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SPIRITUALISM

by Ormond McGill

Come with me to a seance. We enter a dark, lofty, foreboding house are ushered into a semi-lit, spacious living room to find ourselves in a group of mixed humans averaging between the ages of 40 and 50 years. An elderly gentleman enters, he summons us to our seats. The group rapidly grows quiet and an air of expectancy fills the room. Madame Sonis is introduced. She reclines in a chair. The elderly gentleman orates regarding her unusual spiritual gifts, of how she is able to communicate with the spirits of those departed and impart actual messages to the living from the dead.

A wave of comment surges thru the group - some are skeptics, some acceptant - some passively watching, like ourselves, but all expectant. We watch the Madame. Her eyes close, her breathing deepens and becomes regular, her muscles relax, she sags down into the chair - she seems asleep.

Is it just the dimness of the light or do we actually note a faint shudder pass over her frail frame? Her lips part and she says in an emotionless, expressionless voice, a voice that might well have originated across the abyss - "The spirit of a man stands by my side - he asks for someone named Martha. He says his name is John."

A woman shrilly pipes, "I am here John, I am here!"

The Madame continues, "John wishes you to know that he is happy over here and that he thinks of you often."

"Oh I am so, so glad," whispers the woman almost reverently.

Another voice enters the room from the lips of the medium. "Good-evening folks" come the confident tones.

The greeting is acknowledged by someone in the room. He is Henry Wilkes, the medium's control. "Tonite," continues Wilkes, "I bring you a host of spirits that wish to commune with you, the living, gathered thus in this sanctum."

And so they come - spirit after spirit comes thru delivering messages of sundry and various types to all within the musty walls of that old, lofty house. Finally the last of the spirit voices die upon the Madame's lips. She rests, a moment - her lids flutter, her eyes open, and she arises, apparently exhausted by her ordeal with the dead.

We dismiss ourselves somewhat perplexed. Certainly all of what we have observed couldn't be entirely the result of clever trickery, for didn't we attend armed with a knowledge of magic, and yet didn't a message come thru to us that contained information that the madame never could have known? How then could it have happened? It must be the work of the spirits - but ah - need it?

I take a young girl - really quite a charming girl and hypnotize her. Her eyes close, her breathing deepens and becomes regular, her muscles relax, she sags down into the chair - she seems asleep. My, how she does resemble Madame Sonis when she dropped off into that trance!

The girl is hypnotized; she will obey my suggestions. Suppose I tell her that she is to get messages for those watching the experiment. Suppose we endow her with a few "extra-sensory" powers; shall we call it telepathy or clairvoyance?

She follows my suggestion and brings forth a message to each and all of us, and, my, how some of those psychic forces do penetrate our minds and bring to light facts that obviously were only known to ourselves. Her messages are delivered quite straightforwardly and seem definitely to originate within herself. We'll call her a psychic.

Now suppose I take this same charming young girl, and, while she is thus hypnotized and delivering messages, suggest to her that she is receiving her instructions from spirit friends across the void - that she is a great medium - that the dead are talking directly thru her to the living. What happens - such suggestions color the whole picture of her work. No longer do the messages appear to come from out of her, but seem the work of forces from without. The impressions come as though from the actual voices of those now dead. The last message fades away, she sits relaxed and I tell her that when she awakes she will remember what she has done and believe that she is a great spirit medium who has actually communed with the dead. I snap my fingers - she awakes - she recalls the magnitude of her accomplishment and no amount of persuasion can shake her faith that she is gifted of the Gods and has actually the power to converse with the spirits of those now departed.

If mere hypnotic suggestion can thus color a psychical experience, what might not the continued bombardment of belief, suggestion of ideas, and psychological hammering do to a suggestible mind? Might it not very well be that the spiritualistic concept is erroneous and that we have a case of misinterpreted phenomena? The phenomena classed under spiritualism cover a huge field. They cover the entire psychic inclusive of the psychical-physical. The very magnitude of this coverage coupled with the all-prevailing belief that the spirits are the cause of all the phenomena - no matter what the type - is decidedly indicative of the possibility that the spiritualistic hypothesis is erroneous at its base.

True, much that has been offered as real spiritualistic demonstration has been proven fraud, and magicians have been tremendously instrumental in seeking out such deception when it occurs. In fact so much has this been the case that the average magician looks upon the whole field of spiritualism as a bunch of quackery and charlatanism. Such a belief is hardly warranted. Much that has occurred has been undoubtedly genuine phenomena. Men of science have vouched for that. No, the question is not of the genuineness of the occurrences, but the correct explanation of such occurrences - in other words The Correct Basic Theory of the Causation.

The law of parsimony demands that proofs being equal, the simplest of two theories is the one to be accepted. Certainly a belief that man has some supernormal faculties invested within himself, that manifest themselves upon occasion, is more direct and purposeful to believe than that the spirits of the dead can return to commune with us - the living.