Afterlife (25 page)

Two close friends played a major part in convincing Myers that human beings survive the death of the body: the Rev.
Stainton Moses, and William James.
Oddly enough, both of them were originally even more sceptical than Myers.

William Stainton Moses was in many ways a typical ‘sick sensitive’; his health was always poor and he was to die at fifty-three.
He had to resign a number of livings because of breakdowns in health.
His original reaction to spiritualism was one of hostility, and he declared that Lord Adare’s book on Daniel Dunglas Home was ‘the dreariest twaddle he ever came across’.
Robert Dale Owen’s second book on the paranormal,
The Debateable Land
, impressed him rather more.
A doctor named Speers finally persuaded him to attend a seance in 1872, and he was impressed when he received an accurate description of a friend who had died in the north of England.
He began attending seances by Daniel Dunglas Home, and was finally convinced by Home’s incredible phenomena.
Soon after this, he realised that he himself was a medium.
Odd things began to happen.
Raps resounded from around the room.
The toilet articles in his bedroom floated on to the bed and formed a cross.
‘Apports’ — like perfume and pin-cushions — fell from the air.
Then, to his alarm, Moses was himself lifted up into the air.
The third time this happened he was thrown on to a table, then on to the sofa.
He began holding seances, at which the table floated up into the air, musical instruments played and all kinds of scents wafted through the room.
His honestly and integrity were so obvious that he did more to convince Myers of the reality of mediumship than anyone else.

Since table rapping took so long, Moses decided to try automatic writing.
He would write his question at the top of a page, then sit with a pencil in his hand until it began to write.
The handwriting was small and neat, and quite unlike Moses’s own.
Finally, Moses accumulated twenty-four volumes of these automatic scripts.
After his death, they were passed on to Myers, who made selections from them for a volume called
Spirit Teachings
.
Together with Allen Kardec’s
Spirits’ Book
, it forms the most interesting body of automatic writing in spiritualist literature.

Like Myers, Stainton Moses was inclined to believe that all this writing came from his own unconscious mind.
On one occasion, he asked the ‘spirit’ — who seemed to be literate and intelligent — to quote the first line of
Virgil’s Aeneid
.
The ‘spirit’ wrote the answer correctly.
Moses was struck by the thought that, although he himself did not know the line consciously, he might well have recollected it from his schooldays.
So he asked the ‘spirit’ if it would go to the bookcase, select the last book but one on the second shelf, and read out the last paragraph on page 94.
The spirit apparently did this without removing the book from the shelf.
Moses himself had no idea of what the book was, but the ‘spirit’ quoted the paragraph word for word.

This could, of course, be explained by the ‘cryptomnesia’ theory — that Moses had read the paragraph at some time, and that his ‘subliminal mind’ could recall it word for word.
So by way of convincing him, the ‘spirit’ decided to select its own book.
It dictated a paragraph about the poet Pope, and then told Moses that he would find it on the same shelf, in a book called
Poetry, Romance and Rhetoric
.
When Moses took this off the shelf, it opened at the right page.

Spirit Teachings
is a fascinating book because it contradicts Stainton Moses’s own creed in many respects.
For a Christian clergyman, who had been brought up to believe that Christ is God, it must have been disconcerting to be told that Jesus was simply a great teacher, like many others, and that he himself
would have disowned most of the absurd fictions that men have foisted on him.
On the day after this startling communication, Moses argued long and bitterly, attacking the ‘spirit teachings’, and calling them ‘silly and frivolous, if not mischievous’.
But the ‘teachers’ (there were apparently forty-nine of them) refused to budge an inch, and explained to Moses that all human history is a ‘progressive revelation of one and the same God’ — in other words, that the idea of Jesus as the unique son of God is a purely human notion.

Like Kardec’s
Spirits’ Book
, Moses’s
Spirit Teachings
also insists that there are a great many mischievous spirits around, most of them the ‘earth bound’ spirits of human beings who are either unaware they are dead or have no wish to move ‘elsewhere’.
He makes the interesting observation that execution is a silly way to deal with criminals, since it lets loose a vengeful and murderous spirit that will do its best to exert a harmful influence on the living — like Kardec,
the Spirit Teachings
states that spirits can enter into our minds, and that we are often influenced by them without knowing it.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about
Spirit Teachings
is that Moses himself felt so ambivalent about them.
He published extracts in
Light
, the journal of the College of Psychic Science, but deliberately left out some of the harsher exchanges — in fact, there is evidence that he destroyed one of the notebooks because the ‘spirits’ were so uncomplimentary about him.
Moreover, he went to considerable trouble to conceal the identities of the ‘forty-nine’ communicators, obviously feeling that to reveal them — they included half a dozen Old Testament prophets, not to mention Plato and Aristotle — would simply lead most people to assume he was mad or that the spirits were leg-pullers.
The names of the ‘communicators’ were finally revealed more than half a century after Moses’s death by a researcher called A.
W.
Trethewy.

William James, the other major influence on Frederick Myers, was the son of a follower of Swedenborg.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — his attitude towards Spiritualism was originally one of bored indifference.
Like Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, James began his career as a naturalist, and went on an expedition to explore the upper Amazon.
Ill health drove him back to Boston; he studied medicine in Germany,
and became a doctor.
As a thinker he had little patience with involved metaphysics, and he developed the doctrine called ‘pragmatism’, a kind of predecessor of modern Logical Positivism.
Stated very crudely, this says: ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe so long as it works.’ (James expressed it: ‘We have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will’ — a doctrine that victims of Nazism might feel to be a little simplistic.) As a psychologist — his
Principles of Psychology
brought him fame — he believed that our emotions are basically merely physical sensations (a doctrine known as the James-Lange theory of emotions).

It can well be imagined that a pragmatist like James — he invented the expression ‘tough-minded’ — would have little patience with the doctrines of Spiritualism.
Reviewing a book called
Planchette
when he was a medical student, James complained that ‘we fail to discover among all the facts [about psychical phenomena] a single one possessing either aesthetic beauty, intellectual originality or material usefulness’.

When he came to England in 1882, James met Myers, Gurney and Podmore, and was impressed by their integrity and sincerity.
But where the paranormal was concerned, he remained a sceptic.
Then, in 1885, his mother-in-law, Eliza Gibbens, heard about a remarkable young medium called Leonore Piper, and went to see her.
Mrs Piper went into a trance, and then proceeded to tell Mrs Gibbens all kinds of facts about members of the family, identifying most of them by their Christian names.
When Mrs Gibbens recounted all this to her daughter and son-in-law, James was naturally intrigued.
His innate scepticism suggested that Mrs Piper had managed to make vague general statements that sounded true.
The alternative was that she had somehow read Mrs Gibben’s mind.
The next day, James’s sister-in-law went to see Mrs Piper, taking with her a letter in Italian.
Mrs Piper held the letter to her forehead, and described the writer in detail.
James was now sufficiently interested to go to see Mrs Piper himself.

Mrs Piper had discovered her own psychic powers when she went to consult a Boston healer named J.
R.
Cocke, and fell into a trance.
On the next occasion she went to see Cocke, other people were present, including a certain Judge Frost.
As soon as Cocke put his hand on her forehead, Mrs Piper went into a trance, then went to the table and wrote a message on a sheet of paper, which she handed to the judge.
It was, apparently, a message from his dead son, and he declared it ‘the most
remarkable he had ever received’.
Mrs Piper suddenly became a local celebrity.

James went to see her in a highly critical frame of mind, together with his pretty and intelligent wife Alice.
The Jameses took care that Mrs Piper should not know their identity, or that they were connected with the previous ‘sitters’.
Mrs Piper went into her trance, and was then taken over by her ‘control’, a Frenchman called Phinuit.
And to James’s surprise, ‘Phinuit’ mentioned several of the members of the family he had already described to Mrs Gibbens, spoke of Alice’s father as ‘Giblin’, and spoke of a child the Jameses had lost in the previous year.
The child had been called Herman; ‘Phinuit’ called him ‘Herrin’ — a fairly accurate approximation.

James went away badly puzzled; either Mrs Piper knew his wife’s family by sight, and had learned ‘by some lucky coincidence’ all kinds of intimate details about them, or she possessed some kind of supernormal powers.
He continued to visit Mrs Piper, and after observing her for a long time, decided that she was undoubtedly genuine.
But were the ‘spirits’ genuine?
James felt that ‘it is hard to reconcile’ the theory of spirit control with ‘the extreme triviality of most of the communications’.
Besides, ‘Phinuit’ — who claimed to be a Frenchman — had only the most rudimentary knowledge of French.
The likeliest theory, James decided, was that ‘Phinuit’ was some aspect of Mrs Piper’s own personality — in other words, that Mrs Piper was a ‘split personality’, like Louis Vivé.
But even that failed to explain how ‘Phinuit’ could get hold of so much accurate information.
James kept sending his friends to her — all under pseudonyms — and Mrs Piper continued to produce accurate information about dead relatives.

James allowed himself to be convinced.
He said later: ‘If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you can prove one single crow to be white.’ It was one of the most sensible remarks ever made about spiritualism; the ‘crow’ James had in mind was Leonore Piper.

In 1885, an American branch of the Society for Psychical Research had been founded in Philadelphia by Professor William Barrett.
The London Society sent over one of its most promising young investigators, Richard Hodgson, a thoroughly ‘tough-minded’ individual, who had been to India to investigate Madame Blavatsky and decided she was a fraud.
Hodgson immediately called on Mrs Piper, and was staggered
when she spoke to him about a girl called Jessie, to whom he had been engaged in Australia.
Jessie had died while Hodgson was abroad.
What convinced Hodgson even more than ‘Phinuit’ ’s accurate description of Jessie, was his report of a conversation that no one but Hodgson knew about.
Hodgson, who had so far been a sceptic about psychical phenomena, had no doubt that Mrs Piper was genuine.
He signed her up to devote her services to the Society for Psychical Research — for £200 a year — and in 1889 she came to England.
Hodgson even went to the length of having her shadowed by private detectives to see whether she had some private information network.
Myers, Lodge and the Sidgwicks tested her extensively, and decided that, whatever the nature of her powers, they were undoubtedly genuine.
But then, they could have been based on telepathy.

What finally convinced Hodgson was a case involving a young man named George Pellew, who had been killed in a fall in 1892.
Hodgson — who had known Pellew — took another old friend of Pellew’s along to a sitting with Mrs Piper.
‘Phinuit’ immediately recognised Pellew’s friend — or, rather, ‘Pellew’s spirit’ recognised him, and called him by his correct name.
The friend removed a stud he was wearing and handed it to ‘Phinuit’.
George Pellew immediately said (through ‘Phinuit’) ‘That’s mine.
Mother gave you that.’ The friend denied this, but he later turned out to be wrong.
Pellew’s stepmother
had
removed the studs from the body, and when the friend asked for some memento, it was she who suggested sending them to him.
Here was a fact that Mrs Piper could not have learned by telepathy.