Legend
< Various Manifestations, and Speculations Thereon (continued from page 5-49) >
After the lapse of about five minutes, a cloudy white mass, about a foot in diameter, appeared noiselessly on the floor, where there was only light enough for me to see general outlines and not minute details. It grew slowly in breadth, then a part of it, long and white, about six inches broad, rose upwards, curving close to the heart of the medium, then up to her face, while I was holding both her hands. It curved upwards—as Mr. Tapp said he had seen it do on a previous occasion—“like the tail of a fish.” A spirit hand and arm covered with drapery, might have produced the same appearance. For about ten minutes this white band rose slowly at long intervals from the larger mass below, then slowly sank. During the whole time it made not the slightest noise or rustle, then it disappeared. The spirits said they had nearly exhausted the power over the previous strong manifestations, so could not produce the full figure. The consciousness as well as the vital energy of the medium, was largely drawn upon all the time; we had received the strictest injunctions from Lillie not to let her go to sleep or it would be injurious to her, and we with much difficulty kept her awake by continuously talking to her, and putting questions which she had to answer. Her hand on the side nearest the form grew so unmistakeably colder than the one farthest from it, as to attract my attention, and Mr. Tapp had noticed the same thing at a previous seance.
This incipient manifestation was more interesting and instructive than the sudden production of the full figure, which I had seen on a previous occasion, when it presented itself at the door of the cabinet. It then occasionally rose to a height of five or six feet; had a somewhat columnar form, averaging about eighteen inches in diameter, and it had not the outlines of a human figure. No features were visible, and with this class of manifestation, through different sensitives, with the medium in full view, and off his or her own premises, I have never yet seen living, flexible features in the rising form, although I have dimly seen faces and beards. Mr. Tapp said that when the figure rose from the floor, while he was holding Miss Cook on a previous occasion, it knocked its draped head against his in a friendly way, and that the head was an unpleasantly hard one. Miss Cook now and then shook with nervousness when the white object rose and curved over her last Sunday; although Lillie told her that it was a man-spirit trying to manifest, she disrespectfully habitually described the form as “it;” and when it was down near the floor, she twice expressed her desire to “kick it.” Lillie said that it was a new manifestation, imperfectly developed, and that “it”—as time went on and experience was gained—would develops into a living man.
Both Miss Cook and Lillie were very obliging, and gave all possible facilities for seeing what the facts actually were; they seemed more desirous to do this, than to try to make the phenomena doubly wonderful by statements of their own unverifiable on the spot by the observers.
Mr. Charles Blackburn—who is a careful observer, and under whose guidance these strong manifestations are permitted to develope in private, without being kept back to gratify idle curiosity—has seen one of the forms rise from the floor, as already recorded in these pages. He thus describes how the figure developed: “I noticed her (Miss Cook’s) lap full of shining mist, which accumulated and travelled down her left hip to the carpet, when suddenly a white draped form rose from the floor, and came close to our faces.” Mr. Tapp—who is a good observer, without any tendency to keep back weak points and thereby to present his personal faith under the guise of observed facts—informs me that shortly after the formation of the cloudy mass on the carpet, the form “comes up with a rush.”
Mr. Blackburn writes to me: “My experience is, that the spirits who attend a medium have each a different way of producing the forms; some forms come from apparently the side, feet, or head, or suddenly came into view without luminosity. But the spirits are all evidently trying experiments themselves through the medium’s Akasa, or life principle.”
Mrs. Cook, who has had such a large number of remarkable manifestations taking place in her house for years, says that she knows no more about them, or the personality of the spirits who usually produce the phenomena, than the visitors; nor can she explain why the spirits manifest in the peculiar way they do, although she often gives serious thought to the manifold perplexities.
When form manifestations began in this country, I watched their development for some years, and attended between two and three hundred seances with various mediums, in order to learn the very truth as to the actual facts, instead of forming a theory first, and bending a few facts to fit it. The phenomena are divisible into two classes, viz., (1) into those where the “double” in appearance of the medium, or sometimes the more or less transformed medium is presented; and (2) into “recognisable face” manifestations. The former class have been well observed and studied. Little is known about the latter, and although in my earnest endeavour to see a living recognisable face under conditions good enough to present to the public as fair evidence, I attended a dozen or two seances, and induced some private strong mediums to sit for this class of phenomena, flexible features in the faces were not obtained. Perhaps the time had not come. The details of these seances I will print on another occasion. Since then, to the present hour, I have lost no opportunity which presented itself, to see a materialised living spirit face, but without success.
To return to the first class of phenomena, the question of course arose at the outset, whether the materialised “double in appearance” of the medium, was animated by the spirit of the medium, or, as claimed by itself, by an outside intelligence. Mr. Serjeant Cox pleads that the spirit of the medium does it all, not necessarily as act of imposture, but in a mesmeric trance, under the influence of the will-power of observers determined to have spirits and nothing else. In the same way, a mesmerist makes his sensitive helplessly carry out his will. Dr. Wyld, more recently, has argued that the spirit of the medium may be at the root of the matter, and does not proceed so far into details. In relation to the present problem, Serjeant Cox, Dr. Wyld, and myself confine ourselves to this class of manifestations, which favour more than the other phenomena the doctrine of “Spiritualism without the spirits of the departed,” and it wastes time while dealing with one class of phenomena on its own merits, to drag in other phenomena without first clearly demonstrating the relationship. The phenomena of haunted houses, I think, cannot be explained on any but a spiritual theory. Various kinds of writing mediumship present strong evidence in some cases of the presence of the spirits of the departed, and in others give no such evidence, but at present we are dealing with these “doubles” and nothing else.
On only two occasions have I known these doubles to show the possession of knowledge, which might not be supposed to have reached the medium by natural means, and the two exceptional cases might be explained as due to thought-reading powers. In the one case a stranger to Florence Cook asked Katie, “Do you know who I’m thinking about?” and Katie with the utmost promptitude and coolness replied, “Yes; Charles!” which was true.' In the other case, at the house of Mr. Crookes, the form displayed knowledge of the past lives and works of some Fellows of the Royal Society and others, upon whom the medium, Mrs. Fay, had never set eyes before. From the darkened library, filled with hundreds of books, the “form’’ gave each man a book he had written, and those books Mr. Crookes himself would have had difficulty in finding in the light. The medium had only been in the library five minutes, and on first entrance was secured in one corner of the room by the “galvanometer test.”
But on all other occasions I have not known one of these forms to exhibit original knowledge of any kind outside that of the medium. When questioned as to their identity, I am not aware that in any single instance the statements of any one of these “doubles” as to its earth-life identity, has been verified. The mental capacity of the forms, has usually, and probably invariably, been limited by the mental capacity of the medium.
Thus those who advocate the “spirit of the medium theory,” will always find their strongest ground for support <... continues on page 5-51 >