by Bart Schultz
with Myers and Gurney, but the general format was always quite sim-
ilar. The main advances concerned an ever-increasing ability to detect
subtle codes devised by the participants, guarding against such things as
voluntary or involuntary whispering, perhaps observed in the throat and
neck rather than the lips. But when Sidgwick himself examined Smith
for such maneuvers, he came away quite satisfied that this was not the
explanation of Smith’s performances. At any rate, the basic parameter
of these studies was very largely what it would continue to be, with greater
technical and statistical sophistication, throughout the twentieth century:
significantly above-chance performances by “sensitives” on guessing
the answers to questions generated by some controlled, randomized
process.
To be sure, Sidgwick would have his periods of doubt about telepathy,
just as he did about everything else. But even at his darkest and most
skeptical – for example, during the period – – he would allow
that he was “not yet hopeless of establishing telepathy.” Furthermore,
it should be kept in mind that establishing telepathy was something of
a mixed blessing, given Sidgwick’s main priorities. On the one side, as
Eleanor Sidgwick later explained: “Telepathy, if a purely psychical pro-
cess – and the reasons for thinking it so increase – indicates that the mind
can work independently of the body, and thus adds to the probability
that it can survive it.” Relatedly, as the work on hypnotism revealed,
increased “knowledge about the subliminal self, by giving glimpses of
extension of human faculty and showing that there is more of us than
we are normally aware of, similarly suggests that the limitations imposed
by our bodies and our material surroundings are temporary limitations.”
But, on the other side, telepathy often afforded an alternative explanation
for purported communications from beyond the grave – suggesting, for
example, that a supposed medium could be getting the communicated in-
formation from the minds of living friends and relatives, rather than from
the departed. Thus, the research of the Society was complicated by the
discounting of “all communications purporting to come from the dead
P: GCV/LCR/GCZ
P: GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Spirits
where the matter communicated is known to any living person directly or
indirectly in touch with the medium.” Unfortunately, as Eleanor Sidgwick
went on to note, “matters unknown to any living person can seldom be
verified.”
Add to this concerns about unconscious thought processes, and things
get very tricky indeed:
[T]he mere claim to come from the dead is invalidated, because the subliminal
consciousness concerned in automatic writing and trance speaking has been found
liable to claim more knowledge and power than it possesses, to say things which are
not true, and to offer false excuses when the untruth is discovered. This subliminal
trickiness may be found in the case of persons who in their normal life are upright
and honourable; – just as in dreams we may behave in a way that would shock us in
our waking life. Another embarrassing circumstance from the evidential point of
view is that the subliminal memory does not coincide with the supraliminal, and
can draw upon a store not accessible to the normal consciousness. And further,
things may be subliminally taken note of, which do not enter, or scarcely enter the
normal consciousness at all.
Thus, telepathy often yielded the most parsimonious account of para-
normal happenings. Why, for example, assume the reality of ghosts, when
in so many cases supposed apparitions could be accounted for as tele-
pathic communications from the dying person? This approach was seem-
ingly supported by the comparative infrequency, according to the SPR,
of well-evidenced postmortem apparitions. And who could tell what the
unconscious self, partly unveiled in hypnosis, might be capable of, by way
of sending and receiving such communications?
One might well suggest, therefore, that with their work in the Society,
the Sidgwicks ended up engaged in their most tormented soul searching of
all, with the old worries about selfishness and sinfulness transmuted into
anxieties about the tricky and dangerous subliminal self and the vagaries
of its telepathic doings. Much of the work that would follow – “Phantasms
of the Dead,” Phantasms of the Living, and the Census of Hallucinations, for example – would be aimed at sorting out these difficulties, differentiating thought transferences from apparitions and coming to terms with
the question of whether claims concerning these really were inexplicable
statistically.
But before surveying these monumental productions of the Sidgwick
Group, there is another tribute to be paid to their negative and critical
P: GCV/LCR/GCZ
P: GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
accomplishments. For early on in the SPR’s existence, a powerful al-
ternative to spiritualism presented itself to them as the chief aspirant
to becoming the religion of the New Age. Madame Blavatsky came to
Cambridge.
IV. Koot Hoomi on The Methods of Ethics
We all went to a Theosophic lunch with Myers. Madame de Novikoff was there;
certainly she has social gifts, but she does not interest me. Our favourable impres-
sion of Mme. B[lavatsky] was sustained; if personal sensibilities can be trusted,
she is a genuine being, with a vigorous nature intellectual as well as emotional, and a real desire for the good of mankind. This impression is all the more noteworthy
as she is externally unattractive – with her flounces full of cigarette ashes – and
not prepossessing in manner. Certainly we like her, both Nora and I. If she is a
humbug, she is a consummate one: as her remarks have the air not only of spon-
taneity and randomness but sometimes of an amusing indiscretion. Thus in the
midst of an account of the Mahatmas in Tibet, intended to give us an elevated
view of these personages, she blurted out her candid impression that the chief
Mahatma of all was the most utter dried-up old mummy that she ever saw. She
also let us behind the scenes of all the Transcendental Council. It appears that the
desire to enlighten us Westerns is only felt by a small minority of the Mahatmas,
who are Hindoo: the rest, Tibetans, are averse to it: and it would not be permitted,
only Koot Hoomi, the youngest and most energetic of the Hindoo minority, is a
favourite of the old mummy, who is disposed to let him do what he likes. When
the mummy withdraws entirely from earth, as he will do shortly, he wants Koot
to succeed him: but
Mme B. thinks he won’t manage this, and that a Thibetan
will succeed who will inexorably close the door of enlightenment.
Sidgwick, journal entry for August , (CWC)
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in by Madame
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (the former a
Russian, the latter an American), but it quickly became an international
force, with offices in England, India, France, and other countries. In so
many ways, it was the natural product of the period that, in America and
England especially, spawned spiritualism and a fascination with things
occult and mystical. The Rosicrucians, the Hermeticists, the reincarna-
tionists, followers of Aleister Crowley and Samuel Liddell – all helped to
provide a context in which Theosophy might find an eager audience. The
esoteric wisdom of the mysterious East had a very big and very credulous
P: GCV/LCR/GCZ
P: GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Spirits
market. Materialism and scientism had produced a mystical and occultist
reaction – a reaction that often went far beyond the séancing of the spir-
itualists, many of whom were apt to decry the exclusivity and cultlike
practices of occultists.
Theosophists, of course, did seek to capture much of the same audience
as the spiritualists, even if they did come to alienate many of them in the
process. Their creed was an eclectic soup of esotericism. As Oppenheim
describes it:
Blavatsky herself stressed the roots of her teaching in the venerable texts of the
Far East, but the very term ‘theosophy’ conjured up a rich variety of associations
with the cabalist, neo-Platonic, and Hermetic strands in western philosophic and
religious thought. Meaning ‘divine wisdom,’ or ‘wisdom of the gods,’ theosophy
was a familiar term in the vocabulary of the occult long before Madame Blavatsky
stamped it with the mark of her own impressive personality. Belief in the existence
of specially initiated adepts, or of secret documents that held, in coded signs and
symbols, the key to understanding nature’s deepest enigmas, had haunted the
fringes of European thought for centuries, tantalizing susceptible minds with the
possibility of attaining truly godlike power over the natural world. C. C. Massey
dubbed the Jewish cabala ‘a system of theosophy,’ while Hargrave Jennings used
the label ‘theosophists’ to describe the Paracelsists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The links between the new, Blavatsky brand of Theosophy and the
older tradition related to Hermetic teaching were nicely encapsulated in Annie
Besant’s claim to have been none other than Giordano Bruno himself in a previous
incarnation.
Different planes of existence, astral and ethereal bodies, the miraculous
time-and-space-defying feats of yogis and more “highly evolved” beings –
all were displayed with a flourish in Blavatsky’s first major esoteric text,
Isis Unveiled (). She was, she claimed, receiving instruction in ancient
wisdom from the mahatmas of Tibet and India, though more critical eyes
had trouble discerning in her work anything more than a cheap pilfering
of various Hindu and Buddhist sources. Although it would be nice to be
able to read such cultural developments as a meaningful reaction against
Western rationalism and orientalism, the Theosophists in the end did
more to demean multicultural understanding than to advance it, though
the investigation of them by the SPR did do much to shape the way the
Sidgwick Group thought about anthropology and history. As Joy Dixon
has observed, Theosophy was “a kind of middle-brow orientalism
P: GCV/LCR/GCZ
P: GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
(in Edward Said’s sense), which reinscribed divisions between eastern
mysticism and western science.”
What made Theosophy so provocative to all sides involved in the SPR
was the way in which it objected to so much of the spiritualist endeavor.
That is, spiritualism was
predicated on the proposition that, after death, a person’s spirit could remain
in close touch with the living and could relay messages to them with the help
of a medium. Theosophical denial of this principle, and denunciation of séance
practices, seemed to many an angered spiritualist an attempt to cut the very heart
out of their faith. But Theosophists had learned from Madame Blavatsky the
dangers that followed all attempts to commune with spirits around the séance
table.
After all, after death one was supposed to evolve and reincarnate; the
astral plane was populated by all sorts of unsavory spooks and elementals,
primitive and sometimes malicious forces that might pretend to be the
dear departed, but were not. Bringing such things into contact with the
living was risky and, at any rate, beside the point, as far as one’s spiritual
progress was concerned. One’s aim should rather be to advance one’s
spiritual evolution, to cultivate the higher elements in one’s being over
the lower, animal elements. Resort to mediums – or to priests, for that
matter – was a diversion from communing with one’s higher self, which was
immortal and evolving according to karmic laws. And of course, according
to the Theosophical hard sell, this was all the more urgent because the
mahatmas might soon decide to stop wasting their efforts on Westerners.
This was, to mix a metaphor, a window of opportunity on the doors of
perception.
Thus, the Theosophists and spiritualists really were at odds over how
to deal with the spirit world, much as they agreed that there was such a
world and that the material universe was only a form of delusion impris-
oning lower beings. The Theosophists offered up a much more ambitious
rendering of the perennial philosophy, claiming that the basic tenets of
their wisdom formed the root of all the great world religions; this be-
lief, in good Idealist fashion, allowed them to exercise much charity in
interpretation, allowing that all worldviews had some piece of the truth.
This rather Mauricean theme, coupled with the elite and esoteric mode
of inquiry that the Theosophists represented, would have been a natural
P: GCV/LCR/GCZ
P: GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Spirits
draw for old Apostles like Sidgwick. But it was scarcely apt to appeal
to orthodox believers, since it granted no special place to any one re-
ligion, though Buddha did tend to be the first am
ong equals. And the
Theosophical belief in reincarnation was quite alien to most spiritual-
ist and Judeo-Christian audiences, who tended to regard this as a puz-
zling complication of the already much-too-tricky problem of personal
identity.
In England, the Theosophists had quickly established friendly relations
with many members of the SPR, including Myers, and their representa-
tives had been invited to attend the initial meetings of the Society. When
Madame Blavatsky came to England for an extended stay, in , the
Society sent a delegation to interview her in London, and followed this
up with an invitation to come to Cambridge for more extensive exchanges.
The SPR was especially interested in her and her followers because, de-
spite the Theosophical disclaimers about séances, etc., Blavatsky claimed
to have been a successful medium, in some sense, and much of the attrac-
tive force of her new religion came from claims that she could perform
paranormal feats. Thus, it was widely reported that mysterious letters
from her mahatmas would materialize out of thin air, dropping from the
ceiling. Such reports ensured that when Madame, the colonel, and their
collaborator Mohini held a public reception in Oscar Browning’s rooms,
the crowd was overflowing.
The Sidgwicks were undeniably impressed – at one point in his journal,
Sidgwick refers to Blavatsky as a “Great Woman.” As was so often the case,
their initially favorable impression had a great deal to do with what they
took to be the personal credibility of the people involved and the absence
of any obvious motive to deceive. Thus, Sidgwick would write to James
Bryce, in May of :
I did not answer your question about Olcott as I was really in doubt what to say.
He has been here and I am favourably impressed with him as regards honesty
and sincerity: but he has no experiences to relate which are conclusive on the
mere supposition that he is honest: it is possible to suppose that he has been
taken in – only to take him would require an elaborate plot in which persons
would be involved who appear to have no more motive for trickery than the
twelve apostles in Paley’s evidences: one at least – as we are credibly informed –
has sacrificed wealth and position to follow after the Masters of Theosophy.
