Mystic London by Charles Maurice Davies (ebook reader macos .txt) 📕

I have done. The first stage is acceptance of the phenomena, the second the assignment of those phenomena to spirits as their source, the third is identification of these spirits.

1. On the first part of my subject I shall venture to speak with some boldness. I am not a philosopher, therefore I can afford to do so. I shall suppose my five senses to serve my purposes of observation, as they would be supposed to serve me if I were giving evidence in a court of justice. If I saw a table move, I shall say it did move, not "it appeared to move." I do this in my capacity of a commonplace instead of a philosophical investigator; and I must say, if I were, as I supposed myself just now, in the witness-box, with a good browbeating counsel cross-examining me on this point, I would rather have to defend the position of the commonplace inquirer than the philosopher, pledged to defend the philosophy of the last fifty years, and bound hand and foot by his philosophic Athanasian Creed, and I don't know how many articles, more than thirty-nine, I fancy.

In the latter part of the year 1856, or beginning of 1857, then, I was residing in Paris, that lively capital being full of Mr. Home's doings at the Tuileries. At that time I knew nothing, even of table-turning. I listened to the stories of Mr. Home and the Emperor as mere canards. I never stopped to question whether the matter were true, because I in my omniscience knew it to be impossible. It is this phase of my experience that makes me so unwilling to argue with the omniscient people now; it is such a waste of time. At this period my brother came to visit me, and he had either been present himself or knew persons who had been present at certain séances at Mr. Rymer's. He seemed staggered, if not convinced, by what he had heard or seen, and this staggered me too, for he was not exactly a gullible person and certainly by no means "spiritual." I was staggered, I own, but then I was omniscient, and so I did what is always safest, laughed at the matter. He suggested that we should try experiments instead of laughing, and, not being a philosopher, I consented. We sat at the little round table in our tiny salon, which soon began to turn, then answered questions, and finally told us that one of the three, viz., my wife, was a medium, and consequently we could receive communications. I went to a side table and wrote a question as to the source of the manifestations, keeping it concealed from those at the table, and not rejoining them myself. The answer spelt out by them was—"We, the spirits of the departed, are permitted thus to appear to men." Again I wrote—"What object is served by your doing so?" The answer was—"It may make men believe in God." I have said I am not a philosopher, therefore I do not mind confessing that I collapsed. I struck my flag at once as to the impossibility of the matter. At the same time I did not—as I know many ardent spiritualists will think I ought—at once swallow the whole thing, theory and all. I should not have believed if a man had told me this; was it to be expected that I should believe a table? Honesty is my best policy; and I had better, therefore, say I was never so utterly knocked over by anything that occurred to me in my life before or since. My visage of utter, blank astonishment is a joke against me to this hour. We pursued the inquiry almost nightly during the remainder of my stay in Paris—up to late in the summer of 1857 that is—and also on our return to England; but, strangely as it seems to me now, considering how we began, we did it more as a pastime than anything else. The only time we were serious was when my wife and I sat alone, as we often did. Of course when I came to inquire at all into the matter I was met by Faraday's theory of involuntary muscular action, and also with the doctrine of unconscious cerebration—I was quite ready to accept either. My own position, as far as I can recall it, then was that the spiritual agency was "not proven." My wife had great reluctance against admitting the spiritual theory. I was simply passive; but two circumstances seemed to me to militate against the theories I have mentioned: (1.) The table we used for communicating was a little gimcrack French affair, the top of which spun round on the slightest provocation, and no force whatever, not even a philosopher's, applied to the surface would do more than spin the top round; but when the table turned, it turned bodily, legs and all. (2.) As to that ponderously difficult theory of unconscious cerebration communicated by involuntary muscular action, whenever we asked any questions as to the future, we were instantly checked, and told it was better that the future should not be revealed to us. I was anxious about a matter in connexion with an election to an appointment in England, and we asked some questions as to what form the proceedings would take. The reply was that certain candidates would be selected from the main body, and the election made from these. I thought I had caught the table in an inconsistency, and said—"There now you have told us something about the future." It immediately replied—"No, I have not; the matter is already settled in the minds of the examiners." Whence came that answer? Certainly not from our minds, for it took us both by surprise. I could multiply a hundredfold instances of this kind, but, of course, to educated spiritualists these are mere A B C matters; whilst non-spiritualists would only accept them on the evidence of their own senses. I do not mean to say they actually question the facts to the extent of doubting one's veracity, or else nearly all testimony must go for nothing; but there is in these matters always room for doubting whether the narrator has not been deceived; and, moreover, even if accepted at secondhand, I doubt whether facts so accepted ever become, as it were, assimilated, so as to have any practical effect.

My facts at all events came at first-hand. I suppose a man need not be considered credulous for believing in his own wife, and nearly all these phenomena were produced by my wife's mediumship. It was not until late in the year 1865 or early in 1866, that I ever sat with a professional medium. My wife, moreover, from first to last, has steadily disbelieved the spirit theory, so that she has not laid herself open to suspicion of being prejudiced in favour of the subject. She has been emphatically an involuntary, nay, even unwilling agent in these matters.

During these eight or nine years the communications were generally given by automatic writing, though sometimes still by tilting of the table. I am very much tempted to quote two, which linger in my recollection, principally, I believe, because they were so destructive of the cerebration theory, besides being curious in themselves. I kept no records until a later date. At present all rests on tradition. Each of these cases occurred in presence of myself, my wife, and a pupil. In the former, he was a young Englishman, who had lived a great deal abroad, whose mother was a Catholic and father a Protestant. He had been brought up in the latter faith; and when I desired him to ask a mental question, he asked, in French—that being the language most familiar to him—"Is the Catholic or the Protestant religion the true one?" Mark you, he never articulated this, or gave the least hint that he was asking in French. He did it in fact, spontaneously. My wife immediately wrote "Ta mère est Catholique"—so far, in French, with difficulty, and then breaking off into English, "Respect her faith."

In the second instance, my pupil was a French youth, a Catholic, who was living in my house, but used to go to his priest frequently to be prepared for his first communion. One day when we were writing, this youth asked who the communicating spirit was, and received in reply the name of Louis D——. The name was totally unknown to us; but to our surprise when the youth came back from his visit to the priest that day he informed us that his reverend instructor had dwelt strongly on the virtues of Louis D——. Seeing the boy look amazed as the name which had just been given at our séance was pronounced, the priest inquired the reason; and, on being informed, of course directed his catechumen never to join in such diablerie again.

The impression, then, left on my mind by these years of desultory dabbling with—rather than study of—the subject, was decidedly that the phenomena of spiritualism were genuine. Looking at the matter from my present standpoint and frame of mind, it seems to me incredible that I should have thought so little of the source of the phenomena. It was, as I said, that I was then dabbling with, not studying, the subject.

But even without advancing beyond this rudimentary stage, I saw a very serious result produced. I saw men who literally believed in nothing, and who entered on this pursuit in a spirit of levity, suddenly staggered with what appeared to afford even possibility of demonstration of another world, and the continued existence of the spirit after bodily death. I believe a great many persons who have never felt doubt themselves are unaware of the extent to which doubt prevails amongst young men especially; and I have seen many instances of this doubt being—if not removed—shaken to its very foundation by their witnessing the phenomena of spiritualism. "Yes, but did it make good consistent Christians of them?" asks one of my excellent simple-minded objectors. Alas! my experience does not tell me that good consistent Christians are so readily made. Does our faith—I might have asked—make us the good consistent Christians it ought to do, and would do perhaps, if we gave it fair play?

So, then, my study of spiritualism had been purely phenomenal. It was a very sad and serious event which drove me to look deeper. Some people will, I daresay, think it strange that I allude to this cause here. The fact that I do so shows, at all events, that I have looked seriously at spiritualism since. It was none other than the loss, under painful circumstances, of one of my children. Now I had always determined that, in the event of my losing one near and dear to me, I would put spiritualism to the test, by trying to communicate with that one. This will, I think, show that, even then, if I did not accept the spiritualistic theory, I did not by any means consider the position untenable. The very day after my boy's death, I got his mother to sit, and found she was writing a little loving message purporting to come from him. This, a sceptic would say, was natural enough under the circumstances. I said no word, but sat apart, and kept writing "Who is it that communicates? write your name." Suddenly the sentence was broken off, and the child's name written, though I had not expressed my wish aloud. This was strange; but what followed was stranger still. Of course, so far all might have been fairly attributed to cerebration—if such a process exists. It was natural enough, it might be urged, that the mother, previously schooled in the belief of the probability of communication, should