Mediums Rare (13 page)

The introduction of statistical methods for evaluation became standardized, using playing cards as “targets.”

Important test results were obtained with the use of a board divided into 48 squares.

Three series of telepathy tests were conducted, using the color and suit of playing cards exclusively.

A success ratio of more than eight million to one was achieved by these tests.

Tests were introduced to examine clairvoyance as a phenomenon differing from that of telepathy.

Special testing cards known as Zener cards were developed by Rhine.

Five simple shapes were utilized, one on each card, five cards with each symbol for a pack total of twenty-five.

Every known aspect of psychic ability was examined with the use of these cards.

In 1934, Rhine’s monograph entitled
Extra-Sensory Perception
first coined the term ESP and replaced the term “Psychical Research” with “Parapsychology.”

In 1933, and ’34, Rhine initiated tests to study the phenomenon of precognition (the prediction of future events) and psychokinesis (the power of mind over matter).

While none of this could, in any way, match the drama and/or flamboyance of the great nineteenth century mediums, it did endow the field with a definite aura of academic respectability.

The difference between the era of mediumship and the establishment of parapsychological testing was a simple but profound one.

In the nineteenth century, special mediums were examined and tested.

In the twentieth century, with few exceptions, only so-called “ordinary” people were examined and tested.

It is now generally believed that everyone has some psychic ability.

The testing procedure inaugurated by J. B. Rhine and his wife indicated that one in five persons demonstrated these abilities.

Rhine was quoted as saying, “The most experienced investigators have come more and more to accept the view that, while individuals differ greatly in their potentialities, most people—probably all—possess some of these parapsychical abilities in some degree.”

It is interesting to note that Dr. Rhine and his wife initially established all of their scientific procedures to investigate their major interest.

Survival after death.

Parapsychology today would interpret the incidents dramatized in this book in a far different way then they were interpreted when they first occurred.

The King Croesus incident, for example, appears to be an ancient precursor of what parapsychologists, today, call distance vision—or remote viewing—a form of “traveling” clairvoyance.

In this case, the clairvoyant ability of the sixth oracle allowed him to view and describe what the King of Lydia was doing at some distance, namely cooking a tortoise and a lamb in a brass cauldron.

Sister’s Teresa’s spontaneous rising into the air, on the other hand, would indicate a form of what today’s psi investigators would likely refer to as levitation.

This is an area of study not well advanced in parapsychology in that it appears to indicate an ability to negate the law of gravity, a feat even today’s more lenient parapsychologists would not be inclined to advocate in any way.

Swedenborg’s ability to “see” his house on fire three hundred miles distant would, of course, again be suggestive of distance vision.

His ability to locate the hidden drawer in the desk of the deceased Dutch ambassador would probably be interpreted, by contemporary parapsychological thought, as an example of telepathy in that the ambassador’s wife knew, if only sub-consciously, (via telepathy from her husband when he was alive) about the drawer’s existence.