Book review: The original ghostbuster
review by Dorian Lynskey, book by Ben Machell
review by Dorian Lynskey, book by Ben Machell
Quote:...Machell’s elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK. In the middle of the 19th century, the tension between science and religion inspired a craze for “proof” of life after death in the form of spiritualism — seances, clairvoyants, automatic writing — and a subsequent desire to assess its veracity. The SPR was founded in 1882, in a “spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry.” Its members, including Lewis Carroll, future prime minister Arthur Balfour and psychologist William James, pioneered concepts such as telepathy and ectoplasm while exposing fraudulent mediums and “spirit photographers.”
The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author’s nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm. A poltergeist, for example, might actually be “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” — the violent discharge of mental energy by the living. Rhine’s secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy.
The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group’s rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King’s Carrie, Cornell’s mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a “new occultism.” Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers...
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell