Afterlife (16 page)

In fact, this plausible theory of psychic phenomena was put forward later in the nineteenth century by a brilliant newspaper editor, Thomson Jay Hudson, in a book called
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
(1893).
Hudson was fascinated by hypnotism, and by the unusual powers that people can develop under hypnosis.
He became convinced that man has two ‘selves’,
which he called the Objective Mind and the Subjective Mind.
The objective mind is the part of us that deals with everyday problems — the left brain.
The subjective mind is turned
inward;
it controls our inner being, what goes on inside us.
Normally, the subjective mind is impressed and overawed by the objective mind, so it hardly dares to express itself.
But when the objective mind is put to sleep by a hypnotist, the subjective mind can reveal its hidden powers.
In the late years of the nineteenth century, a hypnotist named Carl Hansen used to go around America, and his favourite trick was to make someone so rigid that he could be placed across two chairs like a plank — his head on one and his heels on the other — while the heavy Hansen jumped up and down on his stomach.
Such things as these, said Hudson, were the very least of the powers of the subjective mind (or, as we would say, right brain).
The subjective mind can perform miracles — in fact, the miracles of Jesus were probably merely the manifestation of his ‘subjective mind’.
It is the subjective mind, said Hudson, that is responsible for such mysterious phenomena as telepathy and clairvoyance.

He then turns his attention to ‘spiritism’.
The phenomena, he admits, are undeniable.
But they are not produced by the spirits of the dead.
What produces the phenomena is ‘essentially a human intelligence, and neither rises above nor sinks below the ordinary intelligence of humanity’.
And this is why spiritualism is so oddly boring and disappointing — because it is, as Nietzsche would say, ‘human, all too human’.
‘… we have already seen what remarkable powers the subjective mind possesses in certain lines of intellectual activity, and with what limitations it is hedged about; and we find that the intellectual feats of mediums possess all the characteristics belonging to subjective intelligence — the same wonderful powers and the same limitations’.

It is a convincing theory, and surprisingly ‘modern’; in all the years since
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
appeared, nothing more plausible or ‘scientific’ has been advanced.
But does it really cover
all
the facts?
Hudson’s solution to the problem of spirits is that ‘the subjective mind of the medium, being controlled by suggestion, believes itself to be the spirit of any deceased person whose name is suggested’.
But this fails to explain cases — like Swedenborg’s case of the ‘secret drawer’ mentioned in Chapter One — where the medium was able to produce information that was only known to the dead person.
And how did Sir Alexander Ogston, (as mentioned in Chapter Two), know that the R.A.M.C.
surgeon had died in another part of the hospital, unless his mind had, in some sense, left his body and wandered around the hospital?
We might explain these cases — and many others like them — by some form of telepathy: perhaps Ogston’s mind picked up the death-throes of the surgeon, perhaps Swedenborg contacted the mind of the carpenter who made the desk with the secret drawer … But the explanations are becoming absurdly complicated, and they violate the principle known in philosophy as Occam’s razor, which states that, in trying to solve a problem, it is best to look for the simplest and most economical explanation.
It seems, on the whole, more straightforward to accept the possibility of life after death — or the spirit’s independence of the body — as a working hypothesis.

The other major objection to spiritualism — that it somehow ‘reduces’ the spiritual to the material — was expressed by Dean Inge when he wrote: ‘The moment we are asked to accept scientific evidence for spiritual truth, the alleged spiritual truth becomes neither spiritual nor true.
It is degraded into an event in the phenomenal world.’
^*
And, oddly enough, Rudolf Steiner agreed with him, remarking: ‘The spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ This sounds baffling, in view of the fact that Steiner not only accepted the reality of life after death, but of reincarnation as well.

The explanation is important, and accounts for the general feeling of hostility that is so often aroused by Spiritualism.
One of Steiner’s basic doctrines was that ‘the supersensible world appears to us in such a way that it resembles our perceptions of the sense world’.
^**
So that he says of Swedenborg:

What Steiner is saying here is something that soon dawns on most readers of accounts of near-death experiences.
Some find themselves walking towards a celestial city, some find themselves in flowery meadows, some find themselves drawn towards a heavenly gateway or a whirlpool of light.
It looks as if everyone is interpreting the experience in terms of their own familiar concepts.
Steiner is suggesting that visionaries like Swedenborg, who have caught a glimpse of the ‘supersensible world’, are bound to interpret it according to their ingrained mental habits, and that this explains why the revelations of spiritualism often seem slightly ludicrous.

Oddly enough, Steiner thoroughly approved of Kardec, who obtained the material for his books from automatic writing.
This clearly suggests that what Steiner disliked so much about Spiritualism was its literal-mindedness — the trumpets and accordions floating through the air, the tables dancing around the room, the spirits made of ectoplasm.
His attitude could be compared to that of a Christian mystic who wishes to explain that heaven is
not
full of angels sitting around on clouds and playing harps.

At the same time, there is bound to be an element of unfairness in such an attitude.
Many mediums who started off by producing automatic writing later became ‘voice mediums’, and some even ‘materialisation mediums’.
It is impossible to draw a sharp line between them.
Steiner is not really criticising Spiritualism; he is criticising spiritualists.
Once we have grasped this, one of the major problems disappears — or at least, is revealed as a misunderstanding.

It was a misunderstanding that caused a great deal of trouble and bitterness in the early days of Spiritualism.
It was useless for investigators like Catherine Crowe and Allan Kardec to demand a fair hearing for the ‘supernatural’; scientists and intellectuals felt they were being asked to swallow a farrago of childish nonsense.
They pointed angrily at the Spiritualist churches that were springing up all over America, and asked how anybody could be serious about a religion started by two silly girls.
Their scepticism seemed to be justified in April 1851, when a relative of the Fox family, a certain Mrs Norman Culver, announced in the
New York Herald
that Kate and Margaretta Fox had shown her how they made the rapping noises with their knees and toes.
This may or may not have been
true.
The girls — and their mother — had become celebrities, and spent a great deal of time travelling around the East coast giving demonstrations.
Fate had promoted them from the boredom of small-town life in upper New York State to the equivalent of stardom.
If the spirits were occasionally uncooperative, it would have been surprising if they had not been tempted to do a little cheating.
What seems perfectly clear is that the original phenomena — bangs that were strong enough to make the house vibrate — could not have been caused by cracking the joints of the knees.
Neither could Kate and Margaretta have answered all the questions about the people in the room.
The accusations of fraud were just one more excuse for refusing to look dispassionately at the evidence.

The real tragedy in all this was that the cloud of polemical steam obscured a great deal of serious research into the paranormal.
In the 1840s, a German scientist named Baron Karl von Reichenbach had rediscovered Mesmer’s recognition that human beings can be affected by magnets.
Reichenbach found that sick people seemed to be more sensitive to magnetism than healthy ones, and his ‘sick sensitives’ could see different colours streaming out of the two poles of the magnet — red from the south pole, blue from the north.
They could detect the same emanations in crystals.
And — most important — they could see it streaming from the finger-ends of human beings.
Reichenbach called it ‘odyle’ or ‘the odic force’, and the announcement of his discovery caused widespread excitement when he first made it in 1845.
What Reichenbach had really discovered was the human ‘life field’, investigated in the 1930s by Harold Burr and F.
S.
C.
Northrop.
But by 1850, the rise of spiritualism made scientists feel that any kind of ‘unseen force’ was suspect; Reichenbach suddenly found himself as discredited and ridiculed as Mesmer.

Joseph Rodes Buchanan was a professor of medicine in Kentucky, who was intrigued when a bishop told him he could detect brass when he touched it — even in the dark — because it produced a bitter taste in his mouth.
Buchanan tested his students with various chemicals wrapped in brown paper packages, and found that many of them could distinguish them by touch.
He concluded that we have a ‘nerve aura’ streaming from the ends of our fingers, and that this can ‘taste’ things, just like the tongue.
Then he discovered that some of his best subjects could hold an unopened letter in their hands, and
‘sense’ the mood of the writer — in fact, some of them could describe the writer with remarkable accuracy.

Now all this fits in perfectly with Sir Oliver Lodge’s ‘tape recording’ theory about ghosts — that strong emotions can ‘imprint’ themselves on their surroundings, and that this ‘recording’ can be detected by people who are sensitive to such things.
Buchanan’s subjects were virtually human bloodhounds.
Buchanan called this strange faculty ‘psychometry’, and his book about it aroused widespread interest in 1848.
It caused a professor of geology named William Denton to try similar experiments on his students, using geological specimens.
The results were astounding.
^*
Lumps of volcanic lava brought visions of exploding mountains, mastodons’ teeth visions of primeval forests, meteorites visions of the depths of space.
Denton believed that he had discovered a ‘telescope into the past’, an unknown faculty through which man can travel backwards in time.
Regrettably, no one paid much attention to Denton’s book
The Soul of Things
, nor to Buchanan’s
Manual of Psychometry
.
Such things sounded too much like Spiritualism, and any scientist who took them seriously would have condemned himself to ridicule.

To some extent, spiritualists were themselves to blame for all this hostility.
They were too gullible, too prone to accept any banal nonsense as a message from ‘the other side’.
Hundreds of fake mediums took advantage of their credulity to practise barefaced impositions, and whenever one of them was caught in the act, scientists shook their heads wearily and made comparisons with the mediaeval witchcraft phenomenon.
Most of them had become too blasé even to say ‘I told you so.’ Genuine mediums like the Davenport brothers did themselves no good by appearing in theatres and performing hair-raising feats of escapology that would have done credit to Houdini.
They allowed themselves to be tied so tight that the ropes cut into their flesh and caused bruises; but after a brief period in a cabinet, they would step out with the ropes around their feet.
Professor Benjamin Pierce, a member of an investigating committee, sat between them in the cabinet.
As soon as the door was closed, a hand shot the bolt — both brothers were trussed up like mummies — and briefly felt the professor’s face before going on to untie the brothers.
Professor Loomis of the Georgetown Medical College admitted that the
manifestations were produced by a force with which he was unacquainted.
But this kind of testimony meant nothing compared to the fact that the brothers appeared on the same bill with conjurors and acrobats.

All this explains why so little was achieved by the most remarkable medium of the nineteenth century — perhaps of all time — Daniel Dunglas Home.
Home retained his powers for more than a quarter of a century, with the exception of a period of one year when, as we shall see, the ‘spirits’ decided to punish him.
He performed his astonishing feats in broad daylight.
He caused heavy articles of furniture to float up to the ceiling; he himself floated out of one window and in at another; he washed his face in blazing coals; he could make himself several inches taller at will.
He was tested dozens of times by committees of sceptics, and was never once caught out in anything that looked like fraud.
Yet posterity remembers him chiefly as the man Dickens called ‘that scoundrel Home’, and about whom Robert Browning wrote a scurrilous poem called ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’.