Category: Mental mediumship
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Every movement has its bad apples, and this certainly includes the Spiritualist movement that swept North America and much of Europe in the 19th century. But when we think of Spiritualism's bad apples, we're probably inclined to remember fraudulent mediums, unscrupulous spirit photographers, and other hucksters who were exposed by journalists, skeptical magicians, and the…
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In the early years of the 20th century, a few pioneering Spiritualist psychiatrists attempted to cure acute mental illness via mediumship. Probably the most famous of these is Carl Wickland, whose 1924 book Thirty Years Among the Dead recounts his experiences in treating–and curing–a variety of psychoses in institutionalized patients. In these sessions, the obsessing…
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The Afterlife of Leslie Stringfellow, by Stephen Chism, is a slim 2005 volume distributed by the University of Arkansas Press. It includes the complete text of Leslie's Letters to His Mother, a book produced by automatic writing (specifically, the planchette) and originally published in 1926 in a limited edition of 100 copies. Leslie's mother, Alice…
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Update, June 25: I mistakenly attributed quotes from Testimony of Light to a different book by a different author. The error is corrected now. Thanks to Robert McLuhan for noticing the mistake. — I've often commented on the biggest inconsistency in ostensibly channeled communications about the afterlife — the question of whether or not spirits…
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This is one of the more interesting things I've seen in a piece of channeled material. It comes from the same book I discussed in my last post, The Country Beyond: The Doctrine of Re-Birth, by Jane Sherwood. I was just leafing through the book when I came across a passage that took me very…
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Currently I'm reading a 1969 book by Jane Sherwood, titled The Country Beyond: The Doctrine of Re-Birth, which I saw mentioned in a recent post on Robert McLuhan's excellent blog Paranormalia. (McLuhan, by the way, is the author of the outstanding book Randi's Prize, reviewed here.) The Country Beyond consists of Sherwood's automatic writings, which…
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As readers of this blog know, I've been puzzled by the divergence between two sets of afterlife reports. One set essentially involves a trip to either a disturbing, hellish limbo or a beautiful paradise (known as Summerland to Spiritualists), while the other set involves an immediate awareness of a higher self that chooses various incarnations…
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For a Thanksgiving Day treat, here's one of the best afterlife communication cases ever documented: the chess match between a living grandmaster and (purportedly) a deceased one! As with my last post, I'm not going to summarize the case, since Miles Edward Allen has already done so.* I'll just point out the two most striking…
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Having focused on some problems with mediumship and other afterlife evidence, and on the possibility that some of the evidence can be explained by sociological and psychological factors (such as mania) and by the influence of a collective unconscious constructing the desired phenomena, I now want to look at some of the strongest evidence, which…
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Recently we've been discussing the possibility that the heyday of Spiritualism constituted a "mania," in which normally sober observers found their judgment impaired by what Alan Greenspan would call "irrational enthusiasm." While the very best research from that period was well-designed and difficult to refute, there are undeniably problems with other claims, reports, and observations.…