You feel for everyone involved—the grieving parents; the average physician who simply lacks the understanding or courage to take premonitions seriously; and a strained health care system struggling just to pay for accepted treatment modalities, much less inexplicable “woo-woo.”

So when should we pay attention to our premonitions? Dossey’s advice is simple and succinct: Pay attention when they’re accompanied by physical symptoms; pay attention if they’re intrusive and insistent; pay attention when they indicate death, no matter how fuzzy the details may be.

His suggestions for readers wishing to become more “premonition prone” are poetic: “Court difference, variety and ambiguity in your life, relax and let go. Don’t try too hard. Give up your pet ideas of how the world should work. Make a place for variety, risk, novelty, playfulness, generosity and mystery in your life. As Rumi advises, ‘Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.’ If you do these things, you will probably discover that the universe meets you more than halfway, perhaps with premonitions as its calling card.” (No wonder scientists report fewer premonitions.)

But he serves up his tip sheet with a sober warning: “Premonitions can be grossly misleading, and they can be used as an excuse for irresponsible, reckless or criminal behavior.” Marshall Herff Applewhite, leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult, triggered the largest mass suicide in the history of the United States when he and 38 of his followers acted on his premonition that the earth was about to be “recycled” of human life, and decided their ticket to survival was to shed their bodies and catch a ride on the spaceship they believed was trailing comet Hale–Bopp. “This side of the psyche can be a minefield, and is not for everyone.”

Still, if you’re an SSE member bored with merely reading about scientific anomalies, and studiously practice your premonition skills, it’s a relatively safe and easily accessible mind field ripe for personal exploration.

MICHAEL SCHMICKER

http://www.redroom.com/author/michael-1-schmicker

Traité de Métapsychique by Charles Richet. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922. 815 pp. Available free at http://books.google.com/books?id=xo8FAQA AIAAJ&dq=richet+traite+de+metapsychique, and http://www.archive. org/details/traitdemtaps00rich

Although overviews of psychical research such as the one reviewed here are appreciated, they are not generally considered to be particularly important or influential beyond the panoramic views, summaries, and bibliographies they provide. An exception is the book reviewed here, authored by French physiologist Charles Richet (1850–1935), which was later translated into English from its second edition (Richet, 1923). Richet had in mind the preparation of this book in 1905 when, in his Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) he presented the term métapsychique (metapsychics) to refer to psychical research and mentioned that a possible title for his future book was Traité de Métapsychique (Richet, 1905b:13).

By the time Traité was published, Richet was well-known in psychical research. This was evident from the frequent and multiple citations he received in general French books about the topic (e.g., Coste, 1895:v, xiii, 59, 101, 199, 221). During the 1880s. he conducted research about what we would refer to today as ESP, as seen in his reports “La Suggestion Mentale et le Calcul des Probabilités” (Richet, 1884) and “Further Experiments in Hypnotic Lucidity or Clairvoyance” (Richet, 1889). Later on he was involved with bringing psychical research into the 1889 Congress of Physiological Psychology, the development and publication of the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, the medium Eusapia Palladino (Richet, 1893), and the presidency of the SPR. He authored many more papers about psychic phenomena and their study, among them a highly controversial report of materialization phenomena with medium Marthe Béraud (Richet, 1905a).

Richet’s Preface states that readers expecting “nebulous” discussions about “man’s destiny, about magic, about theosophy” (p. i) would be disappointed. Instead, he would write about facts without advancing a theory, because in his view theories in metapsychics were “astoundingly frail” (p. i).

The Traité is divided into four “books” or sections. The first is a general perspective on metapsychics, which was defined by Richet as “a science which object is phenomena, mechanical or psychological, due to seemingly intelligent forces or to unknown latent powers in human intelligence” (p. 5). He classified the field into subjective and objective metapsychics, terms he used to refer to mental and physical phenomena. The section also includes a discussion of history in which the author divided the subject into four periods. These periods were denominated by Richet as: mythical (up to Mesmer), magnetic (from Mesmer to the Fox sisters), spiritistic (from the Fox sisters to William Crookes), and scientific (starting with Crookes). Richet hoped that his book would start a fi fth period.

Richet saw the scientific period as the high point of the history of interest in metapsychic phenomena and separated it conceptually and methodologically from previous movements. In fact, he pictured mesmerism, as well as spiritism and spiritualism, as stages in the development of metapsychics. Previous movements, Richet believed, had too much theory, something that metapsychics must be careful with. But he believed it would have been an injustice to despise the magnetizers and the spiritists. Their work, Richet stated, “contributed to the founding of metapsychics” (p. 40). But in his view their time was past. Nowadays a medium should not be wasted in informal spiritistic circles “without the use of methods of research adopted by all the sciences, balances, photography, cinematography, graphic registration. Similarly . . . rigorous, strict investigation, similar to those the S.P.R. [Society for Psychical Research] has conducted, is indispensable” (p. 40).

The second part of the book is about “subjective metapsychics.” Richet started with a section in which he attempted to separate phenomena that could be explained via conventional ideas of the action of the subconscious mind such as automatisms, personation, and pantomnesia (or memories of all the past experiences of the person), from phenomena such as telepathy and the like requiring explanations beyond the conventional (I have presented a reprint of this section elsewhere [Alvarado, 2008]). He wrote that:

“to separate the psychic [psychological] from the metapsychic, we adopt the following criterion: Everything that may be done by human intelligence, even the very profound and skillful, is psychic. Everything a human intelligence cannot do . . . would be metapsychic” (p. 62, italics in the original).

Two other sections were about chance and observation errors. Such discussions were not only proper in a book like this to show how psychical researchers have been aware of conventional explanations and the precautions they have taken to avoid them, but also served a rhetorical function in that it gave credibility to Richet’s defenses of the reality of the metapsychic realm beyond the counterexplanations of science.

The rest of this part of the book is devoted to what Richet calledcryptesthesia. This meant a “hidden sensibility, a perception of things, unknown regarding its mechanisms, and of which we cannot know but its effects” (p. 74). Richet discussed spontaneous and experimental examples of this faculty. He included his own observations and studies, such as those with a woman he referred to as Alice, and discussed the topic as manifested in mediums such as Leonora E. Piper, and in various ways, among them psychometry and premonitions. The spontaneous occurrences were classified as monitions involving non-serious and serious events (other than death), death, and those perceived collectively.

Richet mentioned that cryptesthesia showed no time and space limitations. He wrote that the phenomena “is very strange, and we do not understand it at all,” but such lack of understanding did not mean the acceptance of spiritual entities following “savages who attributed forces of Nature to a Divinity . . . .”

(p. 252).

Part 3 is about physical phenomena. In addition to hauntings (and poltergeists), it includes chapters about phenomena infrequently discussed in modern parapsychology, namely telekinesis, materializations, levitation, and bilocation. The latter was defined by Richet as the simultaneous presence of a person in different locations. He rejected the existence of objective bilocation as the duplication of the human body, but accepted that apparitions representing the individual could be perceived as if the person was alive and that this represented a modality of cryptesthesia.

Regardless of the fraudulent practices of some physical mediums, Richet was convinced that there were real telekinetic and ectoplasmic manifestations. Among many observations, he discussed medium Florence Cook and the famous Katie King materialization, and his own observations with medium Marthe Béraud. Regarding Béraud, Richet presented some notes he compiled in 1906 in which he saw ectoplasmic forms move and take shapes. He also paid attention to many other mediums, among them Linda Gazzera, D. D. Home, Eusapia Palladino, and Stanislawa Tomczyk.

In the conclusion, the fourth part of the book, Richet states that the collective weight of all evidence shows the reality of metapsychic phenomena. This, he believed, was the case regardless of criticisms:

Therefore: 1) there is in us a faculty of knowledge that is absolutely different from our common sensory faculties of knowledge (cryptesthesia); 2) movement of objects without contact are produced, even in plain light (telekinesis); 3) there are hands, bodies, objects, that appear to be formed completely from a cloud and show all the appearances of life (ectoplasmy); 4) there are presentiments that neither perspicacity nor chance can explain, and sometimes they are verified to their smallest details. (p. 761)

Also in the conclusion, Richet returned to his view that metapsychics should be an empirical specialty whose current task should not be the defense of particular models. In fact, if there was a perspective characterizing the Traité it was that of the need to have an ultra-empirical metapsychics with little theoretical content. Consistent with this view, Richet stated he was not convinced of any explanation so far offered to account for metapsychic phenomena and that at present (1922) no cohesive theory could be presented. He was particularly critical of explanations based on the concept of discarnate action, something he discussed in other publications. Nonetheless, and regardless of his protestations, Richet was not completely atheoretical. He was positive about the idea that unknown human faculties and forces were at work, and, as he discussed in the Traité, he used the concepts of personation and cryptesthesia to explain the manifestation of mental mediumship (Alvarado, 2008). Richet also speculated about forces in reference to materializations:

Materialization is a mechanical projection. . . . Is it not a very long way to con

sider possible, other than projections of heat, light, and electricity, a projection

of a mechanical force? The memorable demonstrations of Einstein establish to

what extent mechanical energy is similar to luminous energy. (pp. 597–598)

Such an idea, while perhaps too vague to be called a theory, was consistent with an old model of biophysical forces present throughout the literatures of mesmerism, spiritualism, and psychical research (for an overview see Alvarado, 2006).

Richet concluded his book with hope for the future, as he did in other publications. Currently, “when everything is still in darkness” (p. 793), Richet stated that there was a pressing need to move forward with research. “Then Metapsychics will come out of Occultism, as Chemistry was separated from Alchemy” (p. 793). The situation, Richet continued, may seem to be too dark and difficult to solve. He further wrote: “But this is no reason for not increasing our efforts and labors. . . . The task is so beautiful that, even if we fail, the honor of having undertaken it gives some value to life” (p. 793).

Such views were consistent with Richet’s general outlook on science. Like other scientists, he saw science as a slow process based on “patient, long, and difficult research” that could at best only promise to diminish slightly our overall ignorance (Richet, 1899:35).

This book received much publicity when it was first published in 1922. Richet presented it to the prestigious Académie des Sciences, referring to the phenomena in question as “new” and “inhabitual” (Mémoires et Communications, 1922:430). The reception of Traité was surprising for an introductory book about psychical research. It was repeatedly reviewed as a special book. Examples of this are the long and not always positive discussions of it in journals dedicated to psychic phenomena such as the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (Holt, 1922), Luce e Ombra (Bozzano, 1922), and the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Lodge, 1923). A prominent example of a review appearing in the journals of other disciplines is that authored by Pierre Janet in the Revue Philosophique dela France et de l’Étranger (Janet, 1923).

There is no question that the book was comprehensive and systematic, and this made it valuable as a general introduction to the subject. It is in fact one of the best overviews of psychical research for the period in question. Richet’s insistence on the collection of facts, to the neglect of theories, made the book his personal manifesto of psychical research. He projected an image of metapsychics as a science, arguing for the existence of a field that had a subject matter and a right to exist. But as much as the book was a summary of facts, it was also Richet’s attempt to construct and promote the subject of metapsychics.

However, in both Traité and later publications, such as his autobiographical memoir Souvenirs d’un Physiologiste Richet (1933), he described the discipline as being in a preliminary stage of development. Nonetheless, he stated in this later book, “I am convinced it is the science of the future” (p. 156).

Unfortunately, Richet’s neglecting to summarize theoretical models properly and to include systematic discussions or research methodologies weaken the status of Traité as a rigorous textbook. I believe the empirical approach defended by Richet in the book would have received support in discussions of theories and methodologies.

For many, particularly in France, Traité became an exemplar of the “new” science, and this took place in spite of much criticism. Why, one may ask, did Richet’s book attain such a status? After all, the content of Traité was not innovative or revolutionary, so why did it command so much attention and respect? In fact, in many ways Traité was rather dry and uninspired. I believe there are at least two reasons.

First, Richet’s book cannot be dismissed as just a relatively unimportant exercise in synthesis. In fact, this characteristic of the book is one of the aspects identified by Ceccarelli (2001) as being important to produce infl uential books that assist in the development of interdisciplinary communities. Synthesis is present in Traité in the form of a modest non-theoretical integration based on the accumulation of facts presented to show the existence of a phenomenon. Ceccarelli believes that such influential books present two other characteristics, the development of an “authorial persona,” and the fact that the text is addressed to more than one audience. The first point perhaps includes Richet’s strong and repeated ultra-empirical and anti-survival stances, while the second may also be present in that several audiences benefited from the work: scientists, psychical researchers, and the general public. While I do not want to push this view too much, it seems to me that the book could be studied in more detail from this perspective.

Second, the author commanded much attention due to his eminence. Richet—who worked in such various fields as aviation, eugenics, history, literature, pacifism, philosophy, psychical research, psychology, and sociology—was a well-known and highly respected intellectual. He published much research on physiological topics such as animal heat, breathing, stomach acid, serotherapy, and anaphylaxis. As early as 1879, he was referred to in an American medical journal as being “well-known to the medical public as one of the rising younger Frenchmen of scientific tastes and ability, already the author of several works of merit” (Putnam, 1879:815). He also had several important academic positions and honors before the publication of Traité. These included being editor of the Revue Scientifique, Professor of Physiology at the Faculté de Médicine in Paris, member of the Académie de Médicine and of the Académie des Sciences, and Nobel prize winner for his work on anaphylaxis. In addition, Richet had many social advantages. His wealth and high social position, coming both from his father and from his mother’s family, allowed him many personal connections that facilitated publishing and being heard in different forums (on these issues, see Wolf, 1993).

All this meant that a treatise about psychic phenomena from such a man would not be ignored and would be seen as a more important event than publications on the topic by less eminent individuals. His persona was a social and intellectual beacon that attracted many, who would either praise or condemn him for his positive belief in the existence of metapsychic phenomena and for his involvement with the topic.

Modern researchers will find Traité of value for several reasons. The book is a reference work presenting many summaries of studies, bibliographical references, and evidential claims about psychic phenomena for the pre-1922 period. In addition, those current researchers who are not familiar with the old psychical research literature will find in this book a window into the past, a past somewhat different from the present, as seen in the emphasis on gifted subjects, such as psychics and mediums, on the phenomena of physical mediumship, and on the issue of survival of death.

CARLOS S. ALVARADO

Scholar in Residence, Atlantic University 215 67th St., Virginia Beach VA 23451 USA carlos.alvarado@atlanticuniv.edu

References

Alvarado, C. S. (2006). Human radiations: Concepts of force in mesmerism, spiritualism and psychical research. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 70, 138–162. Alvarado, C. S. (2008). Charles Richet on “The Limits of Psychic and Metapsychic Science.”

Psypioneer 4, 198–207. http://www.woodlandway.org/PDF/PP4.9September08..pdf,

accessed February 15, 2010. Bozzano, E. (1922). Considerazioni intorno al “Traité de Métapsychique” del Prof. Charles Richet.

Luce e Ombra 22, 103–115.

Ceccarelli, L. (2001). Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Case of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coste, A. (1895). Les Phénomènes Psychiques Occultes: État Actual de la Question. Montpellier: Camille Coulet. Holt, H. (1922). A review of Richet. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 16, 655–670. Janet, P. (1923). A propos de la métapsychique. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 96, 5–32. Lodge, O. (1923). A textbook of metapsychics: Review and critique. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 34, 70–106.

Mémoires et communications des membres et des correspondants de l’Académie (1922). Compte Rendu Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 174, 429–430. Putnam, J. J. (1879). Richet on the physiology and histology of the cerebral convolutions. Boston

Medical and Surgical Journal 101, 815–816. Richet, C. (1884). La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probabilités. Revue Philosophique de laFrance et de l’Étranger, 18, 609–674. Richet, C. (1889). Further experiments in hypnotic lucidity or clairvoyance. Proceedings of the

Society for Psychical Research, 6, 66–83. Richet, C. (1893). Expériences de Milan. Annales des Sciences Psychiques, 3, 1–31. Richet, C. (1899). Les promesses de la science. Revue Scientifi que, 11(3), 33–35. Richet, C. (1905a). Concerning the phenomenon called materialisation. Annals of Psychical

Science 2, 207–210, 269–289. Richet, C. (1905b). La métapsychique. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 19,

2–49. Richet, C. (1923). Thirty Years of Psychical Research. New York: Macmillan. Richet, C. (1933). Souvenirs d’un Physiologiste. Paris: J. Peyronnet. Wolf, S. (1993). Brain, Mind and Medicine: Charles Richet and the Origins of Physiological

Psychology. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

De L’Inconscient au Conscient by Gustave Geley. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1919. [From the Unconscious to the Conscious by Gustave Geley, 1920, Glasgow: William Collins. Available free at: http://www.archive. org/details/FromTheUnconsciousToTheConscious.]

The other pole of the book is represented by the pamphlet called La Physiologie Dite Supranormale et les Phénomènes d’Idéoplastie (Paris, 1918), which is extracted from his conference on January 28, 1918, at the College de France, invited by Professor Arsène d’Arsonval (1851-1940), then president of the Institut Général Psychologique, where he had been convinced of the authenticity of the phenomena produced by the medium Eusapia Palladino. Geley’s conference was based on his observations of Marthe Beraud starting September 26, 1916, at Bisson’s home, and which would last until the autumn of 1917 (with a summer break), with at least two sessions per week. Geley led further sessions in his laboratory from December 10, 1917, to March 10, 1918. Drawing on photography (24 photo prints illustrate his text), he sought to demonstrate that materialization phenomena are genuine and obey laws which are those of a certain physiology admitting of ideoplasty.

In short, the whole purpose of the book is to build a theory of the evolution of the living that incorporates and, at the same time, supports the existence of ectoplasmic materialization. A fi nal aspect of the context is that the publication is made in the year of the establishment of the Institut Métapsychique International where funds were allocated to test mediums under the best conditions (30 subjects in 1919 only). Then this book is also a scientific program (a “plan,” said Geley, p. 338) and a open call to experimental subjects. As an experimenter, many said that Geley excelled. The book Clairvoyance and Materialization (Geley, 1924) is considered the culmination of his research, but others (e.g., Tocquet, 1963) complain about the frequent lack of detail in his experimental reports.

Contents

The book begins with a methodological introduction explaining the importance of starting with the “higher” facts such as ectoplasmic materialization to build a theoretical basis for understanding the physiology and psychology of the subconscious. Complicated nomenclature (as with Boirac, criticized by Geley) or the study of only the basic structures were apparently each in the wrong direction. Geley advocated a scientific philosophy based on a positive demonstration and on a synthetic method for understanding complex facts.

Book I is a critical analysis of conventional theories of evolution (first part) and of physiological and psychological individuality (second part). The supernormal physiology is used as an argument against the classical theories, but many classic arguments are also mentioned. Geley claimed that Darwinism is unable to explain the transformations by incomplete mutations which the animal did not use; and that Lamarckism is powerless to explain the adaptation to an environment in which the animal does not live yet. There would be abrupt and immediate stable transformations (mutations) unexplained by a model of progressive transformations through drafts.

On the basis of this challenge of conventional theories, Geley allowed himself to propose a new model where the ectoplasm becomes intelligible. He used analogies with known biological phenomena to remove the incomprehensible anomalous character of ectoplasmy. His thought is structured around three key concepts that, according to him, logically result from the facts: the unity of the substance, the organizing dynamism, and the conditioning of this dynamism by the idea³ (p. 75).

Geley (p. 53) described the ectoplasm as a two-step process. First, a substance that was already there will externalize from the medium. This substrate can have any form, a white veil or a sort of saliva, but will then gradually begin to represent various things, mostly more or less complex organs. The representations are therefore organized as seconds even if “the substance has a immediate and irresistible tendency to organization” (p. 57–58). All transitions between complete and incomplete forms occur, so that “substance rudiments” or “organs simulacra” enlighten, according to Geley (p. 61), the mechanisms behind the genes in the form of a true “metapsychic embryology”.

Geley attributed to a superior dynamism the role of modelling this primary paste, but also, by generalization, the organism in general.

It’s not just the directive idea of Claude Bernard, a kind of abstraction, of metaphysical and biological entity that remains incomprehensible; it is a practical concept, that of a director and centralized dynamism, which dominates intrinsic and extrinsic contingencies, chemical reactions of the organic milieu such as ambient influences of the external environment” (p. 51).

Close to the theories of Frederic Myers (1903), Geley assigned to the subliminal Self this “mysterious and impenetrable Unconscious” (p. 75) the role of organizer of the psychic and the organic. No paranormal phenomena depend on the conscious will, because they are all produced either by an apparently foreign will or by a subconscious idea or personality (p. 99). Following Schopenhauer, he put the individual as the common center of body and mind, but he added that, as there may be several streams of personalities cohabiting in one being, there may be several bodies for a single individual, with other representations that may objectify themselves outside the normal and supposedly unique body. Geley didn’t completely eliminate the possibility of interference by external entities (p. 276-277), but he did not really need them.

Book II introduces models of the subconscious of the turn of the twentieth century, primarily about individuality (first part) and about evolution (second part). This connection is possible via a general metaphysics where life tends toward the development of consciousness in a continuous progress from the Unconscious to the Conscious. The human being would be superior to animals because its consciousness can triumph over matter, following the movement of “spiritualization” detectable in nature. Geley immediately drew moral consequences by imposing a “rational optimism” with regard to individual and collective evolution (third party). Humanity tends ideally toward the achievement of supreme consciousness, justice, and good.

Geley relied on the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose books addressed the same topics as French psychists (Larcher, in Méheust, 1997), to criticize the psychophysical parallelism and cerebral localizations (p. 86 et seq.). For example, he claimed that observations of indestructible memories were fatal to the theories of brain imprinting (p. 133). Geley introduced the subconscious psyche as the higher and more complex area in the psychological being. Here he pertinently shifted away from psychologists of his time, Janet, Grasset, Jastrow, Sollier, Ribot, with the conception of a subliminal self as the reservoir of the worst and the best in humans. Geley (p. 111 et seq.) distinguished the automatic or morbid (inferior) subconscious and the active or supernormal (superior) subconscious. All models that were unable to integrate the most wonderful psychic faculties seemed inadequate in his eyes. The pessimistic and pathological Unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysts is not even mentioned, perhaps because it was not yet well-known in France at that time (Roudinesco, 2009). Geley also disliked the pessimism of Schopenhauer, who admitted an unbridgeable gap, an essential difference between the conscious and the unconscious. Yet the evidence of subconscious activities demonstrates a possible bridge, and, even more, a dynamism already in progress (p. 208).

Geley proposed a model of the psyche that offers itself as a viable alternative to past and present models. It is a kind of neo-interactionist dualism that goes further than Bergson’s on some points. Geley recognized Carl du Prel as an intuitive precursor, and Myers (1903) as providing documentation (p. 143). The full range of phenomena presented by Myers could be catalogued as a continuum from normal to supernormal physiology where everything is representation, some usual and other exceptional, conditioned by an essential dynamo-psychism (p. 220). Then the extremity of active ideoplasty, like ectoplasms, would refer to the more general mechanism of passive ideoplasty, which is involved in embryogenesis and physiological functions of the organism

(p. 239). Geley based all his claims on one assumption,

that of an essential dynamo-psychism objectifying in representations and passing, through these representations, from unconscious to conscious (p. 335),

and saw nothing in the science of his time that invalidated it.

In this work, Geley therefore tried an important synthesis based on a few strong ideas, but his remarkable scientific philosophy left little room for analytical accuracy and for a full report of summoned crucial facts (Sudre, 1924). His biological analogies would surely suffer next to current knowledge, and the crucial need to explain the fact of ectoplasmy is no longer credible for a majority of contemporary scholars. It is however important to note that the specificity of its metapsychic approach is this attempt to interpret ectoplasms as emanations not of the afterlife but of life itself, as a more vitalist than spiritualist option. After upsetting all conventional biological theories, and then dying too young before he could better explain his thesis, Geley forced his followers to look elsewhere for support of his theory.

RENAUD EVRARD

Center for Information, Research, and Counseling on Exceptional Experiences (www.circee.org) evrardrenaud@gmail.com

Notes

¹ Externalization of a polymorphic substance from the body of a medium.

² Vitalism is a philosophical tradition for which the living is not reducible to physicochemical laws. It envisions life as matter animated by a vital force, which will add to the laws of matter and breathe life into matter.

³ While ideodynamism means the process of physiological realization of an idea, like a hypnotic suggestion, ideoplasty extends this process to the matter itself. The idea is no longer a dependency, a product of matter but, instead, it models matter and gives it its shape and its attributes.

References

Geley, G. (1912). Monisme Idéaliste et Palingénésie. Annecy: J. Depollier. Geley, G. (1918). La physiologie Dite Supranormale et les Phénomènes d’Idéoplastie. Paris: Institut Physiologique. Geley, G. (1919/1921). From the Unconscious to the Conscious. New York & London: Harper & Brothers. Geley, G. (1924/1927). Clairvoyance and Materialization: A Record of Experiments. London: Kessinger Publishing. Gyel, E. [Geley, E.] (1897). Essaidere Vue Générale et d’Interprétation Synthétique du Spiritisme. Lyon. Gyel, E. [Geley, E.] (1899). L’Être Subconscient: Essaide Synthèse Explicative des Phénomènes Obscurs de Psychologie Normale et Anormale. Paris: Alcan. Méheust, B. (1997). Apropos de métapsychique et de parapsychologie: Entretien avec Hubert Larcher. Synapse, 141. Myers, F. W. H. (1903). Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (2 vols.). London:

Longmans, Green. Roudinesco, E. (2009). Histoire de la Psychanalyse en France. Paris: La Pochotèque. Sudre, R. (1924). La Philosophie de Geley. Revue Métapsychique, Sept./Oct., 335–345. Tocquet, R. (1963). Les Mystères du Surnaturel. Paris: J’ai Lu.

The Eager Dead: A Study in Haunting by Archie Roy. Book Guild Publishing (Brighton), 2008. 590 pp. £18.50. ISBN 9781846241833.

Psychical research is still dependent on the few academics who, alongside their professional activities, can give time to this challenging subject. This was a viable and productive activity during Victorian times, but has become increasingly difficult today with the demands on academics for mainstream publications as well as teaching and administrative commitments. Professor Archie Roy is an exceptional representative of former times and as such is aptly suited to the task of reviewing the new disclosures about the most enigmatic challenge, which early days psychical research has left to us.

In addition to having a successful career in astronomy (even to the extent of having an asteroid named after him), Professor Archie Roy is undoubtedly one of the most important persons in contemporary psychical research. He is the founder of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research and a former president of the SPR. In addition to his research papers on the testing of mediums, Archie Roy is the author of two major books in this field: A Sense of Something Strange and Archives of the Mind which collated the findings from mediumship and spontaneous cases supporting the hypothesis put forward by William James of there being a universal memory repository. Although Archie Roy was in 2004 awarded the Myers Memorial Medal for his outstanding contribution to the field, few readers, and I suspect rather few experimental parapsychologists, will have heard of him. But they should pay attention because he has something important to say in a field that has an acute need to improve its public profile. If parapsychology could make sense of the most challenging and consistent findings, which still lie in the area of case studies, then it might have the theory that is demanded for its entry into neuroscience.

At first look, it may easily be thought that the current book does rather a disservice to the field as far as meeting this goal is concerned. It is a heavy book with a large formatted text, the substance of which concerns intimate letters and papers written between 50 and 100 years ago. The author, whose Foreword is a eulogy of lost Victorian values, would probably agree with me that this does not readily appeal to today’s generation with its demand for iPad texts and easily disseminated digital information. Probably only those with a special interest in the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and in the personal lives of its founders would be willing to follow the 130-year saga to its end. It might have helped if the book had been shortened perhaps by a quarter since the introductory vignettes (which I presume are provided as a means of creating curiosity about the remaining contents) need not have been fully duplicated. The Introduction by Colin Wilson provides a good overview to the intricacies of the cases but a genealogical diagram would have made the journey through the history much easier.

The book is nevertheless of importance since it is both a behind-the-scenes look and an update on the major enigmas of psychical research: the “cross correspondences”. The cross correspondences were communications from 1901 until 1932 which were claimed to be set up in a posthumous state as a means of providing evidence of survival after death. The (dead) communicators were said to be using Greek mythology and poetry as a means of proving their identities in the form of allusions, by often using classical sources to provide private details of their lives. The allusions were often sent through several mediums which only when pooled together made sense. Since the communications came though various mediums, they appeared to indicate that there was some form of intelligent entity or entities steering them.

One of leading contemporary experts in parapsychology and altered states, Charles Tart, suggested that in order to come further in this area we would need to select ten of the most gifted mediums to work with our qualifi ed researchers. In a real sense this is what actually already happened during the period of the cross correspondences, and it is this aspect that makes the book important. The mediums or automatists involved included some the most gifted of the time such as Leonora Piper. Many of them who belonged to highly reputable families were reluctant to publicize their involvement. Alice Fleming, the sister of Rudyard Kipling, wrote under the pen name of Mrs. Holland. One of those most centrally involved in the cross correspondences was Winifred Coombe-Tennant, who produced automatic writing under the pen name Mrs. Willet. Her status in society and politics was such that it was only after her death in 1957 that her role as medium, or sensitive as she preferred to be called, was revealed.

The founding members of the SPR in 1882 were young—the average age was only 33; however, many of the leaders also died young. By the year 1910, the organisation had lost many of its most astute leaders and investigators. Even if it was being claimed that some of them were themselves turning up as communicators, Myers, Sidgwick, James, Gurney, Hodgson, and Podmore were all dead by the beginning of the 1900s. Given the passage of time and the issues that some of the material raises, it is then of value to see if the new information that Archie Roy releases about the Willet/Coombe-Tennant cross correspondences can, by pooling it together what we have learned about the phenomena during the last hundred years, lead us further toward a resolution of the issues.

A fascinating example of cross correspondences is the love story which forms a starting point for the book. This concerned the Balfour family and medium Winifred Coombe-Tennant. Arthur Balfour, who was later the Prime Minister of Great Britain, was a president of the Society for Psychical Research. The unfulfilled love of his life, Mary Lyttelton, had died from typhoid on Palm Sunday and this was an important remembrance day for Arthur Balfour. Apparently unbeknown to anyone, including his brother, Arthur Balfour had had a lock of her hair placed in a silver casket engraved with periwinkles and a verse from Corinthians. The series of communications purporting to come from Mary made allusions through poetry and classical works to the hair, the casket and its periwinkles, the Corinthians quotation, and to an existing photograph of Mary holding a candlestick. One of the main mediums involved was Coombe-Tennant, but since she knew the Balfours this adds to the difficulty of interpreting the findings. Nevertheless, the details of the casket were said to have been known only to Arthur Balfour and not even to his brother Gerald. Moreover, the messages came for a period of years through several mediums who were physically and mentally remote from the family. As for the validity of the claims, caskets with lockets of the hair of deceased persons were certainly common during the Victorian and post-Victorian period, so this can hardly be seen in itself as remarkable. However, like many of the cross correspondences which occurred until 1912, when all the details are taken into account, the Palm Sunday case still appears impressive. But impressive of what? Perhaps only of the existence of a process we do not yet understand. Archie Roy’s book is in effect a postscript to the story that may just help toward a greater understanding.

The scripts continued until the 1930s, whereupon Jean Balfour, married to Gerald Balfour’s son Robert, was chosen to be the custodian of the records. Since the later scripts contained facts of a sensitive nature, they were to be made public only after the deaths of all those concerned. The two Balfour brothers involved, Arthur and Gerald, lived until 1930 and 1945, Gerald Balfour’s daughter-in-law, Jean Countess of Balfour, died in 1981, and the archive then was left to her daughter, Lady Alison Kremer, who finally invited Archie Roy to read the material: He had been as deemed the appropriate person to study the archives and publish the extracts that now form part of the book.

The title chosen for the book was meant to reflect the preoccupation of the Victorian SPR researchers: dealing with death and the claims for an afterlife. Concerning the final opinion of the SPR founders on the survival question, Archie Roy notes that the investigators fell naturally into two groups, with Myers, Hodgson, the Balfours, Lodge, Piddington, and Mrs. Sidgwick being among those fully convinced, while Gurney, William James, Richet—and I would add Podmore—remained undecided. It is of interest to note that the SPR of the time included members with a skeptical nature such as Richard Hodgson, Eleanor Sidgwick, and Frank Podmore. As far as true skepticism is concerned, they could have matched today’s English practitioners, such as Chris French, Susan Blackmore, and Richard Wiseman, and yet even Frank Podmore became convinced of the reality of ESP. Naturally the questions arise: Are the skeptics of today better at finding normal explanations, or have the phenomena become weaker, or are today’s skeptics good at skepticism but less good at being open-minded?

So what do the post-1930 scripts add to the puzzle? The secret that the scripts now reveal is that Coombe-Tennant had an affair with Gerald Balfour and begat a son from him. Potentially scandalous at that time, it was claimed through the automatic scripts that this was part of a grand plan from Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick to improve the destiny of mankind. The offspring would be a noble person who would then have a major role in creating a new peaceful order. The son, Henry Coombe-Tennant, did attend Eton and then a Trinity College, became a student of the philosopher C. D. Broad, and went on to to lead a colorful life as a army intelligence officer in the second world war, and finally ended his days as a Catholic priest without fulfilling any of the hopes laid upon him by his mother and the scripts. It is of course tempting to be cynical about this “plan of the spirits” and see it as merely providing a psychological motive or justification for a pregnancy in what would have been regarded if known at the time as a scandalous love affair.

If it is that simple, and added to it the fact that Mrs. Coombe-Tennant may have desperately needed another child to compensate for the early death of her daughter, it therefore unavoidably undermines the legitimacy of the communicators who were central in the cross correspondences. We could of course dismiss this as a minor aberration in the scripts, but the fact is that “the plan” did form a major part of the later cross correspondences. Archie Roy is completely faithful to his task in presenting the post-1930 scripts in an objective way, reserving his own evaluation, which is not dissimilar to the above explanations, for the final chapters. In forming this opinion, it is disconcerting to note how the Zeitgeist of the period in England, fourteen years before Hitler times, was heavily into eugenics so much so that the plan of conceiving the wonder child, Henry Balfour, derived from a belief in psychobiological eugenics. Appropriately, in my opinion, the author quotes Alan Gauld as saying (p. 561) “he would have been far more impressed with the cross correspondences if they had come to an end about 1912”.

Nevertheless, the saga did not even end with Coombe-Tennant’s demise. Through the mediumship of Geraldine Cummins (1890-1969) and her book Swan on a Black Sea, Winifred Coombe-Tennant herself claimed to posthumously continue the communications. Cummins had responded to a request from Henry Coombe-Tennant following his mother’s death and produced sufficient factual information about her life to convince him that the communications were on the whole genuine. At the initial stage of this, Coombe-Tennant’s identity as Mrs. Willet had not been revealed to the public so it would have diffi cult to find personal information about her. However, such opportunities may be said to have been remote but they could never be said to have been absent.

How do we now evaluate this material? The author makes no penetrating attempt to do so here in this text perhaps because it is still such an enormous undertaking, and he may have felt it was his duty to present the material in its own right, staying faithful to the original. This is obviously not something that we can go deeply into in a review, but some aspects are worth commenting on.

It is clearly grossly misleading to talk of a hundred years of research in this area, but it is still legitimate to ask if anything has now been learned that could shed light on the remarkable correspondences that occurred in the scripts. One problem concerns how the intimate relations between the parties involved could have created the basis for some of the correspondences. Although there is nothing to suggest that this suffices as an explanation, it can be surmised that some information could have spread unconsciously. Not only was Coombe-Tennant then involved for a short time with Gerald Balfour but she was married to Fredric Myers’ brother-in-law and Eleanor Sidgwick was the sister of Arthur and Gerald Balfour. They nearly all shared a Trinity background. Two other mediums, Helen and Margaret Verrall, were mother and daughter, the mother a lecturer at Cambridge, and they were close friends of the Myers.

On the other hand, some mediums were physically remote from this main group: Mrs. Piper was located in America and Alice Fleming was in India. Previous evaluations of the cross correspondences have stressed how the complexity of the correspondences had a design, which “could not be grasped by any automatist from knowledge of her own scripts but only by someone who had the scripts of the whole group to study” (Salter, 1961:183).

Of course there is the problem of subjective evaluation steered by the characteristic of human consciousness to be biased toward seeing meaningful connections in chance events. This again does not seem to suffice as an explanation for the more outstanding cases such as the Hope, Star, and Browning case, the Lethe case, or the Thantos case (summarised by Saltmarsh, 1958). To use subjective evaluation here would be making the opposite sin of refusing to see something that was staring us in the eyes. For instance, in the Thantos case, within the space of twelve days, the keyword “death” was given by three automatists in three languages in three different countries along with allusive references to the topic.

As far as the ESP explanation is concerned, an ultra-skeptic would maintain that like cases of alleged twin telepathy, it is at worst mere subjective selection at work and at best thought concordance. In the latter case, people with similar backgrounds and similar interests – in that above example it would be “death”— make similar associations. Given the diversity of some of the mediums involved in some of the cross correspondences, this explanation seems to be again too limited. Nevertheless, some form of control measure is badly needed.

A noteworthy and innovative attempt at this was provided by Christopher Moreman in 2004. In his study, eighteen pseudoscripts were created from five texts randomly chosen as source material from more than 6,000 books. Volunteers were encouraged to use their creativity to find links between the scripts. Thirty points of correspondences were found, but it is in contention as to whether the correspondences here were as striking as the original scripts. What I found to be the most impressive, almost a cosmic joke, was that one of the five texts randomly chosen from the 6,000, belonged to Rudyard Kipling, the brother of “Mrs. Holland”, one of the main mediums involved in the cross correspondences. A more well-known “cosmic joke” is that given by Arthur Koestler in his book Challenge of Chance (also reviewed in this book on page 351). A schoolmaster had, a few weeks before the invasion of Normandy during World War II and without any idea as to how the words came into head, used five top secret words in making a crossword for The Daily Telegraph. These included the names for the American landing beaches, the code name for where the artificial harbor was to be placed, the code name for naval operations, and finally the word overlord, the overall name of the plan itself for the D-Day invasion in 1944 (Operation Overlord).

Perhaps a clue to making sense of all this is in another part of the Koestler book, that written by Robert Harvie. Harvie relates how using random number tables to produce targets for an ESP experiment differed enormously in the level of statistical significance from that obtained by merely automatically matching computer digits. It seems as soon as human consciousness is involved, then the laws of chance can become deviant, except of course when the infl uence of normal consciousness is presumably steered by consensus reality. Again this is not the place to speculate further on this, but if this is true, when several spheres of human consciousness are operating freely, as they were in the cross correspondences, then ESP in the form of meaningful synchronicities in associations would be facilitated.

Actually, in terms of providing the reader with explanations, Archie Roy could have gone further and included in his book the development of the Jamesian cosmic reservoir theory which he recently wrote together with his colleagues Tricia Robertson, Montague Keen, and David Fontana. As yet unpublished, this has the poignant title That Bourn From Which No Traveller Returns. The manuscript is a detailed exposition of the archival theory of memory, personality, and states of consciousness that goes further than the earlier book, Archives of the Mind. The theory uses an analogy from the downloading of computer programs in order to suggest that memory is located in a personal archive from which individual memories are accessible. This is also a potentially transpersonal collective memory reservoir, so the concept is used to explain how various dissociated and possession states can sometimes appear to contain fragmental memories of other individuals and to transcend the knowledge of the person concerned. Professor Roy and his colleagues based their theory not only on the classical cross correspondences but also on the best cases of mediumistic communication as well as the attested cases of reincarnation memories and near-death experiences. What makes this modern version of James’ theory attractive is that it is empirically testable as to the claims of so-called “survival consciousness”. Let us assume a person visits three mediums and receives what appear to be genuine communications through all of them. He then gives an important message to one of them. A minimum survival theory would dictate that the updating would then become evident in the communications through the other two mediums. If the archive is a closed and passive one following the death of the individual, this would obviously not be so.

The theory that memory functions this way may appear to be totally alien to current thinking in cognitive psychology, but some cases of the extraordinary gifts of savants challenge this. Daniel Tammet¹ is an exceptional individual who impressed the neurobiologist V. S. Ramachandran with his abilities. What is almost unique about Tammet is not just his extraordinary savant ability in the areas of mathematics, memory, and languages but that he has as well as these an introspective ability to describe the processes and to communicate socially with others. His description of seeing or feeling the answers rather than calculating them fits closer to a psychic reservoir or archive theory than to conventional memory trace theories. It is possible that some of the material in the cross correspondences might serve to test this memory reservoir theory, but given the vast size of the archive this would be a major undertaking.

ADRIAN PARKER

University of Gothenburg, Sweden Adrian.Parker@psy.gu.se

Note

1 Author of Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky.

References

Cummins, G. D. (1971 ). Swan on a Black Sea: A Study in Automatic Writing. Book Club Associates.

Fontana (2005). Hardy, A. C., Sir, Harvie, R., & Koestler, A. (1973). Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in

Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome. Hutchinson. Random House.

van Lommell, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: A prospective study in The Netherlands. The Lancet, 358(9298), 2039-2044.

Moreman, C. M. (2004). Response to Keen and Roy re: chance coincidences in the cross-correspondences. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 68(1), 60-62 Roy, A. E., Robertson, T., Keen, M., & Fontana, D. (1996). Archives of the Mind. Stansted Mount Fitchett: SNU Publications. Roy, A., Robertson, T., Keen, M., & Fontana, D. (in press). That Bourn from Which No Traveller Returns. Salter, W. H. (1961). Zoar, or the Evidence for Psychicial Research Concerning Survival. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Saltmarsh, (1958).