ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO

 MERLIN-CLASS MAGICIANS

In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.

—BILLY JOEL

Here we’ll consider three real-world examples of magical power far beyond anything that we typically see in the laboratory. All three of these individuals were observed to do mind-blowing things by dozens to thousands of multiple, credible witnesses. Evidence based on eyewitness testimony can never be as certain as measurements taken in controlled experiments, and there is always the problem that history embellishes a good story. But as you’ll see, there are persuasive reasons to pay attention to the documented evidence in these cases. Each involved many witnesses over long periods of time. In such instances the mundane explanations boil down to mass hallucinations, collusion, or blatant fraud. My take on these individuals is that they probably had genuine talents.

ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO

The first case is Joseph Desa, born in Copertino, Italy, in 1603. Like most ordinary people in the seventeenth century, Joseph was poor and born during a time of widespread poverty, plague, hunger, and war. The Catholic Church was the principal authority among European nations, and its power was enforced with an iron hand in the form of the Inquisition. The general population was constantly on the edge of desperation, quickly inflamed by rumors, and easily spooked. It was a time when the mass mind vacillated between moments of panic, dismay, and fanaticism.

Within this context, when Joseph was nine years old he fell ill from an infection, which led to gangrene. It crippled him for five years, much of it spent bedridden and in pain. Without access to the Internet (Wi-Fi would not arrive for another four hundred years) or even a book, Joseph escaped the prison and pain of his body through daydreams, reveries, and fantasies. In some of those states he was spontaneously transported into states of ineffable bliss.

Finally, a hermit with a reputation as a surgeon operated on the boy, and Joseph encountered his first miracle: he survived the surgery. But without schooling and stunted in social skills, Joseph was perceived as dimwitted. He easily fell into trances and gained the nickname “Boccaperta” (Gaping Mouth) for his tendency to look up with his mouth open when entranced by Church music. Hired and fired from many workaday jobs, he felt attracted to the contemplative life of the Church. After a harrowing series of failures and near misses, he was ordained when he was twenty-five years old.

The Church suited Joseph, but his special talents soon became a problem. Early in his career, if a member of the town displeased him, there were consequences. For example:

A certain Count don Cosimo Pinelli had an ongoing sexual liaison with the daughter of Martha Rodia; Joseph said that if the count didn’t desist from his amours, he would go blind. This turned out to be what happened, and Joseph bragged about his prediction, but later restored the man’s sight, this time getting him to leave the girl alone and pay reparations to the family! Before long nobody in Copertino dared enter the company of the friar unless their conscience was squeaky-clean; otherwise they shrank in terror from the gaze of the black-bearded friar.1Fortunately, Joseph’s tendencies toward becoming Lord Voldemort were suppressed.2 But as he grew older his abilities became stronger, more frequent, and more difficult to hide. He gained a reputation as a prophet and a miracle healer, and he exhibited telepathy, precognition, the odor of sanctity, power over animals and natural forces, and—the icing on the cake—when giving Mass he spontaneously levitated, not just once but hundreds of times in front of many startled congregations.3 This became a big problem, because living miracle-makers threatened to deflect the public’s attention away from Church authority. And that was strictly forbidden.

Church officials kept moving Joseph from town to town and tried to keep him away from people by prohibiting him from doing priestly duties. The strategy didn’t work. Besides hordes of ordinary people wanting to witness his feats, stories about him began to attract nobles, clergy, and royalty. And that in turn led to unwanted attention from the Inquisition. While on trial by the Inquisition in Rome, Joseph was ordered to say Mass in public to see if the rumors about him were true.

They were. He lifted off the ground in the presence of the inquisitors.

You can imagine how freaked out they must have been. But Joseph experienced another miracle that day. He was just given a stern warning to stop all this levitating nonsense, and somehow he escaped being burnt as a witch. But his abilities were not completely under his control and continued to persist, attracting more and more attention, until a second encounter with the Inquisition put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Still, given his history, he was extremely fortunate, for this was during the peak years of the witch-burning craze.

A century after his death Joseph was canonized by Pope Benedict XIV as St. Joseph. Pope Benedict, born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, had previously served as the Church’s Advocatus Diaboli, or “Devil’s Advocate.” This position was charged with arguing why a person nominated for sainthood was not worthy of that position. Any suggestion of fraud, exaggeration, or collusion regarding miracles attributed to the nominee was thoroughly examined. The materials amassed in the case of Joseph amounted to thirteen volumes housed in the Vatican Archives (they are still there today). They include the Inquisition’s trial records, biographies written over the years, diaries, letters, and official Church documents from the different cities and convents Joseph lived in or visited.

Joseph lived for sixteen years at Grotella Convent near Copertino, one of the longest stretches he spent in one location. During that time it was documented that he levitated at least seventy times in front of multiple witnesses. I’ll give just one example of the kinds of documented reports involving Joseph’s levitations:

April 30, 1639: After stepping inside the Church, Giuseppe [St. Joseph] glanced at a painting of the Holy Virgin located in the vault above the wooden frieze of the altar of the Immaculate Conception, a Madonna painted with the Baby Jesus in her arms in a way that strikingly resembled the Madonna of the Grotella [convent where Joseph had spent many years]. At the sight of her, Padre Giuseppe gave a huge scream and flew about thirty meters in the air and, embracing her, said, “Ah, Mamma mia! You have followed me!” It all happened so quickly that those present were filled with sacred terror, marveling to each other, and remaining in a stupor over the Padre’s performance.4For many more details about St. Joseph, I recommend philosopher Michael Grosso’s 2016 book, The Man Who Could Fly. Grosso reviewed the evidence for Joseph’s abilities and compared his case with similar instances of miraculous behavior recorded throughout history. Grosso concluded that Joseph was for real, basing his judgment on the written historical record: thirty-five years of multiple eyewitness testimonies from ordinary people as well as popes, cardinals, ambassadors, dukes, and kings from all over Europe. And that was just the formal written testimonies. An untold number of congregants, probably numbering in the thousands, had also witnessed Joseph’s abilities.5

DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME

Two centuries after St. Joseph, Daniel Dunglas Home was born near Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1833. He was one of eight children of Elizabeth McNeill, a descendant of a Scottish Highland family said to have the gift of “second sight.” Today we’d call that gift clairvoyance, or remote viewing.

Unless you’ve read about the history of psychic phenomena, you may never have heard of Home (it’s pronounced “hume”). But his psychic feats—including levitation—were just as prodigious and in some ways even more startling than St. Joseph’s.

The case of Home is especially interesting because his abilities were subjected to scientific tests. The testimony of Home’s abilities is also better than St. Joseph’s because the former’s performances were extensively covered in the newspapers of the day, and they were repeatedly observed by the most accomplished illusionists and conjurers (stage magicians) of the day, who naturally assumed he was cheating.

When he was nine years old, Home was adopted by his aunt and her husband and they emigrated to America, landing in a town near Norwich, Connecticut. Like St. Joseph, Home was an unusually sensitive child. As an infant he was so weak he wasn’t expected to survive, and he had a lifelong highly nervous temperament. Also like St. Joseph, the “feats Home performed were so extraordinary that when witnesses described what they had seen, they were dismissed as foolish, even insane.”6 That quote is from a 2005 biography of Home by University of Edinburgh historian Peter Lamont, entitled The First Psychic. The title of Lamont’s book refers to the first time that the word psychic was used in the popular press to describe someone with Home’s abilities.

Lamont’s book is especially useful in assessing Home’s feats because Lamont is a historian of psychology, an experienced illusionist, and a member of the Inner Magic Circle, a special branch of the London-based organization for magicians called the Magic Circle. One becomes a member of the Inner Magic Circle by invitation only, based on proven expertise and other significant contributions to the art of conjuring. Being a member of that fraternity, Lamont naturally regarded Home with a practiced, skeptical eye. But despite a strong inclination to regard magic solely in terms of tricks and illusions, that’s not what Lamont concluded about Home. He was just as puzzled as everyone else:

What are we to make of Daniel Dunglas Home? It is true that there were many accusations of fraud, but most of them were entirely without base, and actual evidence for fraud was both rare and inconclusive. He might have been a cheat, but if he was, then he cheated successfully for two decades, before hundreds of witnesses in thousands of séances. Many of the witnesses were hostile to spiritualism, and many remained unconvinced by what they had seen, yet time and again they admitted that they were unable to explain what had happened.7

The best conjurers of the day tried, and failed, to explain Home’s feats. Scientists investigating Home, including one of the most prominent chemists and physicists of the day, Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), reported evidence in support of Home’s claims. Crookes’s critics were reduced to making ad hominem attacks and misrepresenting the nature of his research.8

The phenomena produced by Home were in the context of a rising cultural interest in spiritualism, especially in the form of physical mediumship. These performances involved speaking to spirits via rapping sounds, levitating tables, invisible spirits playing musical instruments, sitters at the séances being touched by spirits, and so on. Many of these séances were conducted in rooms that were completely dark, or dimly lit by candles or gaslight. Demand for such performances was high, and because of supply and demand, many mediums were only too happy to perform séances for tidy sums. Many of them were subsequently unmasked as frauds.

It was in this context that Home was performing his séances throughout Europe, both for secular and scientific people highly skeptical of the claimed phenomena and for spiritually inclined people sympathetic to it.

Lamont’s book provides a full accounting of the kinds of phenomena associated with Home and the settings of his performances. To give a flavor of that history, I’ll recount one episode involving a group of highly skeptical Dutch rationalists who were openly hostile to spiritualism. They were members of the Dutch Radical School of Modern Protestantism, which virulently denied all biblical miracles, miraculous divine intervention, and the concepts of spirits. Like other skeptics, they had loudly dismissed Home’s claims without having seen them. But Home wasn’t intimidated by skepticism, so he agreed to perform a series of séances for them.

Home arrived in the Netherlands on January 31, 1858. The following day he conducted a séance for Queen Sophie of the Netherlands. A few days later in a hotel in Amsterdam, Home held a séance for ten of the Dutch rationalists, none of whom he had previously met. The group included a doctor of philosophy, a physician, a lawyer, an optician, and a Dr. Gunst, who reported the setup:

[The skeptics] sat round a large mahogany table, which they examined sufficiently to note that the top, column and base were “directly and immovably fixed” together….On top of the table were four [bronze] candelabras, with two more below, which “made it possible to obtain an undisturbed view of what was happening under the table.”9

The group placed their fingertips on the table in plain view, and Home told them that if they wished to remove their hands they could do so. They tested themselves to make sure they weren’t being manipulated by suggestion, were allowed to talk freely among themselves, and “laughed mockingly concerning the matter at hand.”10Within this context one would not expect much to happen. But then:

These expressions stopped soon enough. For as they mocked, “the table started to make a sliding movement,” and those towards whom it was moving “were requested to try to stop this movement; this, however, they could not do.” When the table stopped, raps began, and when raps were requested “in a certain manner, and as many times as we should indicate, [t]his wish was carried out to the full.” As Daniels’ skeptical witnesses watched in characteristic disbelief, the table “started to rise up on one side…so high that all of us were very much afraid that [the candelabras] would fall off.”11

Two more séances were held with this group, with increasingly inexplicable phenomena. Dr. Gunst later reviewed the normal interpretations that critics had offered as an explanation for Home’s effects. The first was that Home was using some sort of conjuring trick or gimmick. This was dismissed because, according to Dr. Gunst, the “Amsterdam séance room was well illuminated all the time the sittings lasted. Furthermore, the skeptical observers were crowded around Home (the performer) and not restricted in any movement or observation they desired to make.”12

The second explanation, that the table movements were due to unconscious motor movements by the sitters, was dismissed because the séance table was large and sturdy enough to seat fourteen people, and besides the thickness of the wood it had a very heavy central column. Despite the weight of the table, it was observed by multiple witnesses to levitate at least twelve inches off the floor.

The third explanation, regarding faked “spirit hands” touching the sitters, was deemed insufficient because the séance room was well lighted, so they were able to keep Home under constant surveillance and the sitters were still touched in quick succession, as they had requested, with one person being correctly touched after making requests mentally.

The fourth explanation, hallucination, was dismissed because, unlike claims that Home could perform only in front of “believers” who might be inclined to imagine things, these séances were conducted for a group of avowed skeptics, none of whom Home knew.

Other common interpretations, such as Home deflecting attention while using his feet to perform the trick, were excluded because the skeptics could easily see under the table and noted that Home had not moved. Still other objections asserted that the room must have been prepared by confederates in advance, using hidden wires and gimmicks. That too could be ruled out because “the séances were conducted in a hotel where Home had never been before and where he arrived only a few hours before the commencement of the first sitting.”13

Dr. Gunst concluded that strange things really had happened but could not be explained. He added, “And nothing could be observed that could give rise to even the slightest suspicion that Mr. Home was acting in a fraudulent manner.”14 This was consistent throughout Home’s career. No one ever brought forth evidence of fraud, nor was there any evidence that the effects were due to hallucination. In sum, Home, like St. Joseph, remains a genuine mystery.

So far we’ve discussed people who lived centuries ago. In such cases, even with excellent documentation it’s difficult to know with any certainty what happened back then. What about a modern Merlin?

Dean Radin

Real Magic 

The Mediumship of Daniel Dunglas Home

 

If poltergeist phenomena are genuine — and in the face of the evidence from many cultures and down through the centuries it is difficult to argue that they are not — then we already have some grounds for supposing that physical phenomena in the séance room might be a realistic proposition. Mention has already been made of the Fox sisters, and the effects associated with them during their years as professional mediums, but the most celebrated of the physical mediums investigated by psychical researchers in the early years of investigations is surely the Scotsman Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886), pronounced in the Scottish way as "Hume." In fact, even at this distance Home remains arguably the most noted physical medium ever to be put extensively to the test. After a boyhood in Scotland, Home spent his teens in the USA, firstly in Connecticut and then in Troy, New York State, under the care of an aunt, Mrs. McNeil Cook. It was in Troy, at the age of 13, that he had his first vision, that of a deceased classmate with whom he had once made a pact that whoever died first would return to the other, and who appeared to him in a bright cloud. His second vision followed four years later, when his mother came to him to announce her death, apparently at the precise hour at which it took place. Paranormal rappings occurred subsequently in his vicinity, and alarmed by these happenings (it was only two years after the commencement of the rappings at the home of the Fox sisters) and afraid that he was possessed by the devil, his aunt turned him out of the house.

News seems to have spread of Home's experiences, and in the light of the publicity surrounding the Fox sisters he was investigated by Professor Wells of Harvard University and by Judge Edmonds of the USA Supreme Court, both of whom testified to the genuineness of the rappings (Judge Edmonds even subsequently became a spiritualist). In 1855 Home returned to Britain, but spent virtually the rest of his life traveling around Europe and America, holding séances not only with eminent scientists but with emperors and royalty, including Napoleon 111 of France, the King of Bavaria, the King of Naples (in the years before the unification of Italy), the Emperor of Germany, the Queen of Holland, and the Czar of Russia. Apparently so impressed with Home was the Czar and his court that he was permitted to marry into the nobility, in the person of Alexandrina de Kroll, sister of Count Koucheleff-Besborodka. The wedding was held in St. Petersburg, with Count Alexis Tolstoy, one of Russia's greatest writers, and Count Bobrinsky, Chamberlain to the Czar, as groomsmen. However, Home continued to practice mediumship, and he did not escape controversy. The poet Robert Browning, whose poet wife Elizabeth Barratt Browning was convinced that Home was genuine, wrote Mr. Sludge the Medium, which is an ill-disguised attempt to portray Home as fraudulent (although Browning never claimed he had caught Home in trickery). By contrast, the equally illustrious writer William Thackeray, who had many sittings with Home, was convinced of his genuineness, and said so in print.Home seems to have been a victim of tuberculosis from an early age, and his powers apparently fluctuated, but he insisted on holding most of his séances in a good light, and was highly critical (particularly in Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, which followed his earlier book Incidents in My Life) of those who relied upon darkness. Nevertheless, he continued to have detractors. The eminent scientist Michael Faraday, for example, who was invited to séances, apparently declined to attend unless Home acknowledged that the phenomena were "ridiculous and contemptible." Wild stories also circulated about his private life. An attempt was made to assassinate him, a successful law suit was brought against him by a Mrs. Lyon for the return of £60,000 that she had given him, and another law suit (which he won) was brought against him by his wife's family to prevent him from inheriting her fortune after her death in 1862. In 1864 he was even expelled from Rome for practicing sorcery, which I suppose at least means he received the stamp of authenticity from the Church.

Home's career took a significant turn, however, in 1869 when Lord Adare privately published a careful record (Experiences with D. D. Home in Spiritualism) of 80 séances that he had had with him, spread over two years. The original printing was intended only for a few of Adare's friends, but he agreed in 1924 that it be reprinted for public consumption both by Glasgow University Press and by the SPR, who brought it out as a copy of the Proceedings (Vol. XXXV, Part XCIII). This reprinting — a bold step for a respected peer of the realm (Adare had now succeeded his father as the Earl of Dunraven) — attests to the continuing confidence that Adare had in the genuineness of the phenomena. The fact that the prestigious Glasgow University Press and the Council of the SPR thought it worth publishing also says much for the regard that serious scientists still had for Home, 38 years  after his death.

Experiences in Spiritualism with D. D. Home is a remarkable document by any standards, and essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Home. Lord Adare catalogued an amazing range of phenomena over the sittings. In his preface to the SPR edition Adare says cautiously "I was very young at the time .., and was not trained in scientific observation. All that I desire to say is that, to the best of my ability, I scrupulously examined certain strange phenomena ... and faithfully recorded the facts." He also said of Home, who he reports took no money for séances during the two years in which he kept his records, that:

He was proud of his gift, but not happy in it. He could not control it and it placed him sometimes in very unpleasant positions. I think he would have been pleased to have been relieved of it, but I believe he was subject to these manifestations as long as he lived.

Adare was Home's close companion throughout these two years, and had as assistant investigators his cousin Captain Charles Wynne, and his friends the Master of Lindsay (later the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres), and Captain Gerard Smith of the Scots Guards. The phenomena recorded by Adare

... occurred at all times and seasons, under all sorts of conditions — in broad daylight, in artificial light, in semi-darkness, at regular séances, unpredictably without any séance at all, indoors, out of doors, in private houses, in hotels — at home and abroad.

They included among many other things full materializations. On one occasion, when sharing a room with Home at the home of a friend, Adare saw at the foot of his makeshift bed "a female figure standing in profile to me, and asked Home if he saw anything. He answered 'A woman looking at me

It is my wife; she often comes to me.' And then she seemed to fade away." Adare saw the features perfectly, and the following day recognized the face in a photograph of Socha, the deceased Mrs. Home. On another occasion, in Adare's rooms in London, he, Captain Smith, and another friend Dr. Gully were present when Socha

... slowly, very slowly revealed herself beside Home, who was standing at the window. She moved close to Home and kissed him. She stood beside him against the window, intercepting the light as a solid body, and appeared fully as material as Home himself ... It was too dark, however, to distinguish features ... Her hair was parted in the middle and flowed down her shoulders, or ... she had on what appeared to be a veil.

There were levitations of Home in which the investigators saw him rise four to five feet from the floor. For example, Adare tells us that on one occasion, when the room was "nearly dark" Home while in trance ... was lifted up to the back of my chair. "Now" he said, "take hold of [my] feet." I took both his feet in my bands, and away he went up into the air so high that I was obliged to let go his feet; he was carried along the wall, brushing past the pictures, to the opposite side of the room, he then called me over to him. I took his hand, and felt him alight upon the floor.

On another occasion, while out of doors, Lord Adare and Captain Charles Wynne saw Home floating above the ground and being carried over a two-foot broken wall — in Adare's view "There could not be a better test of his being off the ground." But the most dramatic of his levitations was the reported occasion when, while in trance he was lifted up and taken through a third floor window at Ashley House in London, and re-entered through a window in the next room. It was night time, but we are told that some light was coming from outside. Adare tells us that there was a ledge outside each window 19 inches deep, bounded by two balustrades 18 inches high. The distance from the balustrade of one window to the nearest balustrade of the next was seven feet and four inches. Between the window at which Home went out and the one at which he came back in, the wall receded six inches. The only masonry connecting the windows was a stone string course four inches wide running from the bottom of one balustrade to the bottom of the other, and another string course three inches wide running between the windows at the top. The idea that anyone could have used these protrusions to pass from one window to the next seems highly unlikely, and Home — still entranced — demonstrated to Adare how he had been taken through the window. This sash window was open less than a foot, and Home was drawn rapidly through this aperture head first, his body rigid and horizontal, and brought back in feet first.

Various suggestions have been made over the years as to how Home might have managed this feat by normal means, but none of them is particularly convincing. They also ignore the fact that the Master of Lindsay, who it seems had some psychic abilities of his own, told Adare before Home went to the window in the next room what he was going to do, the information apparently being conveyed to him by Adah, Home's control, in "tones that were whispered or impressed inside his ear." Of course, if trick it was, Lindsay may have been Home's accomplice and therefore party to what was about to take place, but in the two years of Adare's investigation there was never any suggestion that Home engaged in trickery, and never any suggestion that the Master of Lindsay was anything other than an honest investigator. Furthermore, in writing his preface to the reissue of his report in 1924, over half a century after the events concerned, Adare clearly had no reason with hindsight to suspect Home or Lindsay of trickery.Other phenomena witnessed by Adare and his companions, all of which Home claimed were accomplished by the spirits, included elongation, in which with his feet held firmly on the floor by two investigators while the other two measured the height of his head against the wall he was seen to be "stretched" by more than a foot. Another bizarre phenomenon was his apparent ability to withstand heat. In trance he buried his face in red-hot coals without injury, held burning coals in his hands, and even seemed able to communicate this immunity temporarily to the investigators. 'Tongues of flame" were also reported proceeding from his head, gusts of wind were said to blow through the room, and on one occasion a bird was heard flying round the room, whistling and chirping, although only Lindsay, with his presumed psychic abilities, was able to see it. Home also caused apports of flowers to be brought to sitters, withdrew the scent from flowers at will, and caused his head or hands to become luminous. In his presence chairs and tables were moved by unseen hands or levitated (on one occasion a heavy table was raised three feet, with all its legs off the ground), and a harp in the gallery of the Dunraven home played, even though it was under its cover and some distance from him.

None of these phenomena took place in Home's own home. All happened in the properties of Adare or his friends, and none of the objects that moved or levitated belonged to Home. Thus he had little chance of bringing his own trick props or of secreting accomplices around the room. Often when entranced the spirits would speak through him and give notice of what was about to happen, thus giving the investigators every chance of observing closely. Adare and his colleagues could be accused of inexperience in their investigations, and of lacking any equipment for maintaining control over Home. As much of the phenomena happened to him personally, there were limited opportunities for securing him to a chair while paranormal events happened around him. Even so, the recorded phenomena were at such a dramatic, macro level that it seems unlikely that four intelligent and observant young men would not have spotted fraud at some point in the two years of their investigation had it existed, or that with hindsight they would not have realized that certain events looked suspicious.

The charge could be made that Adare and his colleagues were young men intent on being party to practical jokes in order to make fools of the gullible, but this seems unlikely. Adare's record of events — mostly in the form of letters originally intended to be read only by his serious-minded father — was only circulated to a small number of friends, and was never intended for publication. No money was involved. And at no time, either during the two years of the investigation or subsequently, did Adare or his colleagues admit to being involved in tomfoolery — hardly the behavior of high-spirited young men determined to play a series of pranks on the world.

In 1871 an even more important series of investigations commenced with Home, this time carried out by Sir William Crookes. Crookes at the time was already a Fellow of the Royal Society, a top honor for a British scientist, and although many of his other honors (including his knighthood, which came in 1897) lay in the future, he was already bidding fair to become one of the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century. His interest in psychical research, which seems to have begun with the death of a much-loved brother, was aroused by sittings with mediums Mrs. Marshall and J. J. Morse, and in 1870 he expressed his determination to bring mediumship under the scrutiny of science. As he put it in an article entitled Spiritualism Viewed in the Light of Modern Science in the Quarterly Journal of Science, 'Views or opinions I cannot be said to possess on a subject I do not pretend to understand ... I prefer to enter upon the inquiry with no preconceived notions whatever ... The increased employment of scientific methods will produce a race of observers who will drive the worthless residuum of spiritualism hence into the unknown limbo of magic and necromancy."Crookes' intentions were well received by both the press and fellow scientists. Here, it was thought, was the death blow to this nonsense of talking with spirits. In the event, the exact opposite turned out to be the case. Crookes was assisted in his investigations by his chemical assistant, Williams, by his brother Walter, by the eminent physicist and astronomer Sir William Huggins (former President of the Royal Society), and by the leading lawyer Serjeant Cox, and his report was presented to the Royal Society in 1871, which together with the British Association for the Advancement of Science had refused to send observers to the investigations. The report was refused by the Royal Society, and it was left to Crookes to publish it in the July 1, 1874 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Science, of which he was co-editor, under the title Notes of an Inquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual.One of the phenomena reported was the playing in a good light of "a sweet and plaintive melody" on an accordion supplied by Crookes and placed in a specially made wooden cage situated under the table while Home's hands were held by the investigators on the table top. The accordion was also seen to float about in the cage. The cage was wound round with insulated copper wire which was connected to two Grove cells to form an electric circuit, thus ensuring that any attempt to tamper with the cage would be immediately detected. Another was an alteration in the weight of bodies placed on specially designed and fraud-proof apparatus. Crookes was adamant that his experiences with Home enabled him to confirm ... conclusively the existence of [a psychic force]." He also reported seeing "luminous points of light darting about and settling on the heads of different persons ... a luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side table, break a sprig off, and carry [it] to a lady" and also condense "to the form of a hand and coriy small objects about." He further described

A beautifully formed small hand [rise] up from an opening in a dining-table and [give] me a flower, it appeared and then disappeared three times at intervals, affording me ample opportunity of satisfying myself that it was as real appearance as my own. This occurred in the light in my own room, whilst I was holding the medium's hands and feet.Crookes' reference to holding the medium's hands and feet suggests that he had four hands and was capable of extraordinary contortions, but I take it he meant controlling rather than holding, and the usual way to do this was to grasp the medium's hands while placing both feet over his.

Crookes also held materialized spirit hands on occasions, and try as he might to keep them captive they resolved themselves "into vapor, and faded in that manner from my grasp." He witnessed repeated levitations of Home and was able to feel under his feet, over his head and all around him to ensure there was no mechanical means of support. Once his own wife was levitated while in her chair. In the "dusk of the evening" the form of a man materialized, "took an accordion in its hand, and then glided about the room playing the instrument. The form was visible to all present for many minutes, Mr. Home also being seen at the same time." The figure then vanished. The accordion also played while Crookes was holding it, with the keys downwards, some distance from Home, and on another occasion floated about the room with no visible means of support. Like Adare, Crookes witnessed Home's fire-handling. Home stirred the fire with his hand, "took out a red-hot piece nearly as big as an orange, and putting it on his right hand, covered it over with his left hand ... and then blew into the small furnace thus extemporized until the lump of charcoal was nearly white-hot ... [then] he took out another hot coal with his hand..."Crookes gave fuller accounts of his experiences with Home in SPR Proceedings Volume VI, Part XV, 1889 and in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, published in 1874 (reprinted 1953), but unfortunately, as Medhurst and Goldney (1964) point out, his family destroyed his voluminous collection of papers on psychical research after his death, and much detail of his work with Home has undoubtedly been lost (how many families have destroyed the papers of great men after their deaths in the mistaken belief that by doing so their reputations would be protected!). In answer to the ridicule that was heaped upon him by colleagues (none of whom had been present at the sittings) Crookes demanded "Will not my critics give me credit for the possession of some amount of common sense?" He also asked reasonably why they could not "imagine that obvious precautions, which occur to them as soon as they sit down to pick holes in my experiments, are not unlikely to have also occurred to me in the course of prolonged and patient investigations?"Many of the phenomena reported by Crookes were similar to those described by Lord Adare. In addition, to reduce any risk of fraud he had a special room constructed for séances, with a concrete floor to guard against vibrations, and with iron shutters on the windows. A massive table, which could neither be moved nor made to produce creaking or cracking noises by any one person, was installed, and it was this that was levitated on several occasions by Home. The Reverend Stainton Moses, in one of his notebooks preserved at the College of Psychic Studies in London, records of this table that while attending a séance

The movement of the table was very remarkable. The very heavy mass moved with a sort of ponderous sliding motion, and once rose and vibrated heavily in the air. The whole room shook, in spite of its solid foundation and vibrated throughout, the pictures shook, and the chairs on which we sat oscillated strongly.

Another sitter at a Home séance was Sir Francis Galton, noted for his pioneering work on genius and for founding the science of eugenics (in the attempts by psychologists to assign IQ ratings to great men of the past based upon their work, Galton comes out on top, with a massive IQ of over 200 points). Writing to his friend Charles Darwin (see Medhurst and Gïldney 1964) Galton reports that in full gas-light the accordion played without apparent human agency under the table, away from the table, behind the chain and in the hands of Serjeant Cox, one of the investigators. 'The playing was remarkably good and sweet ... [and] ... there were other things nearly as extraordinary." The accordion was even placed in Galton's hands by the spirits, though it did not play for him. Calton concluded that É am convinced, the affair is no matter of vulgar legerdemain and believe it well worth going into on the understanding that a first rate medium (and I hear there are only three such) puts himself at your disposal." Calton says in the same letter to Darwin that `I really believe the truth of what they [the mediums] allege, that people who come as men of science are usually so disagreeable, opinionated and obstructive and have so little patience, that the séances rarely succeed with them° (words which might still apply today). In a further letter to Darwin, Calton expressed his regret that "I can't myself get to these séances as often as I like — indeed I have had no opportunity for a long time past.' The correspondence was sparked off by Darwin's earlier letter to Galton in which he asked `Have you seen Mr. Crookes? I hope to Heaven you have, as I for one should feel entire confidence in your conclusions." We can assume from this that Darwin accepted Gallon's conclusions that "no matter of vulgar legerdemain' could account for the phenomena he had witnessed with Home.Home's marriage and withdrawal from public mediumship meant that Darwin himself never saw him in action, but together with Gallon he had earlier attended a séance with the medium Charles Williams (whose honesty was vouched for at the time by Home, a discerning critic of other physical mediums), held at the house of his brother. In a letter to Thomas Huxley, Darwin wrote that "We had grand fun ... Charles Williams made the chairs, a flute, a bell and a candlestick jump about ... in a manner that astounded everyone, and took away their breath,' while the medium's hands and feet were controlled by the philologist Hensleigh Wedgwood on one side and by George Huxley (brother of Thomas Huxley, Darwin's greatest champion) on the other. Darwin may also have been influenced by the fact that Alfred Russell Wallace, who developed the theory of evolution at the same time as himself and with whom he was on the best of terms, was converted from initial skepticism by his many experiences with mediums, as witnessed by his On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, published in 1874. However, Thomas Huxley subsequently attended a further séance with Charles Williams, at which he concluded, although without positive evidence, that the medium was a cheat and an impostor. Darwin, it seems, was much relieved by this, and considered that it rid him of the necessity to believe that Williams was genuine. He preferred to ignore a séance that Crookes and Serjeant Cox had with Williams a few days later behind locked doors, at which heavy objects were brought and placed upon the table from a distance of seven feet away, a musical box was wound up and conveyed around the room playing all the time, and a hand bell was taken from the table and rung at each corner of the room near the ceiling (Inglis 1977).Like Lord Adare, Crookes never wavered in his support of the genuineness of Home's phenomena (and, it seems, of that of Charles Williams). In his Presidential Address to the British Association years later in 1898 he affirmed that psychical research was not only "the weightiest and farthest reaching" of his interests, and that

Thirty years have passed since I published an account of experiments tending to show ... there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals. I have nothing to retract. I adhere to my ... published statements. Indeed I might add thereto.In an interview published in The Psychic Gazette in 1917, two years before his death, he went further and affirmed his continuing belief in survival:

I have never had any occasion to change my mind on the subject. I am perfectly satisfied with what I have said in earlier days. It is quite true that a connection has been set up between this world and the next.

At the age of 38, after re-marrying (to another aristocratic lady, the daughter of a Councillor of State to the Czar of Russia — Home seems to have had a special affinity for Russia), Home retired from public life. His decision to do so was not just a consequence of married bliss, but from concerns for his health, which had never been strong. By all accounts his mediumship took a great deal out of him, and on one occasion the spirits had withdrawn his gift from him for a year in order to allow him to regain his strength. His retirement may have prolonged his life, but in 1886 his lungs were in such a bad condition that specialists in Paris held out little hope for him, and he died there in June of that year at the early age of 53, presumably confident in his reception by his spiritual friends. In 1888 Julie, his second wife, published her D. D. Home: His Life and Mission, a lengthy and somewhat rambling but totally supportive account of her husband's life and work, and of his conviction that he had been given a divine mission to convince the world of the truth of the spirit world.In his 1889 article in the SPR Proceedings Sir William Crookes wrote of him:

During the whole of my knowledge of D. D. Home, extending over several years, I never once saw the slightest occurrence that would make me suspicious that he was attempting to play tricks. He was scrupulously sensitive on this point, and never felt hurt at anyone taking precautions against deception. To those who knew him, Home was one of the most lovable of men and his perfect genuineness and uprightness were beyond suspicion.The only published attempt to discredit Home on the basis of direct observation in the séance room is a letter from a Mr. Merrifield published in the SPR Journal in 1903 but written in 1855, the year that Home arrived in London from America and in which several attempts were made, without supporting evidence, to dismiss the 19-year-old newcomer as a fraud. Merrifield claims to have seen a connection between Home's arm and a spirit hand during a séance, and to have seen his shoulders "rise and fall" in concordance with the movements of the hand. On the strength of this Frank Podmore, in his The Newer Spiritualism (1910), changed his earlier favorable opinion of Home and accused him of being a practiced conjuror, though even Podmore, who throughout his work with the SPR remained skeptical of survival, concluded by confessing that "We don't quite see how some of the things were done, and we leave the subject with an almost painful sense of bewilderment." This same bewilderment is also apparent in Jean Burton's account of Home and his work (Heyday of a Wizard) published in 1948. Burton gives no evidence to support charges of fraud against Home, yet adopts a somewhat frivolous attitude to the phenomena, as if to imply we all know it must have been fraud really, although we can't think how it was done. By contrast Harry Price in his long Foreword to Burton's book, states that "Home was a great medium [who] produced genuine phenomena at times." He speaks of him as one in ten thousand among physical mediums, and — although not noted for commending the work of investigators other than himself — he extols "the classic experiments" with Home of Lord Adare, Sir William Crookes, "and a host of other serious inquirers." Price ends his Foreword with the words of Home (which we have in his own handwriting) that his strange powers were a "gift from God."

Nevertheless, some critics have dismissed Crookes work with Home by referring to what, without the benefit of being present, they regard as weaknesses in his experimental methods. For example in 1933 H. G. Wells (no friend of psychical research) wrote in his The Science of Life, published over half a century after these experiments were completed, that Crookes "experiments have been submitted to searching criticism and it is now seen that they have no claim to be in any way scientific." Other critics have insisted that the methods of investigation available in Crookes' day were inadequate, and that had Home been working in later years his tricks would quickly have been found out. This kind of reasoning is little more than speculation, and I doubt very much if the critics concerned read the work of Adare or of Crookes on the subject in any detail or with any care. If they did so, they could hardly fail to be aware that Adare and Crookes had little need of modern infra-red cameras when many of the phenomena were produced in good light, had little cause to wire the medium up to modern electrical circuits and circuit breakers when the phenomena occurred on the opposite side of the room from him, and little reason to suspect the kind of elaborate modern stage props and hidden accomplices necessary for levitating the medium nearly to ceiling level when these levitations occurred on the home territory of Adare and Crookes respectively rather than in Home's lodgings.

If critics were to study the reports of Adare and of Crookes they would also be aware, from the descriptions given, of the apparent quality of the observations concerned. They would then be faced with explaining how even the most accomplished conjurors could duplicate Home's achievements under the conditions in which they occurred. If trickery there was, no one has so far provided convincing chapter and verse as to how it might have been done. The best way of demonstrating its existence would be for critics to duplicate the phenomena under the conditions described by Adare and by Crookes. To my knowledge no attempt has yet been made to do this. But we can still wait and see. For those wishing to duplicate Home's phenomena it is worth concluding this section by listing the 13 different kinds of physical phenomena that Crookes reports witnessing. The list is abbreviated from the summary given by Inglis (1977).Home's Phenomena Witnessed by Crookes:

· Movement of heavy bodies (e.g. the heavy table), with human contact but without human propulsion.

· Percussive and other sounds (e.g. raps).

· Alteration in the weight of bodies (e.g. the medium's own body weight).

· Movement of heavy bodies without human contact (e.g. chairs moving from the far side of the room).

· Raising of furniture off the ground without human contact (e.g. the heavy table rising one and a half feet off the floor under conditions that "rendered trickery impossible").·  

Levitation of human beings (e.g. Home, another medium, and children).

· Movement of small objects without human contact (e.g. knots tied in handkerchiefs, a pendulum enclosed in a glass case, the keys of an accordion, a fan which fanned sitters).

· Luminous appearances (e.g. points of light and a cloud "that visibly condensed into the form of a hand").

· Materializations (e.g. a hand grasped and held firmly by Crookes that then faded like vapor from his grasp).

· Writing by materialized hands.

· Phantom forms.

· Demonstrations of intelligence not attributable to the medium (e.g. answers the medium could not have known given to questions put by investigators).· Translocation (e.g. a bell in Crookes' library disappearing and reappearing in the séance room though the door was locked).

IS THERE AN

AFTERLIFE?

David Fontana