The Dr. Joire mediumship experiments in Nancy

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Was It Better Afterlife Evidence Than the "Cross Correspondences"?

Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Mark Mahin
futureandcosmos.blogspot.com

Interesting blog article by Mark Mahin about a case evoked in quite a few of the essays for the recent Bigelow Institute prize competition.
 
It concerns mediumship experiments in Nancy, France, in the early 20th century, assisted by and written about by Dr. Paul Joire, that consisted in raps and associations with the alphabet. Mahin considers if this is better survival evidence that the "cross-correspondences".

The experiments involved five people at a table, at which was seated a very young medium and also Dr. Joire. Mysterious raps were heard on the table, and attempts were made to query unseen agents. We are told queries were made "using the alphabet as usual," and presumably this was a system by which the alphabet was repeatedly recited and a table rap after a particular letter was counted as standing for a particular letter of the alphabet.  The plan was that experimenters attempted to get as many pieces of factual information they could from these mysterious rap signals, and they then attempted to verify whether there was any truth to the information provided. 

In quite a few cases, the experimenters were able to verify claims made during these seances. Below are some examples.

Very interesting thank you. I also agree with the author that although the cross correspondences may be good evidence, I find them difficult to follow.

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Yes and in addition to the several examples of very detailed, correct information verified, this is the especially interesting conclusion:

If all of these details were to have been provided orally by a seemingly entranced medium,  we have a possible explanation for these results by hypothesizing some extremely elaborate and very hard-to-prepare fraud in which a medium learned and meticulously memorized very many details about deceased figures (some not famous), and then orally recited those details, only pretending to be entranced.  But in this case we have the fact that all of the details came from mysterious table raps, with the raps spelling out letters.  The total number of raps needed to spell out the details above (with one rap per letter) would have been many hundreds, occurring spread out over a long time.  We can imagine no medium manually producing so many hundreds of raps at a table where five people were seated, without being detected by the investigators. 

Yes and in addition to the several examples of very detailed, correct information verified, this is the especially interesting conclusion:

Agree. Also it would be an extraordinarily tedious way to communicate if it was fraudulent lol

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The ultimate fraud deterrence: extreme tediousness!