Category: Materialization mediumship
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In the comments thread on the last post, Amos Oliver Doyle includes a link to an issue of Psypioneer Journal that offers an exhaustive look at the puppet-photos controversy. The article, titled "Helen Duncan, Esson Maule and Harry Price," was written by Paul J. Gaunt. I can't add anything to this comprehensive overview, so I'll…
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A minor but ongoing mystery surrounds a couple of photos apparently taken of the British materialization medium Helen Duncan. The photos show a blindfolded and loosely secured Duncan in a chair during a séance, attended by two different "phantoms" – which, all too obviously, are crude, cartoonish puppets. The implication is that Duncan used these…
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Though it's been mentioned in the comments, I'd like to call additional attention to Stephen E. Braude's reply to Tom Butler's criticism of his work with Kai Mügge. His detailed response can be read here. (It has been posted via Dropbox, but you do not need to have a Dropbox account to read it or…
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A new website has been set up to display infrared videos, presumably taken surreptitiously, that show what goes on behind the scenes at one physical/materialization medium's seances. His name is Gary Mannion. (No, I'd never heard of him, but apparently he has a following in the UK.) It's interesting stuff, and a reminder that books…
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As a palette cleanser after our political kerfuffle, here's a book review that I originally posted on June 21, 2008. Happily it is Trump-free, though trumpets do make an appearance. ~~~~ Arthur Findlay's On the Edge of the Etheric was first published in 1931. The used edition I purchased came out in 1970; it was the 66th…
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Gnosticism is a very old and complicated spiritual tradition, and I don't claim to be well-versed in it. But as I understand it, the essence of the Gnostic position is that our universe was not created by the one true God, but by a lower-level deity, the demiurge, who messed things up. This explains the…
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In the comments thread of my last post, the subject of speculative bubbles came up. Of course we are all too familiar with such bubbles nowadays–the dot-com bubble, the real-estate bubble, the derivatives bubble. But the phenomenon has been well known since at least 1841, when Charles Mackay published his famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions…
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Two items of possible interest. Recently I had a telephone reading with medium Georgia O'Connor. This was only the third time I've sat with a medium. While I prefer to keep the details private, I found the reading strongly evidential and emotionally meaningful. I personally feel much more convinced of life after death than I…
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As long-time readers of this blog know, I've been very skeptical of the English medium David Thompson, who has participated in a series of séances with a group called the Circle of the Silver Cord in Sydney, Australia. It is claimed that Thompson, while securely bound and gagged in a dark room, can materialize the…
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I’ve been reading the online text of Florence Marryat’s book There Is No Death. Some parts are interesting, and her sendup of dogmatic skepticism is funny and smart; but I was disturbed by the way she handles a well-known incident in the career of medium Florence Cook. The crisis of Cook’s career was her exposure…