I now pass at once to a class of Spiritualistic manifestations which would be put forward by any well-educated occultist as the most authentic of all. Reference was made a few pages back to a large group of scientific and professional men who believe in what they call "mediumistic phenomena." They are not Spiritualists, and it is one of the questionable features of recent Spiritualist literature that they are often described as such. Thus the astronomers Flammarion and Schiaparelli are quoted. But Flammarion says repeatedly in his latest and most important book (Les forces naturelles inconnues, 1907) that he is not and never was a Spiritualist (see p. 581), and he includes a long letter from Schiaparelli, who disavows all belief even in the phenomena (p. 93). Professor Richet, who believes in materializations, is not a Spiritualist. Professor Morselli, who also accepts the facts, speaks of the Spiritualist interpretation of them as "childish, absurd, and immoral." The long lists of scientific supporters which the Spiritualists publish are in part careless or even dishonest.
But such professors as Richet, Ochorowicz, de Vesme, Flournoy, etc., and men like Flammarion, Carrington, Maxwell, etc., do believe that raps and other physical phenomena are produced by abnormal powers of the medium. They believe that when the medium sits in or before the cabinet, in proper conditions, the floor and table are rapped, the furniture is lifted or moved about, musical instruments are played, and impressions are made in plaster, although the medium has not done it with his or her hands or feet. As I said, these scientific men scorn the idea that "spirits" from another world play these pranks. They look for unknown natural forces in the medium. They think that they have excluded fraud. We shall see. Meantime, the assent of so many scientific men to the phenomena themselves gives this class of experiences more plausibility than others.
Most of these men base their opinion upon the remarkable doings of the Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino, and we shall therefore pay particular attention to her. But Spiritualists rely for these things on a very large number of mediums. In fact, some of our leading English Spiritualists do not believe in Palladino at all, having detected her in fraud. We must therefore first examine the evidence put before us by Spiritualists.
We begin with the story of the Fox family in America in 1848, which admittedly inaugurated modern Spiritualism. Since Spiritualists commemorate, in 1920, the "seventy-second" anniversary of the foundation of their religion, I will surely not be accused of wasting time over trivial or irrelevant matters in going back to 1848. As, however, this is not a history, I must deal with this matter very briefly.
In March, 1848, a Mr. and Mrs. Fox, of Hydesville, a very small town of the State of New York, had their domestic peace disturbed by mysterious and repeated rappings, apparently on their walls and floors. Swedenborgians and Shakers had by that time familiarized people with the idea of spirit, and the neighbours were presently informed that the raps took an intelligent form, and replied "Yes" or "No" (by a given number of raps) to questions. The Foxes stated that the raps came from the spirit of a murdered man, and later they said that they had dug and found human bones. These raps were clearly associated with the two girls, Margaretta (aged fifteen) and Katie or Cathie (aged twelve). A third, a married elder sister, named Leah—at that time Mrs. Fish, and later Mrs. Underhill—came to Hydesville, and, at her return to Rochester, took Margaretta with her. Leah herself was presently a "medium." The excitement in rural America was intense. Mediums sprang up on every side, and the Foxes were in such demand that they could soon charge a dollar a sitter. The "spirits," having at last discovered a way of communicating with the living, rapped out all sorts of messages to the sitters. In a few years table-turning, table-tilting, levitation, etc., were developed, but the "foundation of the religion" was as I have described in 1848.
Towards the close of 1850 three professors of Buffalo University formed the theory that the Fox girls were simple frauds, causing the supposed raps by cracking their knee joints. At a trial sitting they so placed the legs and feet of the girls that no raps could be produced. A few months later a relative, Mrs. Culver, made a public statement, which was published in the New York Herald (April 17, 1851), that Margaretta Fox had admitted the fraud to her, and had shown her how it was done. Neither of these checks had any appreciable effect upon the movement. From year to year it found new developments, and it is said within three years of its origin to have won more than a million adherents in the United States, or more than five times as many as it has to-day.
Our Spiritualists may find it possible, in their solemn commemoration of 1848, to smile at the Buffalo professors and Mrs. Culver, but I have yet to meet a representative of theirs who can plausibly explain away what happened in 1888. Margaretta Fox married Captain Kane, the Arctic explorer, who often urged her to expose the fraud, as he believed it to be. In 1888 she found courage to do so (New York Herald, September 24, 1888). She and Katie, she said, had discovered a power of making raps with their toe-joints (not knee-joints), and had hoaxed Hydesville. Their enterprising elder sister had learned their secret, and had organized the very profitable business of spirit-rapping. The raps and all other phenomena of the Spiritualist movement were, Mrs. Kane said, fraud from beginning to end. She gave public demonstrations in New York of the way it was done; and in October of the same year her younger sister Cathie confirmed the statement, and said that Spiritualism was "all humbuggery, every bit of it" (Herald, October 10 and 11, 1888). They agreed that their sister Leah (Mrs. Underhill), the founder of the Spiritualist movement and the most prosperous medium of its palmiest days, was a monumental liar and a shameless organizer of every variety of fraud. That a wealthy Spiritualist afterwards induced Cathie to go back on this confession need not surprise us.
So much for "St. Leah"—if she is yet canonized—and the foundation of the Spiritualist religion in 1848. We need say little further about raps. Dr. Maxwell, the French lawyer and medical student who belongs to the scientific psychic school which I have noticed, gives six different fraudulent ways of producing "spirit-raps." He has studied every variety of medium, including girls about the age of the Fox girls, and found fraud everywhere. In one case he discovered that the raps were fraudulently produced by two young men among the sitters; and the normal character of these men was so high that their conduct is beyond his power of explanation. He has verified by many experiments that loud raps may be produced by the knee- and toe-joints, and that even slowly gliding the finger or boot along the leg of the table (or the cuff, etc.) will, in a strained and darkened room, produce the noises. In the dark, of course—Dr. Maxwell roundly says that any sitting in total darkness is waste of time—cheating is easy. The released foot or hand, or a concealed stick, will give striking manifestations. Some mediums have electrical apparatus for the purpose.
If any Spiritualist is still disposed to attach importance to raps, we may at least ask for these manifestations under proper conditions. Since spirits can rap on floors, or on the medium's chair, let the table be abolished. It usually affords a very suspicious shade, especially in red light, in the region of the medium. Let the medium be plainly isolated, and bound in limb and joint, and let us then have these mysterious raps. It has not yet been done.
The same general objection may be premised when we approach the subject of levitation and the moving of furniture generally. Levitation is a more impressive word than "lifting," but the inexpert reader may take it that the meaning is the same. The "spirits" manifest their presence to the faithful, not by making the table or the medium "light," but by lifting up it or him. It is unfortunate that here again the spirits seem compelled by their very limited intelligence to choose a phenomenon which not only looks rather like the pastime of a slightly deranged Hottentot, but happens to coincide with just the kind of thing a fraudulent medium would be disposed to do in a dim light. However, since quite a number of learned men believe in these things, let us consider them seriously.