insistence on
more discerning diagnostics would in fact place them firmly against the grain
of medical orthodoxy even before they
discussed properly parapsychological
phenomena. Regarding divisions of the self, for example,
du Prel argued that rudimentary forms of non-pathological multiplicity already
occurred in ordinary dreams:
If in dream I sit at
an examination, and do not find the answer to the question put by the teacher,
which then my next neighbor, to my great vexation, excellently gives, this very
clear example shows the psychological possibility of the identity of the
Subject with the contemporaneous difference of persons.
Approaching
spiritualism using such minimalist conceptions which were continuous with
ordinary psychological knowledge, Myers and James initially viewed trance
mediumship as a more pronounced instance of such dramatized dream monologues.
For example, on the height of her career Mrs. Piper occasionally gave up to
three communications simultaneously, each hand writing a message from a
different ‘spirit’, while a third would coherently address another sitter in
the room. Spiritualists viewed such dramatic instances as
self-evident spirit communication even when messages were not veridical.
However, Gurney, James and various psychologists were able to demonstrate
similar multiple automatic action in hypnotized subjects, while
experiments in telepathy between the living through automatic writing likewise
suggested striking parallels without the need to invoke spirits.
And it is in this
context that early Piper investigators came to believe that her first prominent
‘spirit control’, a personality calling himself ‘Phinuit’, was not a spirit,
but a fragment of Piper’s own mind: Not only did ‘Phinuit’ fail to produce
evidence supporting his claim that he was the spirit of a certain French
doctor. While he did often provide highly specific veridical information about
‘spirits’ other
than himself, Phinuit
and other trance personalities would also often make absurd statements
reminiscent of confused ramblings of a sleepwalker. One example is the
often-cited claim by the ‘spirit’ of Sir Walter Scott that there were monkeys
in the sun, a statement the reasonably well- educated medium would not have
made in the waking state. On another occasion,
the entranced Mrs. Piper grabbed the arm of the chair she sat in, correctly
identifying it as belonging to a deceased aunt of Lodge’s, but stating it was
part of a church organ.
Another strong
indication that Phinuit was indeed a partition of Mrs. Piper’s own mind was the
fact that he would sometimes shamelessly ‘fish’ for information, trying to
tease out responses from sitters which might help to improve his performance. These and other instances – for example,
Phinuit sometimes making up ludicrous excuses for giving blatantly false
information – only reinforced the impression that the entranced Mrs. Piper,
through the vehicle of ‘Phinuit’, was unconsciously responding to
investigators’ expectations like a hypnotic subject, compelled to satisfy
sitters by furnishing them with ‘information’ no matter how. Principal Piper
investigators frequently discussed these and many other signs as fundamental
hurdles for the spirit hypothesis. At
the same time, they still struggled to make sense of the wealth of impressive
veridical information provided by Phinuit and other supposed ‘split
personalities’ of Mrs. Piper, which they preliminarily pigeonholed as
‘telepathy from the living’.
One of several early
examples which appeared to far outstrip such an interpretation, however, was
reported by Oliver Lodge. When he hosted Mrs. Piper during the first series of
experiments in England, a personality claiming to be the son of Mr. Rich, head
of the Liverpool post office, was purported to communicate. The only other
sitter present was a friend of Lodge’s, whom he had introduced to Piper using a
pseudonym, but who was still addressed by his actual name. Moreover, while
Lodge and his friend faintly knew Mr. Rich, neither were aware that his son had
died. The communicator then urged Lodge and his friend to pass on a message to
Mr. Rich, expressing worry over his wellbeing and claiming among other things
that he had recently suffered from dizziness and saw himself forced to retire.
Lodge decided to bite
the bullet and convey the message to Mr. Rich as requested, who confirmed these
and other details. Moreover, Rich said that he took the loss particularly badly
because of an estrangement with his son shortly before his unexpected death a
few months before the sitting. Considering how he should explain Piper’s
veridical impersonation of his dead son to Mr. Rich in terms of telepathy from
the living, Lodge wrote:
the only
thought-transference explanation I can reasonably offer him is that it was the
activity of his own mind, operating on the sensitive brain of the medium, of
whose existence he knew absolutely nothing, and contriving to send a delusive
message to itself!
This is by no means
one of the most striking cases, and there are countless others, reported and
analyzed in often painstaking detail, in studies of many other mediums. Moreover, the case of Mr. Rich already
gives us an idea of the intimacy of
many communications. In fact, a frequent complaint by James in his writings and
private letters to friends was that sitters frequently did not consent to a
publication of some of the most striking veridical material because it was too
private and personal.
A much more
complicated case of mediumship strongly suggestive of survival were the so-called
‘cross-correspondences’, beginning in 1906. On the face of it, this appeared
like a concerted long-term effort from the ‘other side’ by deceased SPR
personnel – including Gurney, Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Hodgson – to prove
their continued existence through mediums distributed across three continents.
These included Rosalie Thompson, ‘Mrs. Forbes’ (the wife of Judge Raikes), Mrs
‘Willett’ (Mrs Winifred Coombe-Tennant), and Margaret Verrall and her daughter
Helen in Britain; Mrs. Piper in the US; and ‘Mrs. Holland’ (Rudyard Kipling’s
sister Alice Fleming) in India. Prompted by the supposed spirits of Myers and
colleagues, each medium conveyed pieces of a literary jigsaw puzzle, whose
individual parts were meaningless in themselves, but assumed significance when
assembled according to directives of ‘Myers’ and fellow spirits.
An often-cited
critique of the cross-correspondences has interpreted them as a result of
chance-coincidence. However, the author
only used a small fraction of these literary fragments, while ignoring said
‘directives’ by ‘Myers’ and other supposed spirits, which in themselves
contained many rather specific, veridical aspects. The most recent and
comprehensive account and painstaking analysis of published and previously unpublished
primary sources has clearly shown that chance coincidence is a rather
inadequate explanation for the bulk of the messages: “Whatever the source”,
Trevor Hamilton has argued, “the scripts were not passive inert structures that
did not answer back”. ‘Myers’ and other
communicators regularly gave explicit instructions in which order to assemble
the pieces of the puzzle, gave hints of interpretations, and provided an
overall strong impression of a conscious, deliberate direction and monitoring
of the process from the outside.
William James and
other critical mediumship researchers increasingly acknowledged that telepathy
and clairvoyance of the living seemed insufficient as an explanation of subtle
aspects of the ‘trance drama’, which were often lost in the printed records.
Even the most seasoned and cautious sitters would often admit to be impressed
not only by veridical bits of information specifically matching a certain
deceased individual, but especially the way in which it was conveyed – vividly displaying
a deceased person’s unique mannerisms, tone of voice, characteristic humor, and
so on.
In his final
comprehensive study of Piper’s mediumship, James once again admitted to
struggle with what he called the “rubbish of trance-talk”, which we briefly
addressed above. At the same time, he strongly doubted that a medium’s
subconscious ‘will to personate’ plus telepathy was a sufficient explanation.
If telepathy from the living was all there was, James argued, it should “play
an entirely passive role – that is, the telepathic data would be fished out by
the personating will, not forced upon it by desires to communicate, acting
externally to itself”.
Some of the
strongest impressions of such an external ‘push’ often only emerge from a close
study of certain details in the original records. Boston psychiatrist Walter F.
Prince, an authority in the study of multiple personality disorder, provided a
vivid example of the apparent discrepancy between a medium’s ‘will to
personate’ and a supposed spirit’s ‘will to communicate’ in an account of his
investigations of Mrs. Chenoweth. There, a ‘spirit’ claiming to be Prince’s
deceased mother tried to identify herself by mentioning an event in Prince’s
childhood, a visit to a neighbor who owned a young calf (colloquially a
‘bossy’) which young Prince had been fond of. Here’s an excerpt from the
stenographic records of communications from Prince’s supposed mother:
“We went to a
neighbor’s to see a pet Bunny” – pause – “pet Bunny BB Bunny” – pause – “No, it
was a pet Bunny BB Bunny B” – long pause – (medium moans) “Milk – a small cow
Bossy”.
Prince, who stated
there was no plausible way for the medium to be aware of the event from his
childhood through conventional means, comments:
Who can doubt that
someone or something intended “Bossy” [...] from the first? Else why did the
communicator stop at Bunny every time and begin again, express dissatisfaction,
pause as though pondering what was the matter or how to remedy it, experience
emotion which extorted moans from the medium, and finally say ‘small cow’ as
though to avoid the word beginning with B? If two minds were engaged in the
process, the second receiving from the first, we can see how this second, call
it [...] the medium’s subconscious, would, when the ‘pet B-‘ was reached,
conceive the picture of a rabbit and cling to the preference for some time
despite the efforts of the first mind to dislodge it.
In short: The
stammers in the communication suggest signs of a struggle by the spirit of
Prince’s mother to enforce her own memory against the medium’s immediate
association with the letter B.
By far the
strongest evidence for personal survival along these lines available by 1939
has been provided by German philosopher Emil Mattiesen. Discussing findings of
English, American, French, Italian and German psychical research throughout his
three volumes of fine-grained analysis of such important formal aspects of
mediumistic impersonations, as well as apparitions, Mattiesen identified what
he called a “center of activity”, arguing that
a complete theory has
to explain not only where the expressed knowledge comes from, but also
determine the origin of the drive that weaves both into a lively personation,
which as such bowls over the sitter as persuasive.
Similar views were
also expressed by perhaps the last scientifically eminent figure to sit with
Mrs. Piper, American psychologist Gardner Murphy. Following an intense study of
the literature on mediumship, Murphy likewise concluded that it was “the autonomy,
the purposiveness, the cogency, above all the individuality, of the source of
the messages, that cannot be by-passed”.
Finally, another
class of mediumistic case reports also more than suggests a ‘push’ from the
‘other side’ instead of a ‘pull’ from the living: well-documented cases in
which a ‘spirit’ who was completely unknown not just to the
medium, but to all sitters, initiates communications. While Lodge and his
friend in the Rich case cited above, for example, were aware of the existence (though not of the
death) of Rich’s son, cases of so-called ‘drop-in communicators’ are defined by
the perfect strangeness of a ‘spirit’, whose deceased biographical counterpart
is eventually identified only through its own veridical statements. Here, motivations to produce
impersonations are typically difficult to ascribe to the medium or any of the
sitters, but more plausibly to a deceased man or woman whose communications
seem driven by their own motivations.
There are
close equivalents of ‘drop-in’ cases in studies of apparitions, some of which
seem even more suggestive of spirit agency than so-called ‘Peak-in-Darien’
cases, where a person thought to be alive appears, and is later found to have
died before the ‘hallucination’ occurred. The
most striking and recent counterpart of ‘drop-ins’, however, is to be found in
certain cases of the reincarnation type. Here are some of the most impressive
and well-documented features:
· Reported past-life memories by young children
are narrated repeatedly and with strong emphasis;
· Specific names of persons, places, etc. are
given, which eventually lead to the discovery of the child’s supposed previous
personality (PP);
· Social standing and profession of the PP is
acted out in play;
· Claimed memories engender family conflicts, due
to ambiguity of family
membership;
· Sexual precocity and gender dysphoria in cases
where the PP belonged to the opposite
biological sex;
· Display of unlearned skills not plausibly
acquired in the present life, including basic
foreign language skills, procedures associated with a profession, etc.;
· Unusual behavior and idiosyncratic traits
corresponding to the PP, including phobias,
aversions, obsessions, and penchants;
· Alcohol and drug addictions that were manifest
in the PP;
· Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,
which do not seem to match any events
in the child’s current life, but to specific circumstances in the remembered PP’s
life, often their mode of death; and not least:
· Birthmarks, differing in etiological features
such as size, shape and colour from conventional
birthmarks, and other bodily abnormalities, including severe deformations.
Often resembling actual scars and lesions, they significantly correspond to
wounds involved in the death of the PP as shown by autopsy reports and other
evidence.
Puzzling
psychological and behavioral reincarnation evidence, especially children’s
substance addictions seemingly out of nowhere, and phobias and full-blown
post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms corresponding with remembered causes of
death, is occasionally discussed even in conventional medical and psychology
journals. Together with the
physical evidence – specific lesions which mirror typically fatal wounds of a
PP – they strongly point to the carrying-over of affects and other compulsive
elements of personality from one life to the next. And while cases of
birthmarks and lesions may appear especially odd and inexplicable, even they
seem continuous with phenomena of conventional biomedicine: Shortly after World
War 2, for example, the Lancet
reported the case of
a traumatized army officer, on whose body marks or imprints would spontaneously
appear, resembling ropes with which he had been tied up during war. Other cases reported since then have
involved similar spontaneous reappearances during psychotherapy of signs of
physical abuse.
Andreas Sommer, “What is the
Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent
Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic.
The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.
