The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

was addressed by a control who announced himself as ‘“‘ Grandfather West,” and hailed her as “ Rebecca.” Mr. Dennis Bradley, who records the incident, remarks that she became “emotional.” ‘This is the more understandable when we learn that “ Rebecca West” is a pen-name taken from a character in a play of Ibsen’s, and that the lady’s real surname is Fairfield. The possibility of a horde of ink-relations, if one may coin a phrase, parents, grandparents, cousins, and so forth being added to one’s blood-relations is surely enough to make anyone emotional.

Sir Conan Doyle received a long series of communications from a “control” named ‘‘ Pheneas,” who is declared to be a gentleman of prominence resident “thousands of years ago”? in Ur, before the time of Abraham. Archzologists may yet discover his home. He is not, however, a Sumerian, as one might have expected, but an Arab—an anachronism. He has a penchant for predicting earthquakes. And he seems to have contrived a bicycle accident for Sir Conan in order to oblige him to take a needed rest; he was helpful to Sir Conan in finding a house in the New Forest and he compared Sir Conan’s spiritualist book-shop to a “ great flare in a pea-soup mist.” In the spirit world he is known as the “Star of Hope” and “leaves a trail of joy behind him.” In his childhood (at

Ur) he was taught to fear God and that, he

explains, was all wrong. In that pagan city before the time of Abraham, he was perhaps fortunate to hear of God at all —even with a Presbyterian flavour. Later he “won a great battle against odds and that was what first drew the people’s attention to him.” It would. Such feats confer distinction on the most obscure. Afterwards people remarked ‘his glorious character.” At Ur he used to write “ through pieces of leafy stuff ’’—disdaining, it would seem, the clay tablet commonly used in that part of the world for cuneiform writing. There is a bookful of communications of this type from and about Pheneas published by Sir Conan Doyle. A large part of this mass is vaguely platitudinous and uninteresting, This Pheneas matter is an extreme instance of the type of material produced by a medium in the clairvoyant state. Generally the “control” represents itself as coming from less remote sources than Pseudonymia or Ur. More often than not, it claims to be the ghost of some recently deceased person known to some of the in-

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vestigators. Sir Oliver Lodge has been the means of publication of various books about lost sons, including his own son Raymond. ‘The Raymond “ communications ” are made up into a book together with Raymond’s very vivid letters home from the Western front, where he was killed in 1915. The contrast between the interest and conviction of these letters and his essentially futile communications through the medium is very great. Certain recognitions and identifications are achieved, and beyond that the alleged Raymond is either weakly incredible or platitudinous. And it would seem that his messages have now faded out. Earlier communications professing to come from the late Frederic William Myers and the late W. Richard Hodgson, through such celebrated mediums as Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Verrall, have proved equally lacking in novelty or profundity and equally have they faded out. The alleged posthumous minds of these acute persons appear as if flattened and faded. And they desist. They cannot keep it up—important though the business must be to them. But occasionally in the minor matters used for identification, the grasp of the medium upon small intimate points has been remarkable. Such a grasp is no evidence whatever for this mythology about controls and spirits which seems to be necessary for the operations of most (but not all) mediums; in many instances it has been of a type to sustain a provisional belief in telepathy, and a case may be made out for further systematic investigation by competent persons of possible elements of an unknown nature still awaiting recognition in the clairvoyant state.

The talking medium is, however, only one way in which these abnormal responses and communications ascribed to ghosts and other spirits are made. ‘Talking is not the usual initial stage. The development of mediumship often begins with rappings and the movement of articles of furniture. Then the rappings are codified. So many mean Yes, so many No. Next there is the spelling out of words by means of an alphabet of raps. As the communications continue, the gathering impatience of controls and mediums and observers alike is mitigated by the spoken word. Or communications may be made by automatic writing ; the experimenter thinks of something else and _ his hand writes automatically. Planchette is a little mobile apparatus which runs about under the hands of the transmitter, writing down messages. ‘There is indeed a great