Super-Psi & some notes from Braude's Immortal Remains

As it's in the public domain, going to quote some more from Gauld for particular Piper mediumship cases of interest that will touch on this question of controls/survival/Super-Psi noted in the above post:

On the face of it the ‘grapevine plus sticky memory’ theory should have been on its strongest ground with the alleged post-mortem communications from Richard Hodgson himself. For not merely had Mrs Piper known Hodgson for eighteen years; she could also have learned a good deal about those friends of his who were most likely to attempt to make contact with him after his death. She would therefore (it might be said) have been able to produce those Hodgson-reminiscences which had a particular appropriateness for each sitter.

In his report on Mrs Piper’s Hodgson-control, William James considers and rejects this hypothesis, saying of Hodgson (74, p. 6): ‘Gifted with great powers of reserve by nature, he was professionally schooled to secretiveness; and a decidedly incommunicative habit in the way of personal gossip had become a second nature with him, -especially towards Mrs Piper.’ In fact one has only to consider a few of the incidents described in James’s report to see just how implausible is the grape-vine hypothesis as a general explanation of Mrs Piper’s successes. I shall give three examples:

1. The Pecuniary Messages Hodgson’s salary as secretary of the American branch of the SPR, though small, was often irregularly paid. The result was that he was sometimes left in circumstances of great financial embarrassment. On one occasion he was rescued by a wholly unexpected remittance from a friend. To this remittance, says James (74, p. 26), … he replied by a letter which … cited the story of a starving couple who were overheard by an atheist who was passing the house, to pray aloud to God for food. The atheist climbed the roof and dropped some bread down the chimney, and heard them thank God for the miracle. He then went to the door and revealed himself as its author. The old woman replied to him: ‘Well, the Lord sent it, even if the devil brought it.’

At this friend’s sitting of 30 January, [Hodgson] suddenly says: Do you remember a story I told you and how you laughed, about the man and woman praying.

SITTER: Oh, and the devil was in it. Of course I do.

HODGSON: Yes, the devil, they told him it was the Lord who sent it even if the devil brought it … About the food that was given to them … I want you to know who is speaking.

The sitter feels quite certain that no one but himself knew of the correspondence … Later another friend agreed to make up any deficit in Hodgson’s salary, provided this action should remain anonymous, and Hodgson should ask no questions. On the first sitting which this friend had after Hodgson’s death, the ‘spirit’ of Hodgson immediately referred to the matter and thanked the sitter.

‘The donor is of opinion,’ says James (74, p. 27), ‘as I am also, that Hodgson may have suspected the source of the aid while receiving it, and this his “spirit” may therefore naturally have thanked the right person. That Mrs Piper’s waking consciousness should have been acquainted with any part of this transaction is incredible.’

2. The ‘Fist-Shaking’ Episode I quote James’s own account of this episode (74, p. 109):

The following incident belongs to my wife’s and Miss Putnam’s sitting of 12 June 1906: – Mrs J. said: ‘Do you remember what happened in our library one night when you were arguing with Margie [Mrs J.’s sister]? – ‘I had hardly said “remember",’ she notes, ‘in asking this question, when the medium’s arm was stretched out and the fist shaken threateningly,’ then these words came:

R. H. Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn’t help it. She was so impossible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn’t help it.

[I myself well remember this fist-shaking incident, and how we others laughed over it after Hodgson had taken his leave. What had made him so angry was my sister-in-law’s defence of some slate-writing she had seen in California. – W. J.]

3. ‘Buying Billy’ Again I quote James’s own account (74, p. 112):

On 30 January 1906, Mrs M. had a sitting. Mrs M said: Do you remember our last talk together, at N., and how, in coming home we talked about the work?

(R. H.) Yes, yes. Mrs. M. And I said if we had a hundred thousand dollars - Buying Billy!!

Mrs. M. Yes, Dick, that was it – ‘buying Billy’. Buying only Billy?

Mrs. M. Oh no – I wanted Schiller too. How well you remember!

Mrs. M., before R. H.’s death, had had dreams of extending the American Branch’s operations by getting an endowment, and possibly inducing Prof. [W. R.] Newbold (Billy) and Dr [F. C. S.] Schiller to co-operate in work. She naturally regards this veridical recall, by the control, of a private conversation she had had with Hodgson as very evidential of his survival.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Gauld then offers some analysis:

If one regards the various ‘naturalistic’ explanations of Mrs Piper’s performances as by and large inadequate (and personally I do so regard them), and is further prepared instead to consider the possibility that she may have possessed abilities of kinds not yet generally recognized by science, then the most obvious hypothesis to present itself is undoubtedly that of telepathy between the medium and persons present at the sitting. Clairvoyance will hardly serve, for most of the evidence (not all) transmitted was confirmed by the recollections of living persons rather than by documents, photographs, etc., which might, by a great stretch of imagination, be supposed decipherable by clairvoyance. All the cases so far quoted in this chapter could in principle be explained by telepathy between medium and sitters; and some incidents from the Piper records strongly suggest it. For instance, Hodgson had one day been reading with great interest Lockhart’s Life of Scott. Next day a ludicrous Sir Walter Scott turned up at a Piper sitting, and gave a guided tour of the solar system, stating that there are monkeys in the sun (145b, pp. 437–448). Mr J. T. Clarke was told by Phinuit that he was in financial trouble, which was correct. Phinuit further asserted that things would improve within four and a half months, and that ‘There are parties that haven’t dealt honourably with you.’ He warned Clarke particularly against a man named H. None of Phinuit’s further assertions was justified; but they accurately reflected Clarke’s own beliefs at the time (111, pp. 568–571).

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

But there are also cases that stretch the Super Psi hypothesis:

Phinuit said … A little child is coming to you … He reaches out his hands as to a child, and says coaxingly: Come here, dear. Don’t be afraid. Come, darling, here is your mother. He describes the child and her ‘lovely curls’. Where is Papa? Want Papa.

[He (i.e. Phinuit) takes from the table a silver medal.]

I want this – want to bite it.

[She used to bite it.] [Reaches for a string of buttons.]

Quick! I want to put them in my mouth.

[The buttons also. To bite the buttons was forbidden. He exactly imitated her arch manner.]

… Who is Dodo? [Her name for her brother, George.]

… I want you to call Dodo. Tell Dodo I am happy. Cry for me no more. [Puts hands to throat.] No sore throat any more.

[She had pain and distress of the throat and tongue.] Papa, speak to me. Can you not see me? I am not dead, I am living. I am happy with Grandma.

[My mother had been dead many years.]

Phinuit says: Here are two more. One, two, three here, – one older and one younger than Kakie.

[Correct.] … Was this little one’s tongue very dry? She keeps showing me her tongue.

[Her tongue was paralysed, and she suffered much with it to the end.]

Her name is Katherine.

[Correct.]

She calls herself Kakie. She passed out last.

[Correct.]

Where is horsey?

[I gave him a little horse.]

Big horsey, not this little one.

[Probably refers to a toy cart-horse she used to like.]

Papa, want to go wide [ride] horsey.

[She plead this all through her illness.] … [I asked if she remembered anything after she was brought downstairs.]

I was so hot, my head was so hot. [Correct]

…Do not cry for me – that makes me sad. Eleanor. I want Eleanor. [Her little sister. She called her much during her last illness.]

I want my buttons. Row, row, – my song, -sing it now. I sing with you. [We sing, and a soft child voice sings with us.]

Lightly row, lightly row, O’er the merry waves we go, Smoothly glide, smoothly glide, With the ebbing tide. [Phinuit hushes us, and Kakie finishes alone.]

Let the wind and waters be Mingled with our melody, Sing and float, sing and float, In our little boat. … Kakie sings: Bye, bye, ba bye, bye, bye, O baby bye. Sing that with me, Papa. [Papa and Kakie sing. These two were the songs she used to sing.]

Where is Dinah? I want Dinah. [Dinah was an old black rag-doll, not with us.]

I want Bagie [Her name for her sister Margaret.]

I want Bagie to bring me my Dinah … Tell Dodo when you see him that I love him. Dear Dodo. He used to march with me, he put me way up. [Correct.]

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Will get into some thoughts on this, including Gauld's, but for clarity's sake let me give Chris Carter's summary of the case [Actual the first seems like it was meant to a quote from Gauld's work]:

If the facts were obtained telepathically from the minds of the sitters, then it appears that Mrs. Piper must have obtained parent’s-eye-view information about Kakie from the sitters, and then, with a great deal of dramatic skill, have played back those facts from Kakie’s perspective. What is even more difficult to explain on the basis of ESP is that at both sittings associations were made that seemed to be in the mind of the child, but not in the minds of the adults.

At the first sitting Kakie asked twice for “the little book,” which Mrs. Sutton thought at the time referred to a linen picture book. At the second sitting Kakie, through Phinuit, asked, more specifically, for “the little bit of a book mama read by her bedside, with the pretty bright things hanging from it—mama put it in her hands—the last thing she remembers.”4 Both requests now seemed to refer to a little prayer book with symbols in silver, read to Kakie as she lay dying, and placed in her hands after her death.

Carter, Chris. Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness (pp. 181-182). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

While the Kakie case is perhaps the best example challenging Super Psi, two more cases from Gauld to round this all out:

1. Sir Oliver Lodge’s Uncle Jerry This case took place during Mrs Piper’s visit to England in the winter of 1889–90. Sir Oliver Lodge’s summary of it (111, pp. 458–459) is as follows:

It happens that an uncle of mine in London [Uncle Robert], now quite an old man, had a twin brother who died some twenty or more years ago.

I interested him generally in the subject, and wrote to ask if he would lend me some relic of his brother. By morning post on a certain day I received a curious old gold watch, which his brother had worn … I handed it to Mrs Piper when in a state of trance. I was told almost immediately that it had belonged to one of my uncles … After some difficulty … Dr Phinuit caught the name Jerry … and said … ‘This is my watch, and Robert is my brother, and I am here. Uncle Jerry, my watch.’ … I pointed out to him that to make Uncle Robert aware of his presence it would be well to recall trivial details of their boyhood …

‘Uncle Jerry’ recalled episodes such as swimming the creek when they were boys together, and running some risk of getting drowned; killing a cat in Smith’s field; the possession of a small rifle, and of a long peculiar skin, like a snake-skin, which he thought was now in the possession of Uncle Robert.

All these facts have been more or less completely verified. But the interesting thing is that his twin brother, from whom I got the watch, and with whom I was thus in a sort of communication, could not remember them all.

He recollected something about swimming the creek, though he himself had merely looked on. He had a distinct recollection of having had the snake-skin, and of the box in which it was kept, though he does not know where it is now. But he altogether denied killing the cat, and could not recall Smith’s field.

His memory, however, is decidedly failing him, and he was good enough to write to another brother, Frank, living in Cornwall, an old sea captain, and ask if he had any better remembrance of certain facts – of course not giving any inexplicable reason for asking. The result of this enquiry was triumphantly to vindicate the existence of Smith’s field …, and the killing of a cat by another brother was also recollected; while of the swimming of the creek, near a mill-race, full details were given, Frank and Jerry being the heroes of that foolhardy episode.

It should be noted that Uncle Frank could not remember the snake-skin; so that if Mrs Piper got all this information by telepathy, she must have ransacked the memory stores of two separate individuals and collated the results.

=-=-=

2. The following is a summary (164a, p. 354) by Miss Helen Verrall (Mrs W. H. Salter) of a case from a long paper in which she describes and analyses some remarkable communications from a recently deceased young man, Bennie Junot, to surviving members of his family:

On 11 February 1902, Mr Junot [senior] sent a message through his son Bennie to a former coachman of his, Hugh Irving, who had been dead some months, asking where ‘the dog Rounder’ was. Hugh Irving had left Mr Junot’s service about two months before his death and taken the dog with |44| him.

In the waking stage [i.e., when Mrs Piper was beginning to ‘come to’] on 2 April 1902, it is stated that ‘John Welsh has Rounder’. Mr Junot succeeded after some difficulty in tracing ‘John Welsh’, but unfortunately it proved impossible to discover whether he had ever had the dog in his possession. It is certain, however, that he was closely associated with the coachman, who took the dog away, and it was through his attempts to find John Welsh that Mr Junot recovered the dog. Moreover, there seems good reason for thinking that John Welsh, even if he never had the dog himself, knew something of his whereabouts, and could have helped Mr Junot to recover him.

Neither Mr Junot nor any of his family had ever to their knowledge heard of John Welsh (at any rate under that name), still less of his connection with Hugh Irving and possible connection with the dog. Doubtless people could have been found to whom all these facts were known, but they were not people with whom Mrs Piper had ever been brought into contact. Until we know to what limitations, if any, telepathy between living minds is subject, we cannot determine whether it is a sufficient explanation of such phenomena as this.

Those final six cases, for now, [almost] completes this long foray into trance mediumship. [Just have to do the Cross Correspondences.] So we have 3 cases where it seems quite unlikely Piper had information beforehand, given Hodgson's privacy regarding his financial straits or loss of temper. There's also the Uncle Jerry case where multiple minds would have to be scanned by Super-Psi and the information then collated, and finally the Dog Rounder case where you have a similar need to scan minds and then produce a useful narrative

But even better -IMO anyway- is the "Kakie" case where we have the additional benefit of a child perspective. One thing of interest to me in the "Kakie" case is how she wants her grieving, living relations to be happy - she reassures them she's with Grandma. This seems to go against Fisher's claim that all discarnates are manipulative beings ("lower astral entities", "hungry ghosts")...putting aside how sadly ridiculous Fisher's evaluation of trance mediumship is given his own follies.

There's also the singing, and the confusion regarding a particular toy. Of this Gauld writes:

Remarkable though this excerpt is (not more remarkable, however, than the full transcripts of the two sittings, which are, incidentally, documents of social as well as psychical interest), no information was communicated which lay outside the knowledge of the sitters. Does this mean, then, that we can comfortably attribute all Mrs Piper’s ‘hits’ here to telepathy with the sitters? Such a conclusion would be too hasty. I know of no instance of undeniable telepathy between living persons, or for that matter of any other variety of ESP, in which the flow of paranormally acquired information has been so quick, so copious, and so free from error. (I may say that these features are understated by the brief extract which is all I have been able to quote.) Then again there is the question of the point of view from which the information is presented.

It appears that Mrs Piper must have obtained parents’-eye information about Kakie from the sitters, and then with a fair degree of dramatic skill have constructed on the basis of this information a Kakie’s-eye view of the same facts. Furthermore (and this is exceedingly odd), incidents at both sittings apparently showed associations that seemed to be in the mind of the child, and which did not awaken the corresponding associations in the minds of the sitters. For instance when Kakie asked for ‘horsey’, and was given a little toy horse, she said ‘big, horsey, not this little one.’ Mrs Sutton surmised that she referred to another toy horse that she used to like. At the second sitting Kakie requested the horse again, but when given the little horse, said (66b, p. 387) ‘No, that is not the one. The big horse – so big. [Phinuit shows how large.] Eleanor’s horse. Eleanor used to put it in Kakie’s lap. She loved that horsey.’ These additional particulars made it clear to Mrs Sutton what horse was meant – one which was packed away and forgotten in another city. In a later passage, not given above, from the first sitting Kakie asked for ‘the little book’. Her mother supposed that she meant a linen picture book. At the second sitting it became clear that what was intended was a little prayer book which had bee n read to Kakie just before her death, and then put in her hands. If we are to say that Mrs Piper could select from the sitters’ minds associations conflicting with the ones consciously present and utilize them in order to create the impression that the communicator’s thoughts moved along lines distinctively different from the sitter’s, we are beginning to attribute to her not just super-ESP but super-artistry as well.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

This points to one of my issues with controls, specifically Phinuit - on the one hand fishing for information in such an obnoxious manner as to make Piper appear to be nothing but a fraud, but then also able to gather the necessary information in order to pull of the consciousness of the deceased young daughter in convincing fashion. To me it makes more sense that Phinuit resorts to fraud when there is no one coming through to communicate, though there is another possibility to explain his obnoxious behavior I'll get into below.

Of course one can take issue with the argument that we don't see this kind of clear communication coming through when ESP is tested outside of medium (or in general survival) communications. This isn't necessarily the case, but even if it were so we know so little about how Psi works it's hard to say what is and isn't possible with living agent Psi.

That said Braude does make a point of interest - the more power we give to Super-Psi the harder it is to explain why we don't see all sorts of disasters and incredible fortunes arising. He suggests that if everyone (or at least a large segment of the population) has Super Psi then any attempt to use it involves maneuvering through the continual "traffic" of psychic exertion by multiple subconscious minds. Thus the more power one gives living agent Psi the harder it is to explain why any act of telepathy or clairvoyance would work. Braude does note this assumes something about the nature of Psi that may not be true, that there does not need to be any "traffic".

But I think there's a deeper issue here, one that Chris Carter brings up - why can't Super Psi do more to save people from death rather than masquerade as the dead to alleviate the fear of death? Super Psi posits that no matter what Psi is or how it works, it doesn't involve a spirit realm - after all once you have such a realm the balance shifts to the Survival Hypothesis. But then what is the evolutionary explanation for Super Psi's limitations? There is an argument that Psi is weak because it was selected against due to anomalous information being detrimental to animals seeking to survive in their local space-time, to say nothing of how accidental or partially developed control over PK might kill you more often that save you. But with Super-Psi this evolutionary constraint doesn't seem to be in place, so why haven't we evolved conscious control over Psi abilities?

Going even further, when trying to fit Psi into an evolutionary picture it just seems easier to assume a functional dualism - Mind is localized by the brain which acts as a filter/transmitter. But once you have this dualism (whether or not there's an underlying Monism) you have the "mental realm" needed to accommodate survival.

Finally, for now, is how Super Psi hinges a great deal on the mental condition of multiple personalities and subpersonalities. Braude notes continuously through Immortal Remains about how we need to get a better psychological profile of mediums, supposed reincarnates, and so on to see why it could make sense for assuming disassociation. But I think this knife cuts both ways and possibly explains the mischievous nature of controls. Perhaps Phinuit, for example, was born not from a need to fake an afterlife but a need to cast aspersion on the very idea or at least a particular version of it. The kind of afterlife mediumship suggests seems rather divorced from the prevailing faith in the Western World, where one expects Heaven for good Christians. Additionally Braude brings up the status of women in varied cultural contexts as a motivation for disassociation. Yet this frustration could also extend to the afterlife mediums come to see - Piper and other female mediums may have subconsciously despaired that the afterlife didn't offer the rest and equality of Salvation but instead a life too much like that of earth and its - at the time at least - male dominated societies.

Admittedly the above is a just-so story, and perhaps contradicted by certain descriptions of the afterlife offered at the time Piper and Leonard lived, but it seems to me the very kind of just-so story that motivates Super-Psi?

Finally, as a sort of coda, here is a reported drop in that didn't involve any trance controls (again from Gauld's book):

Cases in which a deceased person has, through a medium, apparently manifested a clear-cut and characteristic purpose are somewhat uncommon (see 131). There are a few quite dramatic ones, in which, for instance, suicide or starvation have ostensibly been averted by discarnate intervention through a medium; but these tend not to be among the best-evidenced cases. The following, exceedingly odd, case, was reported in detail by a Russian corresponding member of the SPR, Alexander Aksakov, an Imperial Councillor to the Czar.

In January 1885, Mrs A. von Wiesler (Aksakov’s sister-in-law), and her daughter Sophie, began to experiment with a planchette board. The board was soon monopolized by an exceptionally forceful communicator, who claimed to be ‘Schura’ (Alexandrine) the deceased daughter of somewhat distant acquaintances. Schura, who had adopted revolutionary political views, had committed suicide at the age of seventeen, following the death while escaping from prison of a like-minded male cousin. Schura demanded, in no hesitant tone, that another cousin, Nikolaus, should be brought to a sitting. According to Schura, Nikolaus was in danger of compromising himself politically. Sophie hesitated for reasons of social propriety. Schura’s demands became more and more vehement at successive sittings, until on 26 February 1885 she wrote, ‘It is too late … expect his arrest.’ The von Wieslers then contacted Nikolaus’s parents, who were, however, quite satisfied in respect of his conduct.

Two years later Nikolaus was arrested and exiled because of political assemblies which he had attended in January and February 1885. ‘The |77| notes which Mrs von Wiesler had made were read again and again by the families both of “Schura” and of Nikolaus. “Schura’s” identity in all these manifestations was recognized as incontestably demonstrated, in the first place by the main fact in relation to Nikolaus, by other intimate particulars, and also by the totality of features which characterized her personality’ (110a, II, p. 181).

This case exhibits to some degree both of the characteristics which I noted above as constituting especial difficulties for the super-ESP hypothesis: ‘Schura’ pursued her characteristic purpose in the direct and forceful way which had clearly been typical of her in life; and this purpose was quite definitely not that of the operators of the planchette board, to whom the thought of contacting Nikolaus’s family caused considerable embarrassment.

Next up is the Cross Correspondences, but I'll give it few days before posting about those.

Just posted something about the cases of Psi under hypnosis that spawned the Animal Magnetism craze in Europe.

The Alex Didier case, where he performed incredible feats of Psi under trance, does seemingly negate certain criticisms of the Super-Psi hypothesis. We have feats comparable to those required by the Super-Psi hypothesis, and these demonstrations of Psi are - AFAIK from the historical record - isolated to the trance persona.

Now drawing on some extra details from Kripal's Authors of the Impossible & Psi Encyclopedia, here's some additional notes:

- Unlike the silly control personalities the trance personality of Alex Didier seems far more mature.

- In at least one test Didier asked the sitter to concentrate on the locations they wanted him to scry, which suggested telepathy between Didier & the sitter. However it should be noted Didier himself has claimed his soul utilizes OOBEs to travel to different locations:

The well-known French clairvoyant Alexis Didier believed that God allowed the soul to travel anywhere. He wrote: ‘I can transport from a pole to another with the speed of lightning; I can talk with the Cafres, walk in China, descend on the mines of Australia, enter the harems of a sultan in less than an hour, without fatigue …’.

Of course we already know mediums can scry information beyond the proxy sitter, gathering information about the person they are meant to do a reading for, so it isn't 100% clear what is accomplished via proxy sittings. At least they rule out a simple reading of the proxy-sitters mind, but it does not seem proxy sitting clearly decides in favor of Survival.

OTOH we've gone through cases where the trance persona(s) would have to do some actual detective work, finding information on the deceased - *and* then present this information in such a way as to make it seem like the deceased was existing in some spirit realm. This could arguably mean scanning an incredible number of minds along with then taking the right information needed to make a convincing fake simulacrum of the deceased...keeping in mind this is being done by trance persona(s?) that provide obvious cases of fishing and false information to the point of thinking "Chlorine" is an acceptable name for a Native American girl.

Thus, IMO, where mediumship is concerened the best arguments tipping toward Survival over Super-Psi hinge on the drop-in communications and those cases that suggest the trance persona(s?) are both idiotic and ingenious all at once.

Sadly Didier's own trance persona itself has no advice on how to settle the debate- when asked what happens to us after death he replied, “Dieu seul le sait“: "Only God knows that.”

....The Alex Didier case, where he performed incredible feats of Psi under trance, does seemingly negate certain criticisms of the Super-Psi hypothesis. We have feats comparable to those required by the Super-Psi hypothesis, and these demonstrations of Psi are - AFAIK from the historical record - isolated to the trance persona....

...Thus, IMO, where mediumship is concerened the best arguments tipping toward Survival over Super-Psi hinge on the drop-in communications and those cases that suggest the trance persona(s?) are both idiotic and ingenious all at once...

Sadly Didier's own trance persona itself has no advice on how to settle the debate- when asked what happens to us after death he replied, “Dieu seul le sait“: "Only God knows that.”

While it isn't evidential in the strict sense I think it is worth adding thoughts about Super Psi from Marcel Cairo who maintains The Good Medium, who unlike trance mediums does not forget his communications with the deceased (from an old comment on Precott's blog):

As a medium, I can only laugh at this theory. Why? Because I'm not out there amassing information from a collective consciousness. I am actually having dialog with the deceased - actual dialog. Even though the dialog is sometimes fuzzy, misinterpreted or incomplete, an exchange is taking place. I receive and I return communication. I say "I", but this is something we all can do... and do.

So, when "I" communicate with spirit, together we combine all kinds of communication tools to try and really understand each other.

Sometimes it comes easy, other times it's a bad game of Pictionary. However, it is back and forth dialog taking place.

Spirit and I argue with each other, we insult each other, we laugh together and some times we even compliment each other for finally getting something right. All of this takes place in front of the sitter, with the sitter not uttering a word or being asked a single question (unless it is to validate the information with a simple "yes" or "no").

My aim as a professional medium and a student of afterlife communication is to demystify the process to what it is - a simple form of dialog taking place from one dimension of consciousness to another. The real mystery to me, or the real awe and wonder, is in the messages they bring. The story they have to tell.

In my readings, I don't just deliver cute tidbits of fact or delve into archetypal personality traits, I actually deliver a custom tailored message to the sitter. Most of the times, that message is a very clear imperative.

Let's get something straight here, spirit has a reason for coming back to share ideas and knowledge with us, and guess what, it's not just for our benefit, it's mainly for theirs.

Might be worth an interview?

......................................

"But I think there's a deeper issue here, one that Chris Carter brings up - why can't Super Psi do more to save people from death rather than masquerade as the dead to alleviate the fear of death? Super Psi posits that no matter what Psi is or how it works, it doesn't involve a spirit realm - after all once you have such a realm the balance shifts to the Survival Hypothesis. But then what is the evolutionary explanation for Super Psi's limitations? There is an argument that Psi is weak because it was selected against due to anomalous information being detrimental to animals seeking to survive in their local space-time, to say nothing of how accidental or partially developed control over PK might kill you more often that save you. But with Super-Psi this evolutionary constraint doesn't seem to be in place, so why haven't we evolved conscious control over Psi abilities?

Going even further, when trying to fit Psi into an evolutionary picture it just seems easier to assume a functional dualism - Mind is localized by the brain which acts as a filter/transmitter. But once you have this dualism (whether or not there's an underlying Monism) you have the "mental realm" needed to accommodate survival."

.........................................

The notion that Psi and esp evolved (presumably by Darwinism, a purposeless, mindless and meaningless physical process driven by random mutations plus natural selection) reveals the materialistic and reductionistic roots of the super-Psi concept. This is the trying to make parapsychology and psychical research somehow digestible to mainstream materialistic reductionist Science by eliminating the need to hypothesize the existence of a spiritual realm, souls and an afterlife. This effort of course in the process, is deliberately mostly ignoring many other manifold areas of empirical evidence that exist apart from mediumistic communications. 

This notion has many insuperable problems, mainly the total bankruptcy of Darwinism as even possibly being a mechanism that can somehow create complex biological systems and machinery from molecular to multicellular. This is the macroevolution that the fossil record demonstrates has occurred repeatedly and suddenly many times over the history of life (a prime example being the Cambrian Explosion of the sudden appearance of virtually all the disparate different body plans of multicellular animals). The indelible signs of conscious designing intelligence or intelligences are all over biology. This topic has been the long term focus of a major thread in Psience Quest, Darwin Unhinged: the Bugs in Evolution, at https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-128.html .  

Aside from there being overwhelming evidence of intelligent design in evolution, there are at least two disconnects or contradictions in the notion of the evolution by Darwinistic processes of Psi and esp. For one, the essence of the creative designing intelligence that must be involved in evolution is not even itself material machinery, it is evidently immaterial mind of some sort, an entity or entities that super-psi strives to eliminate from parapsychology.

Second, a mindless meaningless purposeless material process can't do anything but physically modify physical biological machinery. But physical biological machinery in itself fundamentally can't generate Psi and esp, since Psi and esp inherently involve immaterial information transmission and forces and energies arguably exhibiting characteristics incompatible with existing physics. It's basically the same problem as the Hard Problem of consciousness, in another form. 

Darwinism is the essence of reductive materialism or naturalism, and is fundamentally incompatible with the very existence of Psi and esp, much less with a spiritual realm, souls and an afterlife.

The notion that Psi and esp evolved (presumably by Darwinism, a purposeless, mindless and meaningless physical process driven by random mutations plus natural selection) reveals the materialistic and reductionistic roots of the super-Psi concept. This is the trying to make parapsychology and psychical research somehow digestible to mainstream materialistic reductionist Science by eliminating the need to hypothesize the existence of a spiritual realm, souls and an afterlife. This effort of course in the process, is deliberately mostly ignoring many other manifold areas of empirical evidence that exist apart from mediumistic communications.

I do think there's some truth to this, though some Super-Psi supporters mention a psychic reservoir like the Collective Unconscious.

But it does seem the problem would still hold, unless one is positing some kind of intentional design process, as to how our subconscious has evolved to tap into this extensive Ur-Mind but we cannot access it as well with our waking selves. And such an intentional design posits some kind of entity or entities that would exist in a place much like what we'd suggest deceased intellects would end up in...

And, of course, asking where and what the Collective Unconscious is and why such a mental realm cannot accommodate discarnate intellects IMO is quite a challenge for Super-Psi.

I do think [given what we've looked at so far] the true tally that tips things toward Survival is drop-ins and those cases where the subpersonality control would have to scan around to get information from multiple minds and then concoct a good imitation of the deceased. But that, as you say, is simply for the mediumship cases.

When we get to the other lines of evidence we'll see Super-Psi getting stretched further...

From the Psi Encyclopedia, an introduction to the Cross Correspondences:

In parapsychology, the term ‘cross-correspondences’ describes a phenomenon that emerged in the early twentieth century in the study of ‘automatic writing’, a practice in which a person writing in a state of semi-trance may obtain scripts apparently originating in the unconscious mind, but seemingly also on occasion from an external source.  Investigators of the Society for Psychical Research noticed that statements in a script produced by one person sometimes seemed connected with similar statements in scripts produced by one or more persons elsewhere, at about the same time, without any communication having occurred among these people. They concluded that such ‘correspondences’ were being deliberately created by certain recently-deceased colleagues to convince them of their having survived death, and in such a way as to exclude other possible explanations.

By 1936, over 3000 scripts were available for assessment. The phenomenon was closely analyzed by senior SPR figures, and for decades was considered by many in the psychical research community to have provided convincing proof of survival of death. This is less the case today, as the extreme complexity of some of the claimed correspondences, and the obscurity of the literary references on which they are often based, make them hard to evaluate with any certainty. Some continue to find them convincing, while others argue their persuasiveness has been overstated.

This introductory article outlines the background and basic principles. Sources for more detailed reading are given below.

Definitely worth reading the whole article, but to get a better sense of why anyone who'd survived death would bother with this, Chris Carter better explains the rationale:

...For instance, on January 12, 1904, the following message was received by Mrs. Holland in India from an intelligence claiming to be Fred Myers: “If it were possible for the soul to die back into earth life I should die from sheer yearning to reach you to tell you that all we imagined is not half wonderful enough for the truth.” And through Mrs. Piper in Boston: “I am trying with all the forces . . . together to prove that I am Myers.” And again through Mrs. Holland: “Oh, I am feeble with eagerness—how can I best be identified? . . . I am trying alone amid unspeakable difficulties.”

As a psychic researcher, Myers was fully aware of how difficult it was to find evidence for survival that could not be explained by ESP. The problem is this: most of the evidence for survival coming from mediums consists of communications of knowledge not known to anyone present, but which was, or could very well have been, known to the deceased. Now it is clear that if such communications are to be of any value as evidence, then the information conveyed must be capable of being verified; and this implies that some living person or persons must know the facts, or that some written record of them exists somewhere. But if the knowledge is recorded—either in memories of the living or in writing—then it is always possible, at least in principle, that the knowledge was gained from the telepathic or clairvoyant powers of the medium.

As mentioned, Myers was fully aware of this problem. What makes the cross correspondences so unusual is that they appear to be a method invented by the postmortem Myers in order to overcome this difficulty. In other words, they appear to be a method invented in order to provide evidence of his survival, which would be very difficult—if not impossible—to explain on the basis of telepathy or clairvoyance among the living.

And from Gauld's Mediumship and Survival, available in the public domain:

The cross-correspondence materials are exceedingly voluminous, and publication of them marks out a kind of epoch in the history of the SPR. In his valuable short introduction to the subject, H. F. Saltmarsh (140) lists fifty-two papers about them (many of them book length) from the Proceedings of the SPR. Even so a substantial quantity of material remains unpublished. Obviously I shall not, in the brief space which I have at my disposal, be able to do anything like justice either to the strengths or to the weaknesses of the cross-correspondences considered as evidence for survival.

Saltmarsh distinguishes between ‘simple’, ‘complex’ and ‘ideal’ cross-correspondences. Simple cross-correspondences ‘are those where in the scripts of two or more [independent] automatists there occurs the same word or phrase, or else two phrases so similar as to be clearly interconnected.’ An obvious explanation of simple cross-correspondence would be that one automatist gains extrasensory knowledge of what the other is writing, and writes something similar herself. Complex cross-correspondences ‘are cases where the topic or topics are not directly mentioned, but referred to in an indirect and allusive way’. An ‘ideal’ complex cross-correspondence would be one in which two independent automatists each wrote apparently unconnected meaningless messages. ‘Now, if a third automatist were [independently] to produce a script which, while meaningless taken by itself, acts as a clue to the other two, so that the whole set would be brought together into one whole, and then show a single purpose and meaning, we should have good evidence that they all originated from a single source.’ If these conditions were fulfilled one might propound the following argument. Call the first two automatists A and B, and the third one, who gives the key that unlocks the whole, C. B will not be able to discover what he should write by paranormally cognizing A’s script, and A’s mind; nor will C be able to discover the ‘key’ by paranormally cognizing the scripts or minds of A and B; for in this ‘ideal’ case (to which perhaps no actual case has done more than approximate) there is nothing in A’s script or B’s script, or in the minds of A or B, to indicate what must be written to complete the cross-correspondence.

There is in my view no doubt that the scripts of the SPR automatists do contain numerous cross-correspondences, for the occurrence of |80| which no ordinary explanation will suffice. Conspiracy to deceive by the principal automatists seems extraordinarily unlikely. They were all persons of excellent reputation, and no indications of fraud ever came to light; besides, at important periods one (Mrs Holland) was in India, another (Mrs Piper) was in the United States, while the rest were in Great Britain. Chance-coincidence is another explanation which can, I think, be very quickly ruled out. It is true that the scripts are full of cryptic literary and other allusions, so full that one might expect occasional coincidences of theme and reference. But Piddington, who counted such references on a large scale, found that allusions pertinent to a given cross-correspondence did not wax and wane haphazardly, but arose during the appropriate period, and then largely died out again (modern techniques of computer analysis would have immensely helped him in this arduous task). Furthermore various attempts to generate artificial cross-correspondences by collating pseudo-scripts written by outsiders were largely unsuccessful (134b; 164b).

One can readily imagine in the abstract that some of at any rate the simpler cross-correspondences might have arisen because two or more of the automatists had simultaneously been exposed to the same external source of stimulation, e.g. the same issue of a daily newspaper. This seems particularly likely in the case of Mrs Verrall and her daughter Helen, who at this time lived together, though they produced their scripts independently. If both these ladies had on a given morning noticed a quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in The Times’s leading article, or had come across a copy of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary lying open at a certain entry, their minds, and subsequently their automatic writings, would, so this theory goes, have been set racing off along similar tracks. One has, however, only to read a few pages of the cross-correspondence records to see that this sort of explanation will not get one very far. In any case, of course, the really interesting correspondences are not those between the scripts of Mrs Verrall and her daughter, but (say) between the scripts of Mrs Verrall and those of the very distant and very different Mrs Holland or Mrs Piper. To explain such correspondences as these we shall be forced towards some very odd hypotheses indeed.

Another great post on Cross Correspondences from Prescott's blog, I think this helps to get a sense of how the good correspondences definitely suggest active intelligence at work:

One of the most common objections to the idea of mediumistic communication is that no voice from beyond the grave has succeeded in revealing the contents of a sealed envelope containing a posthumous message. Yet I recently came across a case which contradicts this claim, at least in part.

We'll get into some more of this, but while one can argue coincidence for some of the correspondence it's hard to suggest this happening over and over. It should be noted that the SPR did try to make chance correspondences using randomization, and these did not match the quality of what was produced via mediumship.

But here we are trying to decide between Super-Psi and Survival, and it does seem that the cross-correspondences are from Meyers, among others, who'd crossed to the other side, pushing to show their minds retained both intellect and personal interests. (Recall the point of this was to show active intellects producing new material, to get passed the possibility that mediums were scanning memories and creating impersonations of the deceased.)

It is, at the least, a great show of how the SPR - both the living and the (presumed) dead - made a very clever plan to help make the decision between Survival and Super-Psi.

Another great post on Cross Correspondences from Prescott's blog, I think this helps to get a sense of how the good correspondences definitely suggest active intelligence at work:

Since it's in the public domain, here is the entire Lethe case from Gauld's book:

In the ‘Lethe’ case (120c, pp. 86–144), the principal medium was Mrs Piper and the sitter was Mr G. B. Dorr, a Vice-President of the ASPR. Dorr was in touch through Mrs Piper with a communicator who claimed to be F. W. H. Myers. Myers had in life been a profound classical scholar. Dorr had dropped Latin and Greek at eighteen, had scarcely looked at any since, while ‘translations from the classics I have hardly read at all.’

Mrs Piper knew virtually nothing of classical literature. In order to test the memory of the Myers communicator, Dorr began to obtain and put to him various questions on classical subjects. On 23 March 1908 he posed the question:

‘What does the word LETHE suggest to you?’

He clearly expected a reply making reference to forgetfulness and the waters of oblivion. Instead he got the following:


MYERS [i.e. Mrs Piper’s communicator]: Do you refer to one of my poems, Lethe? [This is not an inappropriate answer, since Lethe is referred to in one of Myers’s verse translations of Virgil.]

The Myers communicator, egged on by questions and remarks from Dorr, then wrote some disjointed words, including ‘Winds’, ‘Greece’, and ‘Olympus’, and went on:

… It is all clear. Do you remember Cave?

GBD: I think you are confused about this. It was a water, not a wind, and it was in Hades, where the Styx was and the Elysian fields. Do you recall it now?
|94|
MYERS: Lethe. Shore—of course I do. Lethe Hades beautiful river—Lethe. Underground.

Shortly afterwards Dorr closed the sitting. As Mrs Piper came out of trance (the ‘waking-stage’) she spoke the following words:
Pavia [later conjecturally emended by Piddington to papavera, the Latin for ‘poppies’].
…
Lethe—delighted—sad—lovely—mate—
Put them all together …
Entwined love—beautiful shores …
Warm—sunlit—love.
Lime leaf—heart—sword—arrow
I shot an arrow through the air
And it fell I know not where
Mrs Piper then described a vision of someone with a bow and arrow.

On 24 March 1908, the Myers communicator wrote as follows (the deceased Richard Hodgson is, apparently, acting as intermediary, and sometimes refers to Myers as ‘he’ and ‘him’):

I wrote in reply to your last inquiry Cave—Lethe
GBD: I asked him [i.e. Myers] whether the word Lethe recalled anything to him.
MYERS: He replied Cave—Banks—Shore … He drew the form—a picture of Iris with an arrow.
GBD: But he spoke of words.
MYERS: Yes, clouds—arrow—Iris—Cave—Mor MOR Latin for sleep Morpheus—Cave. Sticks in my mind can’t you help me?
GBD: Good. I understand what you are after now. But can’t you make it clearer what there was peculiar about the waters of Lethe?
MYERS: Yes, I suppose you think I am affected in the same way but I am not.

After this some of the above words were repeated in conversation with Dorr, and the words ‘Clouds’ and ‘Flower Banks’ were introduced. As the medium came out of trance she again murmured the word ‘pavia’ (papavera?), and went on:

Mr Myers is writing on the wall … C [a pause] YX. I walked in the garden of the gods—entranced I stood along its banks—like one entranced I saw her at last … Elysian shores.

On 30 March 1908, after an erroneous translation of CYX as ‘chariot’, |95| the Piper-Myers spelled out CYNX. Then, after some confused passages, he continued:

We walk together, our loves entwined, along the shores. In beauty beyond comparison with Lethe. Sorry it is all so fragmentary but suppose it cannot all get through.

On 7 April 1908 the letters SCYX and CSYX were written, and in the waking stage Mrs Piper gave, ‘Mr Myers says, “No poppies ever grew on Elysian shores”.’ (This seems to be an oblique way of denying that there is forgetfulness in the after-life.)

The records of these sittings, which I have considerably abridged, were carefully examined first by Mrs Verrall, and then by G. W. Balfour, both of whom were accomplished classical scholars. To neither did they make sense. They were then sent to J. G. Piddington, who eventually located a passage (previously unknown to him) in the eleventh book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which seems to provide the key to Myers’s ‘Lethe’ associations. It tells the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, of which I give the following summary, adapted from Podmore (122e). The correspondence with the scripts are indicated by capital letters:

CEYX, King of Trachin, was drowned at sea, and Juno sent IRIS, goddess of the rainbow, to Somnus (SLEEP), to bid him carry the news in a dream to Alcyone, Ceyx’s beLOVED Queen, daughter of Aeolus, ruler of the WINDS. Iris points her BOW upon the sky, and glides down to the CAVE of Sleep, which was surrounded and hidden by dark CLOUDS. From the foot of the rock flows the river of LETHE, and on its BANKS are POPPIES and innumerable FLOWERS, from whose juice Night distils Sleep. Somnus sends his son MORPHEUS to impersonate in a dream the dead Ceyx. Going down to the SHORE, Alcyone finds Ceyx’s body, and in despair throws herself into the sea. The gods take pity on her SADness, and transform her into a halcyon. Later her LOVED Ceyx is restored to her as her MATE in the form of a kingfisher. Her nest floats on the sea; and every winter her father Aeolus confines the WINDS for seven days to secure a calm surface for her brood.

The correspondences, I think it is fair to say, are absolutely unmistakable. Now Myers had certainly read Ovid in detail (110b, p. 10), whereas none of the SPR investigators had studied the Metamorphoses, nor, of course, had Mrs Piper. (I should add, perhaps, that reading Ovid in the original is not so light an undertaking that one is likely to forget it!) On the face of it, therefore, the Myers-communicator’s associations to ‘Lethe’ accord with the supposition |96| that they came from Myers’s own mind; they do not fit the hypothesis of telepathy from any of his living colleagues. But of course the story of Ceyx and Alcyone has often been told in the English language. Perhaps Mrs Piper, or else G. B. Dorr, had read an English version of it. Despite considerable search, Piddington could only locate two popular works which gave the story in the requisite detail, viz. Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, and Gayley’s The Classic Myths in English Literature, which is based on Bulfinch. Mrs Piper, of whose honesty there was never any serious question, said that she had never read any such books, and this was borne out by close questioning of herself and her daughters, and by examination of her bookshelves. Dorr had as a boy read at least some parts of Bulfinch. No recollection of the story, however, stirred in his mind when he saw the scripts or read Piddington’s interpretation of them. His own association to ‘Lethe’ was the obvious one, waters of forgetfulness.

There seem in fact to be reasons for denying that the script intelligence reflected Bulfinch’s version of the story. Scripts immediately following the ‘Lethe’ ones make apparent references to other passages of Ovid which are not paraphrased by Bulfinch; and the scripts introduce at a certain point the word ‘Olympus’ which is in the text of Ovid Myers would probably have had, but is not in Bulfinch (120d).
It appears, therefore, highly unlikely that Mrs Piper could have obtained her information about the story of Ceyx and Alcyone telepathically from anyone in the circle of those who were investigating her. Nor, incidentally, could she have read it up in a library after the first sitting—too much undeniably relevant information was given straight away.

Could Mrs Piper have obtained knowledge of Ovid’s version of the story by ESP, by, for instance, clairvoyantly reading a translation of Ovid, or telepathically tapping the mind of a classical scholar? Even if one were prepared to admit that such a degree of ESP is possible (for which there is very little evidence), there still remains the problem of how this material was located. For what had to be located was not Ovid, or the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, but associations which Myers might plausibly be expected to give to the name ‘Lethe’. Did Mrs Piper first track down the passage in Ovid by clairvoyantly (and instantaneously) reading about Lethe in some reference work? Piddington could not find one which mentioned Ovid under the heading Lethe. Or did she with lightning speed pick out from the minds |97| telepathically accessible to her one well furnished with classical knowledge (a Harvard professor no doubt), and flicking straightway through his subconscious, much as she might have done through a reference work, unearth the word ‘Lethe’ and a string of obscure associations to it?

These suggestions are totally preposterous; and later on we shall have to try to put a finger on just why they are preposterous.

And the Ear of Dionysius case:

The next ‘literary puzzle’ which I shall outline is one of two obtained through the mediumship of Mrs ‘Willett’ (Mrs Coombe-Tennant). The other Willett puzzle is known as the ‘Statius’ case (5a). Mrs Willett was not a professional medium, but a British ‘Society’ lady active in national politics and in the League of Nations. She began automatic writing in 1908, but in 1909 it was suggested to her, ostensibly by the deceased Myers and Gurney (she was related to Myers by marriage), that she should instead try to apprehend ideas and images which they would insinuate into her mind, and should then record them by writing or speaking. The principal investigator of the Statius and Ear of Dionysius cases was G. W. Balfour, and the communicators were two recently deceased classical scholars, A. W. Verrall (the husband of Mrs M. de G. Verrall) and S. H. Butcher. They had been close friends. Butcher was not known in life to Mrs Willett, and Verrall only slightly.
The Ear of Dionysius case (5b) is long and complicated, and once again I can only give a bare outline. In a number of Willett scripts, the majority dating from 1914, with G. W. Balfour as sitter, the following topics are mentioned or alluded to:

The Ear of Dionysius. [A cave from which Dionysius the Elder, Tyrant of Syracuse 405–367 bc, was wont to listen to possibly seditious conversations among prisoners. It opened from certain stone quarries in Sicily. A Willett script of 1910 had referred to it, and Mrs Verrall had in consequence asked her husband about it.]

The stone quarries of Syracuse, in Sicily.
Enna, in Sicily. The heel of Italy.
Ulysses and Polyphemus. [Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant, imprisoned Ulysses in his cave.]
Acis and Galatea. [Acis, a shepherd, loved the nymph Galatea, and was murdered by the jealous Polyphemus.]
Jealousy.
|98| Music.
A Zither.
Aristotle’s Poetics.
Satire.

These references did not ‘add up’ to anything so far as Balfour and Mrs Verrall were concerned. The key was provided by the Butcher-
communicator in a script of 2 August 1915, Mrs Verrall being the sitter, in which the following was written:

The Aural instruction was I think understood Aural appertaining to the Ear and now he asks HAS the Satire satire been identified …

The man clung to the fleece of a Ram & so passed out surely that is plain [i.e. Ulysses escaping from Polyphemus’ cave]
well conjoin that with Cythera & the Ear-man …

There is a satire write Cyclopean Masonry, why do you say masonry I said Cyclopean
Philox He laboured in the stone quarries and drew upon the earlier writer for his Satire Jealously

The story is quite clear to me & I think it should be identified a musical instrument comes in something like a mandoline thrumming … He wrote in these stone quarries belonging to the tyrant.

This script links together the previous cryptic references. Philoxenus of Cythera (436–380BC) was an obscure Greek poet who lived under the protection of Dionysius the elder, tyrant of Syracuse. Philoxenus fell into disfavour with Dionysius, and was imprisoned in the stone quarries of Syracuse, because he seduced the tyrant’s mistress, Galateia. After his release (or, according to some accounts, while still in prison) Philoxenus wrote a satirical poem entitled either Cyclops or Galateia. In this he represents himself as Ulysses, and Dionysius, who was blind in one eye, as Polyphemus. It was poetry of a kind usually recited to the accompaniment of a zither. Philoxenus’s Cyclops is mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics (II, 4), which Butcher had translated.

Neither Mrs Willett nor the investigators had ever heard of Philoxenus, of whose works only a few fragments remain. The classical knowledge displayed in constructing this puzzle was far beyond that possessed by Mrs Willett, who had no acquaintance with classical languages and little if any with classical literature in translation. Articles on Philoxenus in various standard classical reference books current at that time did not contain all the details given in the scripts. Many (but not all) of these details are, however, to be found in a |99| moderately obscure American book (H. W. Smyth’s Greek Melic Poets), a presentation copy of which Professor Verrall, the ostensible communicator, had used in the preparation of some lectures.

Now there is no doubt that if Mrs Willett was consciously and deliberately dishonest, we can readily account for the material ostensibly communicated in this case. Any reasonably intelligent person could have put together a puzzle like this after a moderate period of hard research in a large library, or after a piece of luck in a second-hand bookshop (such as finding Smyth’s book and following up the leads contained therein). No test phrase to which the communicator had to respond was presented to Mrs Willett at the outset; she was free to introduce whatever subject-matter came readiest to hand. There is, however, no evidence of Mrs Willett’s dishonesty in this or any other case, so that the hypothesis has no ground in established fact, but is instead an assumption based only upon the supposed antecedent implausibility of the alternatives. This, as I have pointed out before, is never a satisfactory reason for adopting a theory.

If we reject the theory of deliberate deception by Mrs Willett, we seem forced towards some form of ESP theory; for cryptomnesia (latent memory) concerning obscure points of classical scholarship hardly seems a likely possibility in a person of Mrs Willett’s known reading habits. We might try supposing that Mrs Willett, scanning clairvoyantly around for likely material, happened upon the relevant page of Smyth’s Greek Melic Poets, or that in her telepathic investigations of the contents of suitable minds, she chanced upon that of a classical scholar who had read and assimilated this work. She extracted the juice from her chosen source, and (at a purely unconscious level) concocted the ‘literary puzzle’. We have reached this point so often before that it grows wearisome. There is no independent evidence for such ‘super-ESP’. Clairvoyance, indeed, we can rule out immediately, because Smyth’s book, though in derivative accounts of this case often represented as containing all the relevant facts on a single page, does not in reality do so. The information which it gives on page 461 would need to be supplemented by an informed classical scholar before the Ear of Dionysius puzzle could be constructed from it. There remains the possibility that the information was extracted telepathically from the mind of a classical scholar. But the communicating intelligences did not just present a package of facts; despite the apparent difficulties of communication, they deployed |100| their facts intelligently in the manner of persons who were masters of their subject—the extract given above from the sitting of 2 August 1915 will perhaps convey something of what I mean. We come back to the fundamental point that I raised earlier—to acquire a set of facts about, from or related to a certain topic or area is not by itself to become a master of that topic or an adept in that area. Mastery is achieved by use and intelligent practice, not by swallowing and regurgitating facts.

Shortly after G. W. Balfour’s paper on the Ear of Dionysius case was published came a brief but incisive critical note by a classical scholar, Miss F. Melian Stawell (150). Miss Stawell pointed out that Mrs Willett, though not a classical scholar, no doubt had some relevant knowledge latent in her mind. She probably knew the story of Ulysses and Polyphemus, and may have heard that S. H. Butcher had written on Aristotle’s Poetics. Perhaps this latent knowledge could have been first stimulated and then augmented by the external influence of (this will not come as a surprise!) Mrs Verrall’s subconscious mind. Probably Mrs Verrall had at some time or another come across all the necessary information. There are quite a few scattered references to Philoxenus in classical literature, and students commonly follow such things up when they come across them. Miss Stawell herself had run into much of the relevant material. None the less it did not spring to her mind when she heard Balfour’s paper. It is reasonable to assume that Mrs Verrall had similarly come across it and forgotten it. And surely she could have had a look (subsequently forgotten) at her husband’s presentation copy of Smyth’s Greek Melic Poets? And the ‘Sevens’ case (mentioned in the previous chapter) shows that Mrs Verrall’s subconscious was capable of influencing the productions of other automatists.

Miss Stawell added that Smyth’s book had now been adopted as a standard textbook at Cambridge. Hers is a persuasive case, and Balfour’s reply to it (5c) does not seem to me to be effective. Still, we must beware of constantly treating the supposed prodigious powers of Mrs Verrall’s subliminal self as a universal solvent for disposing of cases which might otherwise endanger the super-ESP hypothesis. There is little clear evidence that she (or anyone else) possessed the powers for the imagined use of which she has so often been incriminated. Let us spell out what these putative powers must have been: Mrs Verrall must have been:

(a) An immense repository of information which she could not consciously call to mind.

|101| (b) A successful automatist in her own right.

(c) Capable of telepathically but unconsciously controlling in some detail the writings of other automatists, including Mrs Willett; of being, in effect, an unconscious ‘living communicator’ operating by means of ‘active’ telepathy.

(d) Capable of deciding at an unconscious level what material she might appropriately incorporate in her own scripts, and what material would (like classical knowledge) be more convincing if palmed off on other automatists.

(e) Capable of acting as a living communicator under false names, her real identity and indeed her ‘presence’ remaining unknown to the automatists she influenced.

(f) (In some cases) capable of telepathically or clairvoyantly apprehending (again unconsciously) what was said to the distant automatist and of unconsciously inducing in that automatist a relevant reply quickly enough to conduct a conversation with that automatist’s sitter.