THE DANGERS OF SPIRITISM
Since we have already called attention as occasion arose to the multiple dangers of spiritism, we need not revisit the topic except to take note of certain evidence and some admissions. But first let us say that there are even physical dangers which, if not the greatest or the most common hazards, nevertheless are not always negligible. We offer as proof something reported by Dr Gibier:
Three gentlemen intending to assure themselves as to whether certain spiritist allegations were correct shut themselves one evening in an unlighted room of an unoccupied house after having solemnly sworn to one another to be absolutely serious and in good faith. The room was completely unfurnished, and by intention they had brought only three chairs and a table, around which they took their seats. It was agreed that as soon as something unusual happened the first would strike a light with a kind of wax match they had with them. They were still and silent for a time, attentive to the least sound, to the least quiver of the table on which they had placed their joined hands. No sound was heard and the darkness was complete, and the three amateur conjurers were growing tired and losing patience, when suddenly a strident cry of distress split the silence of the night. Immediately there was a frightful fracas and a hail of projectiles began to fall upon the table, the floor, and the three operators. Filled with terror, one of them struck a match as had been agreed, and with the light two of them found only themselves present and saw with dread that their companion was missing,
his chair overturned at the far end of the room. After the initial confusion had passed they found him under the table unconscious, with his head covered in blood. What had happened? It was observed that the marble mantle of the fireplace had been broken free, that it had been thrown against the head of the unfortunate man, and that it had been broken into a thousand pieces. The victim remained unconscious for nearly ten days, hovering between life and death, and recovered only slowly from the terrible cerebral concussion he had suffered. [1]
Papus, who reproduces this account, recognized that 'spiritist practice leads mediums to depression by way of hysteria', that 'these experiments are the more dangerous to the degree that one is unaware and unprepared,' and that 'nothing inhibits obsessions, nervous weakness, and still graver accidents.' And he adds:
We have in our possession a series of very instructive letters from mediums who have given themselves completely to this experimentation and who are today dangerously obsessed by the beings who, under false names, presented themselves, claiming to be deceased relatives. [2]
Éliphas Lévi had already called attention to these dangers and warned that those who engage in these studies, even from simple curiosity, expose themselves to madness or death. [3] And an occultist of the Papusian school, Marius Decrespe, has also written:
The danger is certain; some of them have gone mad in horrible conditions because they wanted to push their experiments too far. . . . It is not only one's common sense that is at risk, but one's entire rationality, one's health, one's life, and sometimes even one's honor.... The slope is easy; from one phenomenon one passes to another and suddenly one is unable to stop. It is not without reason that the Church forbade all this mischief. [4]
Similarly, the spiritist Barthe states:
Do not forget that by these communications we place ourselves under the direct influence of unknown beings, among whom there are some so sly and perverse that one cannot be too mistrustful of them.... We have had several examples of grave illnesses, mental derangements, and sudden deaths caused by deceiving revelations which became true only by the weakness and credulity of those to whom they were made. [5]
As regards this last citation, we must draw attention to the special danger of predictions contained in certain 'communications'; these act as a veritable suggestion on those who are their object. This danger also exists for those who, apart from spiritism, have recourse to the 'divinatory arts'; but these practices, however little they may be recommended, cannot be exercised in as constant a manner as those of the spiritists, and thus there is less risk of a fixed idea turning into an obsession. There are unfortunates, more numerous than one might think, who do not undertake anything without consulting their [séance] table, even for the most insignificant things: to know which horse will win a race, what number will win the lottery, etc. [6] If the predictions do not come to pass, the 'spirit' always finds some excuse: things would have come about as he said, but such and such a circumstance which was impossible to foresee intervened and changed everything. The confidence of these poor souls is not broken, and they begin again until they are finally ruined, reduced to misery or driven to dishonest expedients which the 'spirit' does not fail to suggest to them. All this ordinarily ends in complete madness or suicide. It sometimes happens that things become complicated in other ways, and that the victims, instead of themselves consulting the pretended 'spirit' by which they let themselves be blindly directed, address a medium who will be strongly tempted to exploit their credulity. Dunglas Home himself reports a remarkable example which occurred in Geneva, and he recounts the conversation he
had on October 5, 1876 with a poor woman whose husband had gone mad following these events:
It was in 1853, she said, that some rather singular news arrived, distracting us from our ordinary occupations. Several young women, with a mutual friend, had developed the strange faculty of 'writing mediums'. The father also, it was said, had the gift of placing himself in contact with the spirits by means of a [séance] table.... I went to a séance, and, as everything seemed to me above suspicion, I got my husband to come with me.... And so we went to the medium, who told us that the spirit of God spoke through his table. . . . In the end, the table gave us to understand that without delay we must install the medium and his family in our home and share with them the fortune that it had pleased God to give us. The communications the table gave were supposed to come directly from Our Saviour Jesus Christ. I said to my husband: 'Let us rather give them some money; their tastes and ours are different and I would not know how to live happily with them.' My husband responded saying: 'The life of Him whom we adore was a life of abnegation and we must seek to imitate Him in all things. Rise above your prejudices, and this sacrifice will prove to the Master your good intention to serve Him. I consented, and a family of seven persons was added to our household. Immediately there began a life of spending and prodigalities. Money was thrown from the window. The table expressly commanded us to buy another carriage, four more horses, then a steamboat. We had nine domestic servants. Painters came to decorate the house from top to bottom. The furniture was changed several times, each time for more sumptuous pieces, this with the intention of receiving with the greatest possible dignity Him who came to see us and to attract the attention of people outside. Whatever was asked of us, we did. It was costly; we kept an open board. Little by little earnest people came in great numbers, mostly young people of both sexes to whom the table prescribed marriage, which was then accomplished at our expense; and if the couple had children, these were given us to raise. We had as many as eleven children at the house.
The medium in his turn married and the members of the family increased so that it was not long before we had thirty persons at our board. This went on for three or four years. We were already nearly at the end of our resources. Then the table told us to go to Paris and that the Lord would need us. So we went. As soon as we arrived at the great capital, my husband received the order to speculate on the Bourse. There he lost what little we had left. This time it was misery, black misery; but we always had faith. I do not know how we lived. Many days I went without food but for a crust of bread and a glass of water. I forgot to tell you that at Geneva we had been enjoined to administer the Holy Sacrament to the faithful. Sometimes there were as many as four hundred communicants. A monk of Aargau left his convent, where he was the superior, and joined us; so we were not alone in our blindness. Finally, we were able to leave Paris and return to Geneva. It was then that we realized the full extent of our misery. Those with whom we had shared our fortune were the first to turn their backs on us.
And Home adds by way of commentary:
There it is! A man at a [séance] table reels off a series of blasphemies by the slow and difficult process of calling out the alphabet; and this is enough to cast a pious and honest family into a delirium of extravagance from which it does not extract itself until it is ruined. And even when they are ruined, these poor people remain blind. As for him who has caused their ruin, he is not the only one I have met. These strange creatures, half deceitful, half convinced, whom one encounters all the time, and who, even while deceiving other men, end by taking seriously their assumed role and become more fanatic than those whom they abuse. [7]
It may be said that such misadventures happen only to weak minds, and that those whom spiritism unhinges must have been predisposed thereto. That may be true up to a point, but in more normal conditions these predispositions would never have developed. Men
who go mad after any kind of accident must also have had such a predisposition, but then, if such an accident had not come to pass they would not have lost their mind, so this is not a valid excuse. Moreover, there are not many so well balanced that they need fear nothing in any circumstance. We would even say that no one can have such an assurance unless he is guaranteed against certain dangers by a doctrinal knowledge that precluded the possibility of all illusion and mental vertigo; and it is not among [psychic] experimenters that one ordinarily encounters such knowledge. We have spoken of scientists who have been led by psychic experiences to accept spiritist theories more or less completely-something which in our view is already an indication of a partial disequilibrium. One such person, Lombroso, after a séance of Eusapia Paladino, declared to his friends: 'I must leave this place now, because I feel that I might become mad; I need to rest my mind. [8] Dr Lapponi, citing these significant words, rightly remarked that
when prodigious phenomena are witnessed by minds that are not prepared for certain surprises, the result may be a derangement of the nervous system, even on the part of subjects who are otherwise healthy. [9]
The same writer also says:
Spiritism presents every kind of danger for the individual and for society, as well as all the fatal consequences of hypnotism; and it presents a thousand others still more deplorable. . . . For individuals who act as mediums and those who attend their séances, spiritism produces either an obsession or a morbid exaltation of the mental faculties; it provokes the gravest neuroses, the gravest organic neuropathies. It is notorious that most of the renowned mediums, and a good number of those who have attended spiritist séances, have died insane or else in a state of profound nervous distress. But beyond these dangers and ills, which are common to both hypnotism and spiritism, the latter presents
others infinitely more detrimental. . . . For no one claim that in exchange spiritism at least offers some advantages, such as that of aiding in the identification and healing of certain maladies. The truth is that, although sometimes the indications obtained in this way are thought to be exact and efficacious, on the contrary they nearly always aggravate the condition of the patient. Spiritists say to us that this is due to the intervention of buffoon or deceptive spirits; but how can we protect ourselves from the intervention and action of such harmful spirits? In practice, therefore, spiritism can never under any pretext be justified. [10]
From another angle, Mr J. Godfrey Raupert, a longtime member of the Society for Psychical Research, London, after many years' experience, declared that
the impression gained from his studies is that of disgust, and that his experience has shown it to be his duty to warn spiritists, particularly those who ask entities from the other world for consolations, counsels, or even for teachings.... These experiences have sent hundreds of people to sanatoria or to insane asylums. Nevertheless, despite the terrible danger for the nation, nothing is done to stop spiritist propaganda. Perhaps these latter are inspired by lofty motives, by scientific ideals; but in the final analysis they place men and women in a state of passivity which opens the mystical gates of the soul to evil spirits. Thenceforth these spirits live at the expense of these weak-souled men and women, driving them to vice, folly, and moral death. [11]
Instead of speaking of 'spirits' as Mr Raupert does (he hardly seems to believe that 'disincarnates' are involved), we would simply say 'influences', without specifying their origin, for they are quite diverse and in any case have nothing 'spiritual' about them. But this changes nothing as to the terrible consequences which the author calls to our attention, consequences which are only too real.
Elsewhere we have cited Mme Blavatsky and other leaders of Thcosophy, who make a particular point of denouncing the dangers of mediumship. [12] We reproduce here a passage from Mme Blavatsky, which we have summarized elsewhere:
Your best, your most powerful mediums, have all suffered in health of body and mind. Think of the sad end of Charles Foster, who died in an asylum, a raving lunatic; of Slade, an epileptic; of Fglington-the best medium now in England-subject to the same. Look back over the life of D.D. Home, a man whose mind was steeped in gall and bitterness, who never had a good word to say of anyone whom he suspected of possessing psychic powers, and who slandered all other mediums to the bitter end. This Calvin of Spiritualism suffered for years from a terrible spinal disease brought on by his intercourse with 'spirits', and died a perfect wreck. Think again of the sad fate of poor Washington Irving Bishop. I knew him in New York, when he was fourteen, and he was undeniably a medium. It is true that the poor man stole a march on his 'spirits', that he baptized them in the name of 'unconscious muscular action', to the great gaudium of all the corporations of highly learned and scientific fools, and to the replenishment of his own pocket. But de mortuis nihil nisi bonum; his end was a sad one. He had strenuously concealed his epileptic fits-the first and strongest symptom of genuine mediumship-and who knows whether he was dead or in a trance when the post-mortem examination was performed? His relatives insist that he was alive, if we are to believe Reuters' telegrams. Finally, behold the veteran mediums, the founders and prime movers of modern spiritualism-the Fox sisters. After more than forty years of intercourse with the 'Angels', the latter have led them to become incurable sots, who, in public lectures, are now denouncing their own life-long work and philosophy as a fraud! I ask you, what kind of spirits must they be who inspired such conduct. . . ?
What would you infer if the best students of a particular school of singing broke down from overstrained sore throats? That the method followed was a bad one. So I think the inference is equally fair with regard to spiritualism when we see their best mediums fall a prey to such a fate. [13]
But there is still more; some eminent spiritists themselves avow these dangers even while endeavoring to attenuate them by explaining them away. Here, notably, is what Léon Denis says:
The inferior spirits, incapable of high aspirations, take pleasure in our company. They mingle in our life, and, preoccupied only with what captured their attention during their corporeal existence, participate in the pleasures and works of men with whom they feel united by analogies of character or habit. They sometimes even dominate and subjugate weak persons who do not know how to resist their influence. In certain cases, their empire becomes such that they can push their victims as far as crime or folly. These cases of obsession or possession are more common than one might think. [14]
And in another work of the same author, we read this:
The medium is a nervous, sensitive, impressionable being . . . the prolonged fluidic action of inferior spirits can be fatal for him, ruining his health and provoking phenomena of obsession and possession. . . . These cases are numerous, some of them going so far as madness.... The medium Philippe Randone, called the Mediantà of Rome, [15] was the butt of the evil practices of a spirit designated by the name uomo fui, who tried several times to suffocate him at night under a pyramid of furniture which the spirit enjoyed putting on the bed. In the midst of a séance, he [uomo fui] violently seized Randone and threw him to the floor, nearly killing him. Until now no one has been able to free the medium
from his dangerous guest. On the other hand, the review Luz y Union of Barcelona (December 1902) reports that an unfortunate mother, pushed to crime against her husband and children by an occult influence, and prey to attacks of fury against which ordinary means were powerless, was healed in two months following the evocation and conversion of the obsessive spirit by means of persuasion and prayer. [16]
This interpretation of the healing is rather amusing; we know that spiritists like to address 'moralizing' sermons to so-called 'inferior spirits'; but that is like preaching in the desert, and we do not believe it would have the least effect. In fact, obsessions sometimes cease of themselves; but it happens, too, that criminal impulses like these in question may result. Sometimes also, what is only an autosuggestion is taken for a real obsession; in this case it is possible to combat it by a contrary suggestion, and this role can be fulfilled by exhortations addressed to the 'spirit', who in such a case is identical with the 'subconscious' of his victim. This is probably what happened in the case just reported, unless there was simply coincidence and not a causal relation between the treatment and the cure. Whatever the case, it is unbelievable that persons who recognize the reality and the gravity of these dangers still dare to recommend spiritist practices, and one must be truly unconscious to claim that 'morality' constitutes sufficient protection to preserve oneself from any accident of this kind-somewhat like attributing to 'morality' the power to protect against lightning or assure immunity against epidemics. The truth is that spiritists have absolutely no means of defense at their disposal, and it cannot be otherwise so long as they are ignorant of the nature of the forces with which they deal.
It would be, if not very interesting, at least useful, to gather the cases of madness, obsession, and accidents of every kind which have been caused by spiritism. Doubtless it would not be very difficult to obtain a good number of authenticated witnesses; and as we have seen, spiritist publications themselves might furnish their share of these as well. Such a collection could have a salutary effect on many
people. But it is not this that we propose. If we have cited certain facts, they only serve as examples; and it will be noted that most of them have been drawn by preference from spiritist authors themselves or from those having affinities with spiritism, writers whom one cannot accuse of unfavorable partiality or exaggeration. No doubt we could have added many others of the same kind; but that would be rather monotonous because all of this is cut from the same cloth and those we have given seem sufficient. To summarize, we say that the dangers of spiritism are of several orders, which can be classed as physical, psychic, and intellectual. The physical dangers are accidents of the kind Dr Gibier reports, and more frequently and commonly maladies provoked or developed especially with mediums, and sometimes with those who attend séances. These maladies, principally affecting the nervous system, are most often accompanied by psychic troubles. Women seem to be particularly susceptible, but it would be wrong to think that men are exempt. Moreover, to establish an exact proportion, it must be taken into account that women are by far the more numerous in spiritist circles. Psychic dangers cannot be entirely separated from physical dangers, but the former appear to be more constant and more serious. Let us recall once more the obsessions of various characters, fixed ideas, criminal impulses, dissociations and alterations of consciousness or of memory, manias, and madness in all its degrees. If one wished to draw up a complete list, nearly all the varieties known to psychiatrists would be represented, not to mention several unknown to them, namely cases of obsession and possession corresponding to what is most hideous in spiritist manifestations. In sum, all this is purely and simply conducive to the disintegration of the human individuality, and this disintegration is sometimes actually attained. The different forms of mental disequilibrium are themselves only stages or preliminary phases; and however deplorable they may already be, one can never be sure things will not go further. Moreover, all this entirely escapes the investigations of medical doctors and psychologists. Finally, the intellectual dangers result from the complete falsity of spiritist theories in all the points to which they refer; a completeness of error which, unlike others, is not limited to experimenters only. We have
called attention to the diffusion of these errors by direct and indirect propaganda among people who do not participate in practical spiritism and who may even believe themselves far removed from it. These intellectual dangers therefore are the most far-reaching, and it is on this aspect of the question that we have been most insistent throughout our study. What we have wanted to show especially and before all else is the falsity of spiritist doctrine; and in our view it is especially because it is false that it must be opposed. In fact, there are truths which it would be dangerous to spread abroad; but if something like this should happen, this very danger would not inhibit us from recognizing that truths are in question. But this need hardly be feared, for things of this kind do not readily lend themselves to popularization. It is a question here of truths which have practical consequences and not those of a purely doctrinal order; as to these latter, there are seldom other drawbacks than those resulting from the incomprehension to which one is exposed whenever one expresses ideas that lie beyond the level of the common mentality, and it would be wrong to be too preoccupied with this. But to return to our subject, we say that these special dangers of spiritism, added to its erroneous character, only render the need to combat it more pressing. This in itself is a secondary and contingent consideration, but in the present situation, and not least for reasons of opportunity, it is not possible to treat it as negligible.