Afterlife (26 page)

‘Phinuit’ went on to talk about a couple named James and Mary Howard, with whom Pellew had lived for a time in New York.
The friend only knew the Howards slightly, and Hodgson did not know them at all; but ‘Pellew’ went on to speak of their daughter Katherine, and sent her a message: ‘Tell her, she’ll know.
I will solve the problems, Katherine.’ This meant nothing to Hodgson or the friend.
But when James Howard was told about it the next day, he had no doubt that the message came from Pellew, who used to have long discussions about Time, Space and Eternity with Katherine Howard, and had used the phrase ‘I will solve the problems, Katherine’ while he was alive.

Myers and Hodgson were finally convinced by Mrs Piper that the messages really came from spirits.
But James continued
to feel that Myers’s ‘subliminal mind’ theory was as good as any.
It was another fourteen years before he was willing to concede that the subliminal mind could not explain
all
the phenomena.
In December 1905, Hodgson was playing handball at a club in Boston when he collapsed and died.
That night, Mrs Piper dreamed she was trying to enter a dark tunnel, and that a bearded man like Hodgson was trying to prevent her; the next morning, she learned of his death.
Eight days later, she was holding a pencil when her hand suddenly wrote the word ‘Hodgson’.
And from then on, ‘Hodgson’ began to communicate through Mrs Piper.
William James and his son attended a seance, and James had to admit that this was the authentic Hodgson personality.
Yet although he was willing to admit that much, he was still not prepared to concede that Hodgson’s ‘spirit’ had somehow survived his death.
He suggested that he was confronting some kind of ‘after-image’ of Hodgson, like a film or gramophone record.
What James did not explain is how a film or gramophone record could answer questions about Hodgson’s life, and convince a number of people that it was Hodgson speaking.
James himself would die in 1910, and — as we have seen in the last chapter — would convince Professor James Hyslop of his survival of death by sending the cryptic message about red pyjamas via a medium who had never heard of either James or Hyslop …

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
concludes with the long account of Mrs Piper; she was, apparently, Myers’s ‘white crow’ as well as James’s.
Myers never lived to see his masterpiece in print; his health had begun to fail soon after the embarrassing business of Ada Goodrich-Freer.
(Miss Goodrich-Freer commented balefully that people who crossed her often came to a bad end.) William James wrote a long review of the book when it finally came out, two years after Myers’s death, and the tone of the review is far from total enthusiasm: ‘The work, whatever weaknesses it may have, strikes me as at least a masterpiece of coordination and unification.
The voluminous arsenal of ‘cases’ … might make the most erudite naturalist or historian envy him …’ In retrospect, James seems less than generous.
It is true that the book has certain weaknesses which Myers would have undoubtedly removed if he had known about them: for example, he cites Ada Goodrich-Freer’s experiments in crystal gazing, and we know enough about that lady to feel that most of her claims must be viewed with suspicion.
Neither did Myers know that
his secretary of many years, George Albert Smith — the hypnotist who demonstrated the nine different levels of trance memory — would one day be accused of cheating in some of his earliest experiments in Brighton with a young man named Douglas Blackburn.
(It is true that there was no earthly reason why Smith should have continued to cheat when he began to work for Myers, and his severest critics concede that he was a genuine hypnotist.
But again, the least breath of this kind of suspicion makes evidence valueless for scientific purposes.) Having said which, it is necessary to concede that
Human Personality
towers above all other books on psychical research like a mountain above foothills.

Where the ‘white crow’, Leonore Piper, is concerned, one intriguing question remains.
If ‘Phinuit’ was not a genuine Frenchman, who was he?
Eleanor Sidgwick studied the problem for twenty-three years before — in 1915 — she announced her own conclusion: that ‘Phinuit’ was a fragment of Mrs Piper’s personality — a multiple personality, like Clara Fowler’s alter-ego ‘Sally’.
And later studies conducted with other mediums — like Mrs Osborne Leonard and Eileen Garrett — make this practically a certainty.
In 1935, the researcher Whately Carington gave Mrs Leonard a word-association test — saying a word, and waiting for Mrs Leonard to reply with a word she associated with it.
He made the interesting discovery that Mrs Leonard and her ‘control’ ‘Feda’ were like mirror images as far as words were concerned.
When Mrs Leonard reacted slowly to a word, ‘Feda’ reacted quickly, and vice versa.
And the same was found of Mrs Garrett and her ‘control’ ‘Uvani’.
This could not be coincidence.
Ever since the earliest studies of multiple personality, researchers had noticed that the patient and his — or her — alter-ego had diametrically opposite qualities.
In 1811, a girl called Mary Reynolds, who lived in Pennsylvania, fell into a deep sleep for twenty hours, and when she woke up, had become another person.
The original Mary was a dull girl, hyper-cautious and subject to fits of depression; the new ‘Mary’ was merry, irresponsible and flighty.
For twenty years or so the Marys alternated, then they slowly blended, creating an altogether more satisfactory personality.
It was almost as if Mary’s personality was made out of a child’s construction kit, and Mary 1 used up one set of attributes, while Mary 2 used the rest.
Janet’s patient Leonie — the one who could be summoned from half a mile away by the hypnotist — had the
same kind of mirror-image alter-ego.
This alter-ego flatly denied that she was ‘Leonie’, declaring that Leonie was a stupid idiot.
Lady Una Troubridge, who published a study of Mrs Leonard in 1922, noticed that Teda’ seemed to feel contemptuous of the medium.

But if ‘Phinuit’, ‘Feda’, ‘Uvani’ and the rest are simply personality fragments of the medium, how is it possible to take them seriously?
The clue may lie in the case of Louis Vivé, whose alter-ego was also clearly his ‘right-brain self’.
We have seen that the right brain is basically what Thomson Jay Hudson meant by the ‘subjective mind’, and what Myers meant by the ‘subliminal mind’.
If they are correct, the right brain is the source of psychic powers, or at least a kind of receiver and amplifier.
Under hypnosis, the left brain is put to sleep, and the right is able to exercise these powers without the unnerving critical scrutiny of the left.
Wallace and Barrett became interested in the paranormal because they observed hypnotised subjects who could share their own sensations — that is, whose right brains could telepathically pick up their feelings.
If this theory is correct, then ‘Feda’ and the rest were pure right-brain entities who may have been able to ‘pick up’ messages from ‘spirits’.

This could also explain their failures.
After ‘Phinuit’, Mrs Piper was controlled by a whole group of spirits who claimed to be the same ones who had dictated to Stainton Moses.
But when asked about their names — which they had secretly communicated to Stainton Moses — they gave the wrong answers.
One psychologist — Stanley Hall — invented a niece called Bessie Beals and asked Mrs Leonard’s ‘control’ to get in touch with her.
The ‘control’ obliged, and the fictitious Bessie Beals passed on all kinds of messages.
The right brain — or subjective mind — is enormously suggestible; it can conjure up a ‘spirit’ as easily as a hypnotised person can conjure up an illusion that someone is sitting in an empty chair.
The fact that ‘Phinuit’ was able to give so much accurate information about George Pellew, including facts unknown to the ‘sitters’, argues strongly that he was a real ‘spirit’, making use of Mrs Piper’s right brain as a telephone line.

We have not yet finished with Myers.
In fact, we might say that the part played by Myers after his death — or by someone who called himself Myers — was more important than the part he played during his life.

Myers had often remarked that one of the few ways for ‘communicators’ to prove beyond all doubt that they were spirits of the dead would be to give separate bits of a message to several mediums, so they only made sense when fitted together.
That
would completely rule out telepathy, cryptomnesia or right-brain leg-pulling.
If we are to believe the evidence of the celebrated series of communications known as the Cross Correspondences, this is precisely what happened.

Myers died on 17 January 1901.
A few years before his death, he had handed Oliver Lodge a message in a sealed envelope; it was to be kept sealed until some spirit purporting to be Myers should claim to repeat the message.

Two of Myers’s closest friends at Cambridge were Dr Arthur Verrall, a classical scholar, and his wife Margaret, a lecturer in classics at Newnham College.
After Myers’s death, Margaret Verrall decided to try automatic writing, to see if she could establish contact with Myers.
She was a rationalist and a sceptic, but she thought it worth a try.
Her hand was soon scribbling its way across the page, but the messages seemed muddled and fragmentary.
Then one day there came a message in rather poor Latin, signed ‘Myers’.
From then on, the messages flowed more freely.
And one of them contained the statement: ‘Myers’s sealed envelope left with Lodge … It has in it the words from the
Symposium
about love bridging the chasm.’ The message was hastily conveyed to Lodge, who opened the envelope.
To his disappointment, it contained nothing about Plato.
It said: ‘If I can revisit any earthly scene, I should choose the Valley in the grounds of Hallsteads, Cumberland.’ Then someone recalled that Myers
had
referred to the
Symposium —
Plato’s dialogue about love — in a privately printed book called
Fragments of an Inner Life
.
It had been written as a memorial to Annie Marshall, wife of Myers’s cousin Walter, with whom Myers had been in love.
Annie had committed suicide by drowning herself in Ullswater, and had lived in Hallsteads, Cumberland.
So there
was
a connection between the sealed message and Plato’s
Symposium
.

Soon after this, Richard Hodgson was holding a seance with Mrs Piper in Boston, and he suggested that Mrs Piper’s ‘control’ — now a spirit called Rector — should try to appear to Margaret Verrall’s daughter Helen, holding a spear.
(Helen Verrall was also a gifted psychic.) ‘Rector’ misheard and asked: ‘Why a sphere?’ Hodgson corrected him, and ‘Rector’ agreed to try the experiment for the next week.
Three days later, Margaret Verrall received a message that included the Greek word
‘sphairos’ (sphere) and the Latin Volatile ferrum’ (flying iron) Virgil’s description of a spear.
Next time Hodgson sat with Mrs Piper, ‘Rector’ said he had carried out the suggestion, and showed Mrs Verrall a ‘sphear’.

Before we go any further, it must be admitted that most of the ‘evidence’ of the Cross Correspondences is just as infuriatingly vague and ambiguous as this.
It has never been published complete, and if it was, it would occupy several large volumes.
It is undoubtedly the most convincing evidence of ‘survival’ ever obtained by mediums, and also the most boring.
A sceptic might well ask why, if Myers wanted to prove he was still alive, he could not have told Mrs Verrall that his sealed message referred to Hallsteads in Cumberland, instead of talking misleadingly about Plato’s
Symposium
, and why, if he wanted to establish a connection between Mrs Piper and Margaret Varrall, he did not write in English: ‘Hodgson asked me to show you a spear.’ One possible answer may lie in a statement made by ‘Myers’ in one of the scripts:

Stainton Moses had also been told that the spirits who wrote out messages were a kind of secretary or amanuensis:

In a moment of exasperation, William James suggested another explanation for the vagaries of the ‘spirits’:

Or, to put it another way, it looks as if the ‘spirits’ have been ordered to provide just enough evidence to convince those who
are willing to be convinced, but never enough to win over the sceptics.
This notion — which we might call James’s Law — must have crossed the mind of everybody who has taken an interest in the paranormal.
The evidence is abundant and plentiful, but it
always
leaves room for doubt.