Afterlife (27 page)

Having said that, it must be admitted that some of the evidence of the Cross Correspondences is very convincing indeed.
At an early stage, Mrs Verrall received a sentence: ‘Record the bits, and when fitted together they will make the whole.’ Soon after this, Rudyard Kipling’s sister, Alice Fleming (who lived in India), decided to try automatic writing, and quickly received a message which read: ‘My Dear Mrs Verrall [it sounds as though Myers had got his ‘secretaries’ mixed up] I am very anxious to speak to some of the old friends — Miss J — and to A W.
This referred to Alice Johnson, Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, and to Arthur W.
Verrall, Mrs Verrall’s husband.
The message then went on to give a description of Arthur Verrall, and ended the message: ‘Send this to Mrs Verrall’s, 5, Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge.’ This was Mrs Verrall’s correct address, but Alice Fleming had no way of knowing this.
She knew Mrs Verrall’s name — having read Myers’s
Human Personality
— but nothing else; she had never been in Cambridge.
Mrs Fleming duly contacted Margaret Verrall at 5 Selwyn Gardens, and became another in the group of mediums who took down the Cross Correspondences.
(She called herself Mrs Holland, because her family disapproved of psychical research.) Most of Alice Fleming’s early messages were signed ‘F’ — a signature Myers frequently used.

On another occasion, Alice Fleming received a detailed description of a room.
It was later recognised as a very exact description of Margaret Verrall’s sitting room.
There was only one inaccuracy; the description said there was a bust in the corner.
When Mrs Verrall mentioned this to a friend, the friend said: ‘But surely you
have
got a bust in the corner of your room?’ Mrs Verrall had some kind of filter, which looked — in the dark corner — very much like a bust on a pedestal.

Later, other ‘communicators’ joined in the game, and claimed to be Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney.
But the conundrums remained incredibly complicated.
One of Mrs Piper’s ‘sitters’ asked ‘Myers’ if he would indicate attempts to transmit Cross Correspondences by drawing a triangle enclosed in a circle.
A week later, Margaret Verrall received a message which ended with a triangle inside a circle, as well as a
triangle in a semicircle.
Two months later, ‘Myers’ spoke through Mrs Piper and stated that he had given Mrs Verrall a circle and tried to draw a triangle, but ‘it did not appear’.
Here we seem to have the typical muddle caused by sheets of frosted glass and obtuse secretaries.

Even this simple case has more complications.
Just after the suggestion that ‘Myers’ should use a triangle in a circle, Mrs Verrall produced a script that began: ‘… an anagram would be better.
Tell him that — rats, star, tars and so on … or again tears, stare.’ Five days later, Mrs Verrall’s script began with an anagram: Aster (Latin for star) and teras (Greek for wonder).
It also talked about hope, and quoted Browning.
Two weeks later, Mrs Piper’s script said: ‘I referred also to Browning again.
I referred to Hope and Browning … I also said star.’ A week after this, Helen Verrall (the daughter) received a script that began with a drawing of a star, and included a reference to Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But most readers might be forgiven for feeling that such complicated puzzles defeat their own purpose.

In 1908, another amateur medium joined the group.
She was Winifred Coombe-Tennant, who was related to Myers by marriage (Myers’s wife was the sister of Mrs Coombe-Tennant’s husband).
She began receiving messages signed by Myers and Gurney.
Then, in 1909, the script explained that Myers and Gurney were trying a new experiment — to make the words enter Mrs Coombe-Tennant’s mind spontaneously.
Soon she was not only ‘picking up’ words that floated into her mind, but receiving clear impressions of the personalities who were sending them; she could sense whether it was Myers or Gurney immediately.
The conversations were telepathic; on the first occasion, Myers’s voice — inside her head — asked ‘Can you hear what I am saying?’, and she replied mentally ‘Yes.’ The written scripts continued, and often included words that she had ‘heard’.
Later, ‘Myers’ asked her to bring Sir Oliver Lodge along to her automatic writing sessions.
Mrs Coombe-Tennant disliked the idea, but finally gave way.
Then Gurney asked if G.
W.
Balfour could also come along — he had been a friend of Gurney’s, and knew a great deal about philosophy.
The result was often tiresome for Mrs Coombe-Tennant.
She had to sit there, acting as ‘secretary’ in philosophical discussions that she did not understand.
After Balfour had given a lecture at Cambridge, ‘Sidgwick’ started a discussion with him about the mind-body relationship, epiphenomenalism and interactionism.
Although Mrs Coombe-Tennant (or, as she preferred to be known, Mrs Willett) was intelligent, she had no idea of what they were talking about, and at one point, as ‘Sidgwick’ tried to put words into her mind, she lost her temper and exploded: ‘I can’t think why people talk about such stupid things!’ Her irritation is far more convincing than any amount of ‘corroboration’.

Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willett scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for ‘life after death’.
For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney and Sidgwick went on communicating after death.
The problem remains: why did they not adopt some straightforward suggestion — like the idea of using a triangle in a circle — that would make them far more simple — and therefore more convincing to sceptics?
The answer — if we can accept James’s Law — is that they were not out to make wholesale conversions.
Which is, of course, just the kind of answer that will make the sceptics shrug contemptuously …

‘Myers’ was nothing if not persistent.
In November 1924, an Irish medium, Geraldine Cummins, was invited to tea with a retired captain and his wife; her friend Miss E.
B.
Gibbes was also invited along.
Geraldine Cummins, daughter of Professor Ashley Cummins, had tried automatic writing for the first time a year before, and found that she was a natural medium.
The captain and his wife were hoping to contact friends through the ‘ouija board’
^*
, a glass on a smooth surface, surrounded by the letters of the alphabet; when fingers of the sitters are laid lightly on top of the glass, it may move from letter to letter, spelling out words.
On this occasion, the board quickly spelled out the name ‘Frederick Myers’ and asked: ‘Do you know my friends?’ Asked which friends, he replied Barrett and Balfour.
He then explained that he wanted to establish a ‘cross correspondence’.
The captain and his wife were rather disappointed to have Myers communicating instead of their own friends, so the session came to an end.
But ‘Myers’ continued to communicate, and a week later announced his presence at another of Miss Cummins’s automatic writing sessions.
Asked about the
problems of communication, he explained that their method was to ‘impress’ the ‘inner mind’ of the medium with the message, and that the inner mind would then send it on to the brain.
‘The brain is a mere merchanism.
The inner mind is like soft wax, it receives our thoughts … but it must produce the words that clothe it.
That is what makes cross-correspondence so very difficult.’ This certainly seems to explain why the Cross Correspondences often sound so muddled.

Myers soon announced an interesting project — to try to communicate through Mrs Leonard’s ‘control’ ‘Feda’ immediately after communicating through Geraldine Cummins.
He suggested that the subject of the message should be telepathy and the views of his friend Lord Balfour.
Miss Gibbes pointed out that this was not a good idea, because she had recently been at a public meeting at which Balfour had spoken about telepathy, and it had been reported in the press.
So it could be objected that the medium was already thinking about the subject.
‘Myers’ agreed, and said that in that case, he would talk about the book he had intended to write before his death — a book expressing his conviction that life after death had been proved beyond all doubt.

The next day, Miss Gibbes hurried along to see Mrs Osborne Leonard, making quite sure she dropped no hint about her purpose in coming.
‘Feda’, Mrs Leonard’s ‘control’, said that there were several spirits hanging around waiting to communicate.
Miss Gibbes said she had somebody special in mind — an important man.
At this, ‘Feda’ announced that an elderly man was present.
Trying to ‘pick up’ his name, she could only get the impression of a capital M.
The man, she said, was showing her poetry, which was one of his main interests — ‘he seems to have been rather clever in understanding old poets — Virgil particularly’.
She then added the important comment: ‘He is keeping an appointment with you.’ Soon after this, she announced the man’s Christian name: ‘Fred — I keep getting Fred.’ (Myers was known to his friends as Fred.) And she added that Miss Gibbes had been in touch with Fred on the previous day.

The next time ‘Myers’ appeared at a session with Geraldine Cummins, he apologised for not coming over very clearly, and explained that he had had problems with ‘Feda’, who was too ‘lively’ (he obviously meant scatterbrained) and that there were too many other thoughts buzzing around the room at the time.
When Miss Gibbes said she thought he had ‘come over’
very well, ‘Myers’ replied; ‘Good, you surprise me.’ All the same, he said, he felt the session had been a failure.
What he had wanted to get across was that he had intended to write a book declaring his total belief in life after death.
But ‘Feda’ had simply not picked up what he was trying to say.
Miss Gibbes’s feeling was that in spite of this, the attempt to communicate through two mediums on two different days had been extremely successful.
It is difficult not to agree with her.
These sessions are also important because they give us a clear idea of the infuriating problems apparently faced by ‘spirits’ in trying to make contact with the living — rather like someone trying to make himself heard over a very bad telephone line, with continual interruptions from ‘crossed lines’.

The books that grew out of these communications —
The Road to Immortality
and
Beyond Human Personality
— will strike some readers as fascinating, and some as utterly tiresome rubbish.
The following is a typical sentence:

It sounds the kind of meaningless waffle churned out by fake messiahs.
But on closer examination, it not only makes sense, but very good sense.
This notion that mind is attempting to ‘insert’ itself into matter is common to all forms of evolutionary vitalism, from Hegel to Shaw.
It goes on to state that matter varies in degrees and kind — implying that it may be either solid or beyond the range of our senses.
(Elsewhere, ‘Myers’ states that it is all a question of rates of vibration — a view that has been made commonplace by modern physics.) The mind develops through this process of inserting itself into matter, and slowly develops power and a deeper sense of reality.
When we look at it again, we can see that the original impression of vagueness is due to the lack of punctuation, which gives it an air of ambiguity.
According to ‘Myers’, the ‘spirit’ who communicates has to use the medium’s own intellectual apparatus (and, presumably, her vocabulary).
And this, presumably, is why so much ‘spirit communication’ gives an impression of feeble-mindedness.
(‘Myers’ is the first to admit that many ‘spirits’
are
feeble-minded.)

This question of
what
is communicated must be left until later.
For the moment, the question is whether it can be seriously accepted as a communication from the ‘dead’.
And, all things considered, the answer to this must be in the affirmative.
If Geraldine Cummins and E.
B.
Gibbes are telling the truth about the circumstances in which the communications were received, then it is certainly a reasonable assumption that the same ‘spirit’ tried to speak through Miss Cummins and Mrs Leonard.

The sense of genuineness is even stronger in a later book of the ‘scripts’ of Geraldine Cummins,
Swan on a Black Sea
, which purports to be a series of communications from ‘Mrs Willett’ — Winifred Coombe-Tennant, the automatic writer who learned to ‘hear’ Myers and Gurney directly.
She died in 1956, at the age of 81, keeping her ‘Willett’ identity secret to the end.
A year later, William Salter, president of the Society for Psychical Research, asked Geraldine Cummins if she would try to ‘contact’ the mother of a certain Major Henry Coombe-Tennant.
Geraldine Cummins knew nothing whatever about Mrs Coombe-Tennant.
On 28 August 1957, ‘Astor’, Geraldine Cummin’s ‘control’, protested irritably about the difficult task she had been set — contacting the mother of someone she had never heard of.
But from Salter’s letter she picked up a feeling of ‘writing and secrets to be kept’.
Then she declared she had been approached by a fragile old lady in her eighties.
Asked for the old lady’s name, ‘Astor’ said: ‘Win or Wyn.’ And from that point onward, Winifred Coombe-Tennant took over, and produced an incredible body of personal reminiscences, full of accurate statements about Mrs Coombe-Tennant’s life.
It is also one of the most direct and personal documents ever ‘dictated’ by a so-called spirit.
Even if Geraldine Cummins had been a fraud, it would have been impossible for her to have found out so much intimate detail about the life of a woman she had never met.
The only other reasonable hypothesis is that Geraldine Cummins and Mrs Coombe-Tennant’s children collaborated to concoct the scripts, which seems unlikely.