IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

This essay is on Spiritualism, and I doubt if any subject has had so many essays written with the same title. This is because the question is fundamental to the practice. When a medium attempts to contact the dead, she asks a double-edged question.
So IS there anybody there? Is the question a general inquiry as to if anyone has come through yet, or is it more fundamental? Or is it a skeptical inquiry, trying to decide whether there could be anyone there in the first place?

GLADYS LEONARD

A typical medium was Gladys Leonard. When her mother died, Gladys opened her eyes one night and found her standing by the bed. It wasn’t a shock to her, for she had been having heaven-like visions since she was a child.
But it was the final piece of the jig-saw which turned this Lancashire woman into one of Britain’s most famous Spiritualist mediums. Going on to work for forty years with her spirit guide, Feda, her greatest fame came during World War One, when she would contact the war dead.
Amongst those she spoke to was the recently departed Raymond Lodge, son of Society for Psychical Research founder Sir Oliver Lodge. Of course, she was often accused of being a fraud. But despite repeated investigations by private detectives, when she died in 1968, Gladys Leonard’s reputation was intact.

ROOTS OF SPIRITUALISM

Despite claims to the contrary, the medium is the world’s oldest profession. Identified from the earliest known pre-history he, or she, can be identified as the instigator of hysterical tribal ritual, known throughout history as the shaman, witch-doctor or medicine man. However, in the Spiritualist medium, the talent came into its own. But how did Spiritualism begin?
Fundamental to the beginnings of Spiritualism was American clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis. During the 1840s he toured America arguing that upon bodily death the spirit remained alive and moved into another existence. Hence, since it was not dead, communication with the living should be possible.

THE FOX SISTERS

Davis set the scene. Then, in 1848, two daughters of a farmer called Fox, from Hydesville, New York State, claimed to have contacted the spirit of a dead pedlar through a code of rappings.
Such spirit contact was not rare, and there is even evidence that this contact was fraudulent. However, showman PT Barnum heard of the case and took the two sisters to New York.
Becoming a sensation, within weeks housewives by the hundred began organising their own sitting room séances, no doubt spurred on by recent controversies that began modern feminism, and Spiritualism had been born.

FRAUDULENT MEDIUMS

Spiritualist mediums have always come in for claims of fraud. Escapologist Harry Houdini dedicated much of his time to attacking Spiritualism. Alternatively, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an avid believer, even writing a huge history of Spiritualism in 1926.
One sceptical answer to their ability to glean information is ‘cold reading’. Through a series of clever questions and psychological prompting it is argued most clients can be induced to believe that messages can come from the afterlife when infant they have provided the information themselves.
Several mediums were caught cheating. Typical was surgeon’s wife, Mina Crandon, who, as Margery the Medium, turned her American home into a form of psychic circus with regular seances during which physical phenomena would manifest and she would contact the dead through her spirit guide, her deceased brother.
During one seance her ‘brother’ provided his spirit-fingerprint in wax. It turned out to be the print of a previous client.

SPLIT-BRAIN CONCEPT

Is there any physiological phenomena that could account for mediumship – in particular, the voices that are said to manifest in the medium’s head?
We are all prone to a disturbing physiological anomaly known through the ‘split-brain concept’. First identified in the 1930s when surgeons cut the nerve fibres connecting the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain to restrict the electric storm of epilepsy to one half of the brain, it was discovered that the two hemispheres had separate functions, the operation leading to a lack of co-ordination in the patient.
On-going research led to an understanding that the left hemisphere is responsible for logical function, whilst the right hemisphere seems to be the seat of emotion and insight. In the main, we are left brain people, but when emotion or intuition rises to dictate our illogical actions, this is the effect of the right brain.
This effect is most noticeable when we do something wrong and feel guilty. We all know the analogy of the little voice of conscience at the back of the mind. This right brain effect is thought not to be an analogy in particularly fantasy prone people.
Rather, more open to right brain influence, these people are thought to hear a real voice, similar to the voice heard in schizophrenia. However, rather than being perceived as coming from the mind, it is perceived as coming from some outside source.

APPROACHING AN ANSWER?

It is attractive to place this ‘outside’ voice within mediumistic talents. However, in doing so, we face a further possibility. We must return to the practice of cold reading.
It is always assumed that the medium practices cold reading as a blatant fraud, and no doubt in many cases it is. But we must also consider the possibility that, once the ‘outside’ voice is heard in the mind, the medium is genuinely persuaded that the voice is from beyond the grave, and her ability to cold read provides ‘genuine’ information from this same source.
This idea seems to fit into the mentality of many mediums, in that they genuinely believe in the phenomenon, and also have a natural perceptiveness to the moods and problems of the sitter. Indeed, it has often been noted that a good medium is an excellent bereavement counselor. Hence, they would naturally pick up signals as in cold reading.
So we can perhaps conclude that Spiritualism does not really deal with the dead, but anomalies of the human mind. Of course, there is much more to mediumship than this – and I will no doubt be returning to the subject from time to time – but at this stage I think we can say, no, there isn’t really anybody there.

© Anthony North, October 2007

Have you clicked Diary of a Writer on Blogroll? Meet me, up close and personal.
Find many more mysteries on my Mysteries page, above.