Cock Lane and Common-Sense

There were other analogies between modern, ancient, and savage spiritualism. The medium was swathed, or tied up, like the Davenport Brothers, like Eskimo and Australian conjurers, like the Highland seer in the bull’s hide. 51 The medium was understood to be a mere instrument like a flute, through which the ‘control,’ the god or spirit, spoke. 52 This is still the spiritualistic explanation of automatic speech. Eusebius goes so far as to believe that ‘earthbound spirits’ do speak through the medium, but a much simpler theory is obvious. 53 Indeed where automatic performances of any sort – by writing, by the kind of ‘Ouija’ or table pointing to letters, as described by Ammianus Marcellinus (xxix. 29) – or by speaking, are concerned, we have the aid of psychology, and the theory of ‘unconscious cerebration’ to help us. But when we are told the old tales of whirring noises, of ‘bilocation,’ of ‘levitation,’ of a mystic light, we are in contact with more difficult questions.

In brief, the problem of spiritualism in general presents itself to us thus: in ancient, modern, and savage thaumaturgy there are certain automatic phenomena. The conjurer, priest, or medium acts, or pretends to act, in various ways beyond his normal consciousness. Savages, ancient mystics, and spiritualists ascribe his automatic behaviour to the control of spirits, gods or demons. No such hypothesis is needed.

On the other side, however, are phenomena not automatic, ‘spiritual’ lights, and sounds; interferences with natural laws, as when bodies are lifted in the air, or are elongated, when fire does not fasten on them, and so on. These phenomena, in ancient times, followed on the performance of certain mystic rites. They are now said to occur without the aid of any such rites. Gods and spirits are said to cause them, but they are only attained in the presence of certain exceptional persons, mediums, saints, priests, conjurers. Clearly then, not the rites, but the peculiar constitution of these individuals is the cause (setting imposture aside) of the phenomena, of the hallucinations, of the impressions, or whatever they are to be styled. That is to say, witnesses, in other matters credible, aver that they receive these peculiar impressions in the society of certain persons and not in that of people in general. Now these impressions are, everywhere, in every age and stage of civilisation, essentially identical. Is it stretching probability almost beyond what it will bear, to allege that all the phenomena, in the Arctic circle as in Australia, in ancient Alexandria as in modern London, are, always, the result of an imposture modelled on savage ideas of the supernatural?

If so we are reduced to the choice between actual objective facts of unknown origin (frequently counterfeited of course), and the theory, – which really comes to much the same thing, – of identical and collective hallucinations in given conditions. On either hypothesis the topic is certainly not without interest for the student of human nature. Even if we could, at most, establish the fact that people like Iamblichus, Mr. Crookes, Lord Crawford, Jesuits in Canada, professional conjurers in Zululand, Spaniards in early Peru, Australian blacks, Maoris, Eskimo, cardinals, ambassadors, are similarly hallucinated, as they declare, in the presence of priests, diviners, Home, Zulu magicians, Biraarks, Jossakeeds, angakut, tohungas, and saints, and Mr. Stainton Moses, still the identity of the false impressions is a topic for psychological study. Or, if we disbelieve this cloud of witnesses, if they voluntarily fabled, we ask, why do they all fable in exactly the same fashion? Even setting aside the animistic hypothesis, the subject is full of curious neglected problems.

Once more, if we admit the theory of intentional imposture by saints, angakut, Zulu medicine-men, mediums, and the rest, we must grant that a trick which takes in a professional conjurer, like Mr. Kellar, is a trick well worthy of examination. How did his Zulu learn the method of Home, of the Egyptian diviners, of St. Joseph of Cupertino? 54 Each solution has its difficulties, while practical investigation is rarely possible. We have no Home with us, at present, and the opportunity of studying his effects carefully was neglected. It was equally desirable to study them whether he caused collective hallucinations, or whether his effects were merely those of ordinary, though skilful, conjuring. For Home, whatever his moral character may have been, was a remarkable survival of a class of men familiar to the mystic Iamblichus, to the savage races of the past and present, and (as far as his marvels went) to the biographers of the saints. ‘I am one of those,’ says the Zulu medicine-man, in Mr. Rider Haggard’s Allan’s Wife, ‘who can make men see what they do not see.’ The class of persons who are said to have possessed this power appear, now and then, in all human history, and have at least bequeathed to us a puzzle in anthropology. This problem has recently been presented, in what may be called an acute form, by the publication of the ‘Experiences of Mr. Stainton Moses’. 55 Mr. Moses was a clergyman and schoolmaster; in both capacities he appears to have been industrious, conscientious, and honourable. He was not devoid of literature, and had contributed, it is said, to periodicals as remote from mysticism as Punch, and the Saturday Review. He was a sportsman, at least he was a disciple of our father, Izaak Walton. ‘Most anglers are quiet men, and followers of peace, so simply wise as not to sell their consciences to buy riches, and with them vexation, and a fear to die,’ says Izaak.

In early middle age, about 1874, Mr. Moses began to read such books as Dale Owen’s, and to sit ‘attentive of his trembling’ table, by way of experiment. He soon found that tables bounded in his presence, untouched. Then he developed into a regular ‘medium’. Inanimate objects came to him through stone walls. Scent of all sorts, and, as in the case of St. Joseph of Cupertino, of an unknown sort, was scattered on people in his company. He floated in the air. He wrote ‘automatically’. Knocks resounded in his neighbourhood, in the open air. ‘Lights’ of all varieties hovered in his vicinity. He spoke ‘automatically,’ being the mouth-piece of a ‘spirit,’ and very dull were the spirit’s sermons. After a struggle he believed in ‘spirits,’ who twanged musical notes out in his presence. He became editor of a journal named Light; he joined the Psychical Society, but left it when the society pushed materialism so far as to demonstrate that certain professional mediums were convicted swindlers.

The evidence for his marvels is the testimony of a family, perfectly respectable, named Speer, and of a few other witnesses whom nobody can suspect of conscious inaccuracy. There remain, as documents, his books, his MS. notes, and other corroborative notes kept by his friend Dr. Speer, a sceptic, and other observers.

It is admitted that Mr. Moses was not a cautious logician, his inferences are problematic, his generalisations hasty. As to the facts, it is equally difficult to believe in them, and to believe that Mr. Moses was a conscious impostor, and his friends easy dupes. He cannot have been an impostor unconsciously in a hypnotic state, in a ‘trance,’ because his effects could not have been improvised. If they were done by jugglery, they required elaborate preparations of all sorts, which must have been made in full ordinary consciousness. If we fall back on collective hallucination, then that hallucination is something of world-wide diffusion, ancient and continuous, for the effects are those attributed by Iamblichus to his mystics, by the Church to her saints, by witnesses to the ‘possessed,’ by savages to medicine-men, and by Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford to D. D. Home. Of course we may be told that all lookers-on, from Eskimo to Neoplatonists and men of science, know what to expect, and are hallucinated by their own expectant attention. But, when they expect nothing, and are disappointed by having to witness prodigies, the same old prodigies, what is the explanation?

The following tabular statement, altered from that given by Mr. Myers in his publication of Mr. Moses and Dr. Speer’s MS. notes, will show the historical identity of the phenomena. Mr. Moses was the agent in all; those exhibited by other ancient and modern agents are marked with a cross.

1. ‘Intelligent Raps.’

2. ‘Movement of objects untouched.’

3. ‘Levitation’ (floating in air of seer).

4. Disappearance and Reappearance of objects. The ‘object’ being the medium in some cases.

5. Passage of Matter through Matter.

6. Direct writing. That is, not by any detected human agency.

7. Sounds made on instruments supernormally.

8. Direct sounds. That is, by no detected human agency.

9. Scents.

10. Lights.

11. Objects ‘materialised.’

12. Hands materialised, touched or seen.

There are here twelve miracles! Home and Iamblichus add to Mr. Moses’s répertoire the alteration of the medium’s height or bulk. This feat still leaves Mr. Moses ‘one up,’ as regards Home, in whose presence objects did not disappear, nor did they pass through stone walls. The questions are, to account for the continuity of collective hallucinations, if we accept that hypothesis, and to explain the procedure of Mr. Moses, if he were an impostor. He did not exhibit before more than seven or eight private friends, and he gained neither money nor dazzling social success by his performances.

This page in the chapter of ‘demoniac affections’ is thus still in the state of ébauche. Mr. Moses believed his experiences to be ‘demoniac affections,’ in the Neoplatonic sense. Could his phenomena have been investigated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Parker, Messrs. Maskelyne and Cook, and Professor Huxley, the public mind might have arrived at some conclusion on the subject. But Mr. Moses’s chief spirit, known in society as ‘Imperator,’ declined to let strangers look on. He testified his indignation in a manner so bruyant, he so banged on tables, that Mr. Moses and his friends thought it wiser to avoid an altercation.

This exclusiveness of ‘Imperator’ certainly donne furieusement à penser. If spirits are spirits they may just as well take it for understood that performances ‘done in a corner’ are of no scientific value. But we are still at a loss for a ‘round’ and satisfactory hypothesis which will colligate all the alleged facts, and explain their historical continuity. We merely state that continuity as a historical fact. Marvels of savages, Neoplatonists, saints of Church or Covenant, ‘spontaneous’ phenomena, Mediumistic phenomena, all hang together in some ways. Of this the Church has her own explanation.

COMPARATIVE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

A Party at Ragley Castle. The Miraculous Conformist. The Restoration and Scepticism. Experimental Proof of Spiritual Existence. Glanvill. Boyle. More. The Gentleman’s Butler. ‘Levitation.’ Witchcraft. Movements of Objects. The Drummer of Tedworth. Haunted Houses. Rerrick. Glenluce. Ghosts. ‘Spectral Evidence.’ Continuity and Uniformity of Stories. St. Joseph of Cupertino, his Flights. Modern Instances. Theory of Induced Hallucination. Ibn Batuta. Animated Furniture. From China to Peru. Rapping Spirit at Lyons. The Imposture at Orleans. The Stockwell Mystery. The Demon of Spraiton. Modern Instances. The Wesleys. Theory of Imposture. Conclusion.

In the month of February, 1665, there was assembled at Ragley Castle as curious a party as ever met in an English country-house. The hostess was the Lady Conway, a woman of remarkable talent and character, but wholly devoted to mystical speculations. In the end, unrestrained by the arguments of her clerical allies, she joined the Society of Friends, by the world called Quakers. Lady Conway at the time when her guests gathered at Ragley, as through all her later life, was suffering from violent chronic headache. The party at Ragley was invited to meet her latest medical attendant, an unlicensed practitioner, Mr. Valentine Greatrakes, or Greatorex; his name is spelled in a variety of ways. Mr. Greatrakes was called ‘The Irish Stroker’ and ‘The Miraculous Conformist’ by his admirers, for, while it was admitted that Dissenters might frequently possess, or might claim, powers of miracle, the gift, or the pretension, was rare among members of the Established Church. The person of Mr. Greatrakes, if we may believe Dr. Henry Stubbe, physician at Stratford-on-Avon, diffused a pleasing fragrance as of violets. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, it will be remembered, tells the same story about himself in his memoirs. Mr. Greatrakes ‘is a man of graceful personage and presence, and if my phantasy betrayed not my judgement,’ says Dr. Stubbe, ‘I observed in his eyes and meene a vivacitie and spritelinesse that is nothing common’.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

1

Fortnightly Review, February 1866, and in a lecture, 1895.

2

This diary was edited for private circulation, by a son of Mr. Proctor’s, who remembers the disturbances.

3

See essays here on Classical and Savage Spiritualism.

4

This was merely a cheerful obiter dictum by the learned President.

5

Not the house agent.

6

Porphyry, Epistola xxi. Iamblichus, De Myst., iii. 2.

7

The Port Glasgow story is in Report of the Dialectical Society, p. 200. The flooring was torn up; walls, ceilings, cellars, were examined by the police, and attempts were made to imitate the noises, without success. In this case, as at Rerrick in the end of the seventeenth century, and elsewhere, ‘the appearance of a hand moving up and down’ was seen by the family, ‘but we could not catch it: it quietly vanished, and we only felt cold air’. The house was occupied by a gardener, Hugh McCardle. Names of witnesses, a sergeant of police, and others, are appended.

8

Report of Dialectical Society, p. 86.

9

For ourselves, we have never seen or heard a table give any responses whatever, any more than we have seen the ghosts, heard the raps, or viewed the flights of men in the air which we chronicle in a later portion of this work.

10

Report on Spiritualism, Longmans, London, 1871.

11

Report, p. 229.

12

Mr. Wallace may be credited with scoring a point in argument. Dr. Edmunds had maintained that no amount of evidence would make him believe in certain obvious absurdities, say the lions in Trafalgar Square drinking out of the fountains. Mr. Wallace replied: ‘The asserted fact is either possible or not possible. If possible, such evidence as we have been considering would prove it; if not possible, such evidence could not exist.’ No such evidence exists for the lions; for the phenomena of so-called spiritualism, we have consentient testimony in every land, period and stage of culture. That certainly makes a difference, whatever the weight and value of the difference may be.

13

This illustration is not Mr. Lecky’s.

14

We have here thrown together a crowd of odd experiences. The savages’ examples are dealt with in the next essay; the Catholic marvels in the essay on ‘Comparative Psychical Research’. For Pascal, consult L’Amulette de Pascal, by M. Lélut; for Iamblichus, see essay on ‘Ancient Spiritualism’. As to Welsh, the evidence for the light in which he shone is printed in Dr. Hill Burton’s Scot Abroad (i. 289), from a Wodrow MS. in Glasgow University. Mr. Welsh was minister of Ayr. He was meditating in his garden late at night. One of his friends ‘chanced to open a window towards the place where he walked, and saw clearly a strange light surround him, and heard him speak strange words about his spiritual joy’. Hill Burton thinks that this verges on the Popish superstition. The truth is that eminent ministers shared the privileges of Mediums and of some saints. Examples of miraculous cures by ministers, of clairvoyance on their part, of spirit-raps attendant on them, and of prophecy, are current on Presbyterian hagiology. No ministers, to our knowledge, were ‘levitated,’ but some nearly flew out of their pulpits. Patrick Walker, in his Biographia Presbyteriana, vol. ii. p. 21, mentions a supernatural light which floated round The Sweet Singers, Meikle John Gibb and his friends, before they burned a bible. Mr. Gibb afterwards excelled as a pow-wow, or Medicine Man, among the Red Indians.

15

Teutonic Mythology, English translation, vol. ii. p. 514. He cites Pertz, i. 372.

16

A very early turning table, of 1170, is quoted from Giraldus Cambrensis by Dean Stanley in his Canterbury Memorials, p. 103. The table threw off the weapons of Becket’s murderers. This was at South Malling. See the original in Wharton’s Anglia Sacra, ii. 425.

17

See Mr. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, chap, xi., for the best statement of the theory.

18

Petitot, Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, p. 434.

19

Very possibly the whirring roar of the turndun, or ρομβος, in Greek, Zuñi, Yoruba, Australian, Maori and South African mysteries is connected with this belief in a whirring sound caused by spirits. See Custom and Myth.

20

Proc. S. P. R., xix. 180.

21

Brough Smyth, i. 475.

22

Auckland, 1863, ch. x.

23

εν τινι στερεω χωριω, ωστε μη επιπολυ διαχεισθαι. – Iamblichus.

24

Kohl, Kitchi-Gami, p. 278.

25

Hind’s Explorations in Labrador, ii. 102.

26

Rowley, Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, p. 217: cited by Mr. Tylor.

27

Quoted in La Table Parlante, a French serial, No. I, p. 6.

28

Colonel A. B. Ellis, in his work on the Yorubas (1894), reports singular motions of a large wooden cylinder. It is used in ordeals.

29

The Natural and Morall History of the East and West Indies, p. 566, London, 1604.

30

February 9, 1872. Quoted by Mr. Tylor, in Primitive Culture, ii. 39, 1873.

31

Revue des Deux Mondes, 1856, tome i. p. 853.

32

Hallucinations, English translation, p. 182, London, 1859.

33

Laws, xi.

34

Records of the Past, iv. 134-136.

35

The references are to Parthey’s edition, Berlin, 1857.

36

και λεyομεναι αναyκαι θεων, 4, 3.

37

All are, for Porphyry, ‘phantasmogenetic agencies’.

38

Jean Bréhal, par P.P. Bélon et Balme, Paris, s. a., p. 105.

39

Procès de Condemnation, i. 75.

40

Appended to Beaumont’s work on Spirits, 1705.

41

See Mr. Lillie’s Modern Mystics, and, better, Mr. Myers, in Proceedings S. P. R., Jan., 1894.

42

Origen, or whoever wrote the Philosophoumena, gives a recipe for producing a luminous figure on a wall. For moving lights, he suggests attaching lighted tow to a bird, and letting it loose. Maury translates the passages in La Magie, pp. 58-59. Spiritualists, of course, will allege that the world-wide theory of spectral lights is based on fact, and that the hallucinations are not begotten by subjective conditions, but by a genuine ‘phantasmogenetic agency’. Two men of science, Baron Schrenk-Notzing, and Dr. Gibotteau, vouch for illusions of light accompanying attempts by living agents to transfer a hallucinatory vision of themselves to persons at a distance (Journal S. P. R., iii. 307; Proceedings, viii. 467). It will be asserted by spiritualists that disembodied agencies produce the same effect in a higher degree.

43

θορυβωδη μεν φερομενα τα ενυλα.

44

ηνικα αν αμαρτημα τι συμβαινη περι την θεουρyικην τεχνην.

45

Damascius, ap. Photium.

46

παθη εκ μικρων αιθυyματων εyειρομενα.

47

Life of Hugh Macleod (Noble, Inverness). As an example of the growth of myth, see the version of these facts in Fraser’s Magazine for 1856. Even in a sermon preached immediately after the event, it was said that the dreamer found the pack by revelation of his dream!

48

iii. 2. δοιζομενου εν τω εισιεναι.

49

Greek Papyri in the British Museum; edited by F. G. Kenyon, M.A., London, 1893.

50

See notice in Classical Review, February, 1894.

51

See oracles in Eusebius, Praep. Evang., v. 9. The medium was tied up in some way, he had to be unloosed and raised from the ground. The inspiring agency, in a hurry to be gone, gave directions for the unbinding. παυεο δη προφρων οαρων, αναπαυε δε φωτα ραμνων εκλυων πολιον τυπον, ηδ απο yυιων Νειλωην οθονην χερσιν στιβαραις απαειρας. The binding of the Highland seer in a bull’s hide is described by Scott in the Lady of the Lake. A modern Highland seer has ensconced himself in a boiler! The purpose is to concentrate the ‘force’.

52

Praep. Evang., v. 8.

53

Ibid., v. 15, 3.

54

Dr. Hodgson, in Proceedings S. P. R., Jan., 1894, makes Mr. Kellar’s evidence as to Indian ‘levitation’ seem far from convincing! As a professional conjurer, and exposer of spiritualistic imposture, Mr. Kellar has made statements about his own experiences which are not easily to be harmonised.

55

Proceedings S. P. R. Jan., 1894.