Gladstone, Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley got in common? The answer is that they were all members of the Society for Psychical Research, a pioneering and highly-respected body set up in London in 1882 with the aim of investigating paranormal phenomena ‘without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated’.
The Society was born out of the general disquiet at the end of the nineteenth century about the nature of the universe. This was before science had taken its quantum leap into the twentieth century, and the prevailing wisdom was that we lived in a mechanical world in which everything – every action and reaction – could be scientifically explained. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had only added to the feeling of being very tiny cogs in a huge well-oiled machine. But the idea that human beings were not the specially-designed central focus of all creation and were simply highly-evolved monkeys, the ‘animals with the big brain’, took a lot of getting used to. There was an undercurrent of belief that this could not be all.
Religion offered some solutions, but the intellectuals of the age did not want to reject the discoveries of the modern scientific world in favour of blind faith. They wanted proof which would demonstrate that man was more than just a sophisticated machine and which would measure up to the new scientific standards. The raw material for that proof seemed to exist: there was no shortage of ghost stories; the ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead – accepted from time immemorial in some cultures – had gone from being a popular craze in the middle of the nineteenth century to being the basis for the Spiritualist religion. ‘Mesmerism’, known today as hypnotism, was beginning to be explored and experiments with telepathy – the linking of two minds without any ostensible means of communication – were being carried out in France.
Perhaps the greatest impetus to investigation was D.D. Home. Today Home is still regarded by many as the most sensational physical medium of all time. Born in 1833 in Edinburgh, taken to America at the age of nine by an aunt, Daniel Dunglas Home was only thirteen when he announced that he was in communication with the spirits of the dead. He became a medium, and rappings and table levitations were common at his seances. Home even appeared to be able to levitate himself, in front of witnesses. He could make objects move around the room, make an accordion play music without touching it, put his head into a burning fire without being singed, and stretch his body, adding as much as six inches to his height while observers held on to him.
Mediums and seances were fashionable at the time, but what distinguished Home from the others – many of whom were undoubtedly frauds extracting easy money from gullible clients – was that he was prepared to work in bright well-lit conditions, and he invited the most sceptical of observers to attend his seances. (Many mediums use the excuse that a sceptic in their midst inhibits their powers.)
He was submitted to fairly rigorous testing. Sir William Crookes, a distinguished physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society, carried out stringent tests, often in the presence of other scientists. Obviously, in the nineteenth century various techniques used by conjurors and frauds today were not understood. None the less, Crookes was not gullible, nor were his peers, and it would be wrong to discredit the witnesses who vouched for Home simply because they belonged to another century. Home did have his critics, among them the poet Robert Browning who disliked the fact that his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a fan of Home. However, in all his long career as a medium, Home was never seriously accused of fraud, and was never caught cheating. Since his death in 1886 there have been many attempts to explain away his feats, the most popular suggestion being that he was an accomplished hypnotist who suggested to his audience that they had witnessed things that never actually happened.
Home lived so long ago, and the eyewitness accounts are so incomplete, that it is impossible to begin to assess the truth. What is certain is that he impressed some distinguished people who, like Crookes, felt that such things should be investigated scientifically and methodically. The Society for Psychical Research was founded by such people, and it attracted the support of some of the most respected scientists, philosophers, politicians and literary figures of the day. Instead of regarding psychical research as a rather suspect pseudo-science, as many people do today, they acclaimed it as an important and developing area. Gladstone said, ‘It is the most important work that is being done in the world – by far the most important.’
The SPR was not the first group to examine the paranormal. The history of Christianity is littered with attempts to appraise objectively miracles and miracle workers. Before the rise of spiritualism religious visions were the most common form of supernatural manifestation in Europe and the New World. Some religions are more comfortable with them than others and accept the existence of seers, shamans, wise ones, yogis.
In the secular world, long before the SPR was dreamed of, attempts had been made to test some areas of the paranormal scientifically. At the court of Queen Elizabeth I the mathematician John Dee tried to find hidden objects by using dowsing. Half a century later, Sir Francis Bacon devised some experiments to test the existence of second sight, as it was called, using cards. His controls were good and the experiments were well thought out: they did not differ greatly from those that were used three hundred years later when serious research began.
In France during the reign of Louis XVI, there was a lot of interest in mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnotism, which took its name from Franz Mesmer, a medical student who discovered he could induce trance states in volunteers. He believed the source of the power was magnetism. During the nineteenth century, experiments with hypnotism were carried out, and by the last quarter of the century its existence was accepted even by the most critical scientists.
Spiritualism took on the status of a religion in the 1840s. Spiritualist beliefs have been around since ancient civilization, but they were formalized into a religion after a whole rash of paranormal events made some people believe that they were in touch with the personalities of the dead. There was a fashionable craze for ‘table turning’, the forerunner of seances, when groups of people in homes all over Europe and America would sit around tables which tilted, turned and even in some instances floated in the air. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were among those who were confounded by the antics of a table. There was probably a great deal of faking going on, but the scientists who investigated the phenomena were unable to prove that it was all fraudulent. Michael Faraday, the physicist, took the line that ‘quasi involuntary’ muscle movements of the sitters were causing the effect without them knowing they were doing it, but many of those who were present when tables and chairs floated around rooms refused to accept this explanation. The fashion for table turning died out, though, mainly because, as with all psi, the phenomena are unpredictable. (Psi is a term now used to cover all paranormal experiences, although it was originally intended to link together ESP and PK.) For every exciting experience, there were many boring evenings passed sitting around tables which remained resolutely rooted to the ground. However, for some people the idea of communication with the dead became the foundation of their religious beliefs and Spiritualist churches sprang up across America and Britain.
The Fox sisters in America were credited with getting spiritualism properly off the ground. In 1848, Margaret and Kate Fox, aged fourteen and twelve, began to ‘communicate’ with the spirits of the dead by a series of rappings that they heard in their home in New York state. The house was reputed to be haunted, and the Fox family complained of strange banging noises. One night the girls tried snapping their fingers to imitate the noise; every time they did so, the rappings mimicked them. Eventually they started to ask questions and dictate a code to the unknown source of the noise, and they got replies that led them to believe they were in communication with the spirits of the dead.
The events in the Fox household were witnessed by many people, starting with neighbours and friends but eventually spreading to the public at large when the press latched on to them. Their stories were not accepted without questions: commissions were set up to investigate them, and they were paraded before panels of experts. The most common explanation offered
