FOOTNOTES:
[19] Fully reported in the Journal of the S.P.R. for December, 1908.
[20] Weekly Dispatch, May 18th, 1919.
[21] “Raymond,” pp. 182, 183.
[22] ibid., p. 273, and see also pp. 276–277 for table phenomena.
Chapter VI
AUTOMATIC WRITING
The Society for Psychical Research has for many years given close attention to the subject of automatic writing. This has been defined as “the faculty possessed by certain people of holding a pencil over a sheet of paper and writing coherent and intelligible sentences without any conscious volition.” Sometimes the medium sits entranced with averted face, and the circle looks on while “the moving finger writes.” The script, in most cases, purports to emanate from a human being who has passed into the Unseen.
I
STAINTON MOSES
The most remarkable automatist of the Victorian period was the Rev. William Stainton Moses (“M.A., Oxon”), whose “Spirit Teachings” are still widely read, and whose character was regarded with admiration by men like F. W. H. Myers and Sir W. F. Barrett. Mr. Moses, who was a clergyman of the Church of England, and a master at University College School, revealed to a curious world the existence of a group of “spirits,” who concealed their identity, for the most part, under such pseudonyms as “Imperator,” “Rector,” “Mentor,” and “Doctor.” It has often been pointed out that the messages of “Imperator,” who was a spirit of a highly didactic and clerical turn of mind, were very much what the curate William Stainton Moses might have written of his own volition. Their main purpose appears to have been the inculcation of Broad Church theology.
Mr. Podmore considered that Stainton Moses was “perhaps the most remarkable private medium of the last generation,” but of his trance utterances this critic said: “They contain no evidence of supernormal faculty.”
Mr. Arthur E. Waite, in a passage on automatic script, refers to “that dark border-line of mystery where deception and self-deception meet and join hands.”
“It is, indeed, open to question,” he says, “whether under some aspects ‘the spirit teachings,’ for example, obtained through the mediumship of the Rev. Stainton Moses are not, on the whole, more hopeless than the quality of the trance address delivered in a back street on a Saturday night before a circle of mechanics, for the simple reason that from the normal gifts of the medium we had fair reason to look for better.”
The revelations conveyed through “Spirit Teachings” suggest to this experienced occultist that “if the dead have spoken at any time since the beginning of the Rochester knockings they have said nothing to arrest our attention or to warrant a continued communication.” Mr. Podmore, in “Modern Spiritualism,” mentions that “Imperator” and his associates were supposed to represent personages of some importance on earth. Their real names were revealed by Stainton Moses to one or two friends. After the migration of these “controls” to Mrs. Piper, “they more than once professed, as a proof of identity, to give their names, but their guesses have been incorrect.”
Mr. Podmore thought that the clue to the enigma of Stainton Moses’ life “must be sought in the annals of morbid psychology.” In justice to the medium it should be added that, while working as a curate in the Isle of Man, he showed remarkable courage and zeal during an outbreak of smallpox, helping to nurse sick and bury the dead. In the various positions he held as parish clergyman and schoolmaster he was liked and respected by all. The physical phenomena of his mediumship were always said to be secondary; his own wish was to emphasise the religious teaching he promulgated through automatic writing.
Spiritualists of to-day reject entirely the notion that the phenomena associated with Stainton Moses were produced by fraud, but as Mr. Hill says, “Whether they were due to spirits is another question, not to be finally settled until we know the extent of our subliminal self’s hidden powers.”