But in the first two examples they are associated with muscular movements which, we must believe, are carried out unknown to the doers and hence have their source in a dissociated stream. As usual, once the dissociation is established, there is no limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work, and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw on the memories of the unconscious.
Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a sleeve can still work miracles.
This is taking us beyond the purely domestic, but there is no difference between the after-dinner tilting of the table for amusement and the same thing done at a séance—the mechanism is the same, but one is treated as a jest whilst the other is something worse. We see again the typical series with simple trickery at one end and reason-destroying dissociation at the other.
Palmistry seems too absurd to be discussed, but it is another half-way house. That the lines of Life, or Love, or what-not, are to be found on the palms of dead-born babies and of monkeys should be enough to stop the cult; but handbooks of palmistry seem to profit their publishers, and the palmists and clairvoyants flourish. The girl who buys a handbook and amuses her friends by reading their hands is comparatively harmless, though even she, becoming shrewd to note when she hits the mark, is likely to develop an unconscious receptivity and drift into fraud.
Crystal-gazing is a form of mediumism admirably fitted to give play both to trickery and dissociation. Used by the medium to 'see as in a glass darkly' and gain time for the help of his or her receptivity, it also allows of the induction of a self-hypnosis, the memories or fancies from the unconscious showing themselves as visions in the crystal.
Table-turning is easily first among the ways of giving rein to the unconscious. It has the advantage of allowing several people to play the same game at once, and further of allowing one Dissociate to work the miracle, whilst no one, not even the Dissociate himself, knows who is doing it. This is illustrated in The New Revelation, p. 19, where Sir Arthur says: 'Some one, then, was moving the table; I thought it was they. They probably thought that I did it.'
The Gate of Remembrance[18] gives an illustration of tapping the unconscious and producing results that seem astonishing.
Two gentlemen, Mr. F. B. Bond and his friend J. A. I., had devoted years of study to the archæology of Glastonbury, exploring every available source of information in history or tradition and thinking hard and often about the Edgar Chapel, a part of the Abbey whose site was undetermined. After this preparatory storing up of memories and thoughts in the unconscious, they proceeded to tap them. I quote from page 18:—
'What was clear enough was the need of somehow switching off the mere logical machinery of the brain which is for ever at work combining the more superficial and obvious things written on the pages of memory, and by its dominant activity excluding that which a more contemplative element in the mind would seek to revive from the half-obliterated traces below.'
Recognising an old friend, we are not surprised to find that automatic writing was the means employed to switch off the main stream of consciousness and produce a dissociation.