The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (34 page)

Mirabelli died in 1951 after being hit by a car. But although few researchers took an interest in him during his lifetime, in 1973 the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research (BPP) appointed a team to compile a dossier on his extraordinary phenomena. Its members included the British writer-researcher Guy Lyon Playfair, who spread the word in Britain.

Mirabelli's sons, although sometimes highly sceptical of Spiritism, were adamant that their father had made astonishing things happen `almost every day, any time and any place' .9' His family were united in denying that he had cheated - or, indeed, that he had any motive for doing so.

Yet Theodore Besterman of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) had no hesitation in denouncing Mirabelli as a fraud, even though he had himself witnessed examples of apparent psychokinesis (mind over matter) in his presence, and seen the medium write a 1,700-word automatic script in under an hour in French - a language he did not know. (He also produced intelligible automatic writing in Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic, just like 'Hel'en Smith' and her alleged Martian, and Kelley and Enochian.)

The mysterious movement of objects Besterman ascribed to the use of `hidden threads', although neither he nor the other members of the research team managed to explain how they could have produced such a variety of phenomena. Despite Besterman's scepticism, however, Professor Hans Driesch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and May C. Walker of the American SPR found Mirabelli `most impressive',95 while Guy Lyon Playfair also discovered no evidence of cheating.

Perhaps the last word should be given to Dr Felipe Ache, who hazarded that Mirabelli's strange gifts were `the result of the radiation of nervous forces that we all have but that Mirabelli has in extraordinary excess.' In other words, perhaps we all have such astounding abilities in latent form, but only certain rare people, with a distinct psychological and perhaps even physiological make-up, will ever possess the weird talent to activate it. If it means conjuring up putrefying corpses, perhaps we should be grateful for that.

Another major case from the annals of the Golden Age of physical mediumship reveals the difficulty in separating apparently genuine phenomena from fraud, at least on a conscious level as far as the medium was concerned. And it shows how dramatic, but often unpleasant, the world of the seance room once was.

Eusapia Palladino remains the most thoroughly investigated medium in the history of psychical research, certainly over a protracted and chronological period. A Neapolitan, she was studied for more than twenty years by at least fifty scientists - many of them internationally acclaimed - from Italy, France, Poland, Russia, England and the US.

Eusapia's life began inauspiciously. Her mother died shortly after the future medium was born in 1854, and her father was murdered when she was twelve. Perhaps this trauma was in some way the cause of the phenomena that surrounded her first attendance at a seance the following year, at which the furniture moved towards her and rose into the air.

Then in 1872 the English wife of one Damiani, an Italian psychical researcher, attended a seance in London at which a spirit calling itself `John King' came through and informed her that there was a very powerful medium in Naples who was the reincarnation of his daughter Katie King, already a well known haunter of seance rooms herself. The ghostly John King then gave the complete address of the house where this reincarnation could be found. In due course, Damiani followed this up, finding the house - and Eusapia Palladino. Much impressed, as well he might be, Damiani helped to foster the Neapolitan's powers.

Soon she was a sensation in the neighbourhood, but it took twenty years for her talents to reach the notice of local academic, Professor Ercole Chiaia - and thence of the waiting world. In 1888 he appealed for scientists to investigate her gifts in a letter to the eminent criminologist - and extreme sceptic - Professor Cesare Lombroso. This was a critical moment in Eusapia's career, after which nothing was ever the same for her.

The investigations begin

In 1892 Professor Lombroso, together with five scientific colleagues put the medium through her paces at a series of sittings, finally pronouncing himself satisfied that her phenomena were genuine. This was only a start: the following year a seven-man commission of distinguished academics from several fields was set up under Professor Schiaparelli, director of the University of Milan. After a full seventeen sittings, they pronounced her genuine.

Their published report included this pronouncement:

`It is impossible to count the number of times that a hand appeared and was touched by one of us. Suffice it to say that doubt was no longer possible. It was indeed a living human hand which we saw and touched, while at the same time the bust and the arms of the medium remained visible, and her hands were held by those on either side of her.'vb

Professor Enrico Morselli, who studied Eusapia closely over a long period in his laboratory in Genoa, drew up a list of thirty-nine varieties of phenomena he observed her produce at close quarters and under rigorous test conditions.

Before long, the obscure Neapolitan had become a psychic superstar, famous across the western world. Scientists from as far away as Russia's St Petersburg flocked to Naples to witness her phenomena for themselves - not all credulous fools by any means. Most put her through her paces in a highly critical frame of mind, having searched both her and the premises beforehand very thoroughly. She also visited Rome, Genoa, Palermo, Turin, Paris, Warsaw - and Cambridge, where she was the guest of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), never known for its credulity.

It was at this point that criticism began to sour Eusapia's career. One of the witnesses was Dr Richard Hodgson, who suspected she was an incorrigible cheat. Although during the experiment he was supposed to control her movements, in fact he relaxed his guard - and Eusapia immediately seized the opportunity to fake the phenomena. As a result, the SPR branded her a fraud, but this created a rift among the international community of psychical researchers: many across Europe declared that they were aware she would fake it if she could, but if denied the opportunity, her phenomena were genuine.

Perhaps tellingly, Camille Flammarion, the leading French astronomer, who also tested Eusapia, noted that as the medium became increasingly tense the phenomena became nastier and more destructive. He wrote:

The sofa came forward when she looked at it, then recoiled before her breath; all the instruments were thrown pell mell upon the table; the tambourine rose almost to the height of the ceiling; the cushions took part in the sport, overturning everything on the table; [one participant] was thrown from his chair. This chair - a heavy dining-room chair of black walnut, with stuffed seat - rose into the air, came up on the table with a great clatter, then pushed off .. 97

Because reports continued to be positive about Eusapia, the SPR examined her again, sending the very sceptical team of Everard Feilding, Hereward Carrington and W. W. Baggally out to Naples. But after holding seances at the Hotel Victoria, even they were compelled to admit defeat, concluding that phenomena including the movement of objects, mysterious lights, raps and materializations were due to an agency `wholly different from mere physical dexterity on her part.' Feilding was moved to write:

For the first time I have the absolute conviction that our observation is not mistaken. I realize as an appreciable fact of life that, from an empty curtain, I have seen hands and heads come forth, and that behind the empty curtain I have been seized by living fingers, the existence and position of the nails of which were perceptible. I have seen this extraordinary woman, sitting outside the curtain, held hand and foot, visible to myself, by my colleagues, immobile, except for the occasional straining of a limb while some entity within the curtain has over and over again pressed my hand in a position clearly beyond her reach 9s

However, despite this glowing endorsement - and from such a very unlikely source - Eusapia went on to cheat again, and was caught once more. This was during her seven-month tour of the US in 1909, when an investigator managed to get under the cabinet curtain and saw that `she had simply freed her foot from her shoe and with an athletic backward movement of the leg was reaching out and fishing with her toes for the guitar and the table in the cabinet.'99

Yet the contradictions multiplied. Even Herbert Thurston, the great conjuror and scourge of fake mediums (and contributor to Samri Frikell's classic sceptics' guide, Spirit Mediums Exposed) had to admit that table levitations in her presence: were not due to fraud and were not performed by the aid of her feet, knees or hands.' °°

Levitation is a particularly interesting phenomenon. Montague Summers fully believed that while saints reveal their holiness by rising unaided into thin air - the seventeenth-century monk Joseph of Cupertino, later canonized, regularly flew some distance, to the high altar or the tops of trees101 - anyone else who exhibited similar phenomena must be acting under Satanic power. However, this seems unlikely. Even Summers would have been most perplexed when, some years ago, there was a playground craze for levitation in which groups of schoolchildren would levitate one of their number using a simple, invented pseudo-magical ritual. There is no doubt that it works, and that real people have floated over the heads of their friends without benefit of special effects, trickery or even a safety net. The ability to flout even the law of gravity by just about anyone in the right frame of mind (whatever that might be) removes the phenomenon of levitation from the exclusivity of either the annals of the saints or the history of witches.

However, another of Eusapia Palladino's rare talents takes us back to the unpleasant aspects of physical mediumship, almost to necromancy.

Ingenious ectoplasm

Interestingly, Eusapia herself admitted that she sometimes cheated, explaining - perhaps ingeniously - that sceptics could will her to do so when she was in the highly susceptible state of deep trance. However, many of her admirers suggested that some of the accusations of cheating could be the result of an error - that as the 'ectoplasm' that exuded from her often took the shape of hands and feet, perhaps that is what her accusers saw moving suspiciously.

Ectoplasm was a greyish-white substance, often similar to mucus, that allegedly oozed from all the orifices of the entranced medium, like something that might be more successfully banished by penicillin than an exorcist. The ectoplasm would gradually take the shape of human faces or figures, which sitters often recognized as their deceased loved ones. However, the phenomenon appears to be a thing of the past: sceptics say it no longer appears in seances because fake mediums are afraid modem infra-red photography would reveal their grubby secrets to the world. The eminent astrophysicist and active psychical researcher, Glasgow's Professor Archie Roy, told me many years ago that when he managed to come close to some ectoplasm it `smelt like B.O.' By no means a sceptic, Professor Roy added, `Which wasn't surprising, because of where it was kept .. 1102

Most known ectoplasm turned out to be nothing more than lengths of cheesecloth, regurgitated, or expelled from other orifices, which says more for the mediums' powers of muscle control than for evidence of the afterlife. However, some photographs of alleged ectoplasm show some other kind of substance - unknown or at least unidentified - at work as a moving and growing hand or face. It seems quite horrible and proves nothing, certainly not the existence of an afterlife, but it could just as easily be paranormal as suspiciously normal.

In the case of Eusapia Palladino, her ectoplasm turned itself into useful rods and levers, known as `pseudopods', which were seen under conditions of infra-red photography, to raise objects and tilt tables. (And significantly, not even Herbert Thurston suggested that these were real rods and levers, somehow secreted about the medium's person.)

At many of Eusapia's seances, humanoid phantoms materialized, apparently created out of ectoplasm, and were seen and felt by investigators. Professor Morselli and fellow researchers witnessed an astonishing example of this on 1 March 1902 in Genoa. The professor examined the medium closely for smuggled aids, then tied her to a camp bed very thoroughly. She remained tied up although in `fairly good light' six ghostly figures appeared.

Professor Charles Richet, a world-renowned physiologist and Nobel Laureate joined in the general endorsement of her gifts, saying: `More than 30 very sceptical scientific men were convinced, after long testing, that there proceeded from her body material forms having the appearance of life.' 103 Dr Joseph Venzano would agree: at a seance he held on 16 June 1901, several ghostly hands materialized and stroked the dumbfounded sitters. Then the disembodied hands took hold of Venzano's:

When my hand, guided by another hand, and lifted upwards, met the materialized form, I had immediately the impression of touching a broad forehead, on the upper part of which was a quantity of rather long, thick, and very fine hair. Then, as my hand was gradually led upwards, it came in contact with a slightly aquiline nose, and, lower still, with moustaches and a chin with a peaked beard.

From the chin, the hand was then raised somewhat, until, coming in front of the open mouth, it was gently pushed forward, and my forefinger, still directed by the guiding hand, entered the cavity of the mouth, where it was caused to rub against the margin of the upper dental arch, which, towards the right extremity, was wanting in four molar teeth.104

The astounded Dr Venzano recognized the face he had just felt as that of a deceased relative. Unsure of which teeth the man had missing, he checked his dental records - and discovered they were four molars ...

However, it was only in Italy that Eusapia continued to be praised. After her exposure as a cheat in the US, her fate was sealed in the Anglo-Saxon world. She died in 1918, an enigma to the end, her apparent triumphs still debated today. But despite her cheating and the weirdness of her phenomena, Eusapia represented what may be seen as a typical Luciferan raft of miracle: always ambiguous, equivocal, perhaps shifting rapidly from positive to negative and back again. Professor Richet wrote tellingly: