This article was published in The Bombay Gazette newspaper, October 29, 1880:
« The stories of occult phenomena which are being wafted to us from Simla,
although new to India, are equaled, and surpassed, by numberless well-attested
narratives of the doings of spiritualists in England and America. Madame
Blavatsky has distinguished herself in India by her discovery of a brooch under
peculiar circumstances, but she can hardly claim the highest rank among the
spiritualists of the world until she has performed some more striking feat.
Let her float out of one window, and into another, like Mr. Home, or
traverse two miles in a moment of time, and appear suddenly on the middle of
the table in a fast-closer room before twelve witnesses like Mr. Guppy, and she
may then claim to have risen above the second rank of spiritualistic
performers. What she has done so far would not be thought much of if it were
merely given as a piece of jugglery, and only appears very marvelous from being
ascribed to the unseen powers.
(Cid´s observation: Blavatsky did not pretend to be a
great spiritualist, but she wanted to show people that there is nothing
supernatural in hidden phenomena, which simply use aspects of nature that
humans do not yet know. And if the writer of this article had he read the witness testimony more carefully, he would have realized
that it could not have been juggling tricks.)
It is rather a pity that a lady of such unquestionable ability should
condescend to trouble herself with the finding of missing brooches or the
production of water from an empty bottle. Her powers are capable of much greater
achievements. Spiritualism is not easy to refute. It is true that the so-called
manifestations of spirit power have in many cases been convicted, and proved to
be nothing but more or less clever pieces of imposture.
But such detections do not move the believers, who can plausibly reply
that the detection of imposture in some instances does not prove the existence
of imposture in every case, and that there are sure to be many who will pretend
to be mediums for gain or reputation, and therefore try by jugglery to rival
the true possessors of spiritualistic power.
If we urge that Maskelyne and Cooke, professed conjurors, perform as
great, or greater, wonders than any medium, they either deny the fact, or allow
it, and explain it by the hypothesis that these professed conjurors are really mediums
who find it pays better to pretend that they are only conjurors. So the believers
will hardly be convinced out of their belief until every manifestation has been
traced to natural causes possible, particularly as the spirits manifest a
predilection for displaying their powers most readily in darkened rooms, and
were no sceptical eye is observing the operations.
So, as it is impossible to explain away each manifestation by exposing
the natural agencies at work, it is incumbent upon the unbeliever to give some
general grounds in justification of his refusal to believe stories given on the
authority of apparently most trustworthy witnesses.
Such stories may be either the result of imposture, or they may have
some foundations of fact to rest upon, which is exaggerated immensely by those
who circulate them. The cases of intentional deception we may leave out of consideration.
Most certainly deception has been often detected on the part of the supposed
medium, but it is just as certain that a large number of cases remain which
cannot be so explained, and it is with these we have to deal.
A great deal of the marvellousness of these tales is due to
exaggerations that have gathered round the original nucleus of fact from the imagination
or imperfect memory of the different narrators.
Thus Miss Cobbe was once assured by a lady that to her certain knowledge
a table had rapped when nobody was within a yard of it. This, if true, would
have been a marvel that could hardly have been explained by any natural causes:
and Miss Cobbe expressed great surprise at the statement. The lady assured her
that there was no doubt about the matter, but to make it still more certain,
she promised to consult the notes she had taken immediately after the séance.
She did so, and found that her memory of all other points was perfectly correct
— but the hands of six persons had been resting on the table.
There we have an instance of instance of a marvellous story, asserted
unhesitatingly by a witness who showed her truthfulness by acknowledging
afterwards the mistake she had made; yet nearly all the wonderful part of the
story was due to a defect of memory.
Dr. Carpenter quotes another instance, which shows how the marvellous
additions that are unconsciously made to a story by its circulators may be
dissipated by closer examination at the original source. A doctor who was
sceptical about mesmerism heard often-repeated assertions about a maid of Miss Martineau,
who could converse when in her mesmeric state in languages that she had never
learnt, and of which she knew nothing when in her ordinary condition.
He could not believe that the story, in spite of the confidence with
which it was told; and some time later, on meeting a brother-in-law of Miss
Martineau, he enquired about this wonderful maid, telling what was reported of
her. He then heard that the account given him of the matter was not quite
accurate. The maid had replied in the vernacular to questions proposed by Lord
Morpeth in the foreign tongue.
In this manner stories get improved in the telling; so that a small
coincidence often swells into the in the proportions of a miracle when it has
passed through a few months. Everybody likes to make the most of any story he
has to tell, and if he has heard one or more versions, is inclined to repeat
the most striking as being the one most able to excite the interest of his
audience. It is also the most marvellous version that is most likely to fix
itself in the minds of the hearers, while the more commonplace accounts of what
took place are easily forgotten.
The residuum of solid fact which remains in each spiritualistic story
after the excrescences produced by exaggeration have been pruned away may, if it
transcends ordinary experience, and there is no possibility of bad faith on the
part of the narrator, he explained by the abnormal power which great excitement
occasionally produces in the muscles and the memory.
If the movements of pieces of furniture under the fingers are rather
more violent than could be expected under ordinary circumstances, there is
still no difficulty in accounting for them by pressure of the fingers, rendered
unnaturally strong by the excitement of the excitement of the circle which is anxiously
waiting to see what wonderful thing will happen.
A man with a mad bull behind, him can run far faster, and make greater
leaps, than he could manage in the more ordinary excitement of a race, and in
the lesser excitement of a race he can run faster than if he were merely
running against time. In Dr. Carpenter’s “Mental
Physiology” an instance is quoted of an old cook-maid, tottering with age,
who having heard an alarm of fire, seized an enormous box containing her whole
property and ran downstairs with it as easily as she would have carried a dish
of meat. But after the fire had been extinguished she could not lift the box a
hair's breadth from the ground, and it required two men to convey it upstairs
again.
The assistance given by faith in the attempt to achieve seeming
impossibilities must also be a most efficacious help at spiritualistic meetings.
Belief in our power to do anything is often the most essential condition for
bringing about its accomplishments. Everybody knows that it is much easier to
repeat a muscular feat which you know you have done before than to do it for
the first time.
This arises, not from any increase of muscular power, but from the fact
that your confident belief in your own powers, derived from experience of what
you have already done, enables you to use your muscles to their full effect.
The great obstacle to learning to swim or to crack a walnut or a hazelnut with
the fingers is want of belief in one’s ability; — when that obstacle is
surmounted by success the rest is very easy.
Dr. Carpenter’s once saw a hypnotized subject — a man so remarkable for
the poverty of his physical development that he had not for many years ventured
to lift a weight of twenty pounds in his preliminary state, but after be hypnotized he can to lift a weight of hundred pounds and swing it round his head with the greatest
apparent facility, upon being assured that it was as light as a feather.
It is well-known to physiologists, heads, that in our ordinary
volitional contraction of any muscle we do not employ more than a small part of
it at any one time; whilst, on the other hand, every experienced medical
practitioner knows that in convulsive contraction far more force is often put
forth than the strongest exertion of the will could bring into exertion.
Violent excitement combined with perfect confidence can sometimes abnormally
increase the power of the memory to the same extent as it increases the power
of the muscles. There .are many instances of persons remembering in the
delirium of fever languages which they had once known, but entirely forgotten
in their ordinary state.
Coleridge quotes an instance of an uneducated girl, unable to read and write;
who, in the excitement caused by fever, alarmed everybody by talking Latin,
Hebrew, and Greek.
The mystery was great, and was naturally referred to the devil. But
further investigation revealed the fact that in her childhood she had lived in
the house of a great scholar, who used to read his books aloud in her hearing.
Among these books were found many of the passages which the girl had repeated
in her fiver without the least idea of their meaning; but in the excitement of
disease she could remember perfectly what was utterly forgotten by her memory
in its ordinary condition.
Such fact may account for the instances in which surprising answers are
really given by the raps of the table or the movements of the planchette, even
although, from want of sufficient knowledge of the circumstances, it may be
impossible to give the special explanation of each particular marvel.
(Cid's
observation: the arguments given by the author of this article are valid for
some cases, but not for all phenomena, since, for example, have also been persons
who in particulars conditions respond in a language that they do not know with
whole sentences to questions that people asked them, and that cannot be
explained by the simple fact that these persons has heard that language before.
And there are also many testimonies of hitting and floating objects without
anyone being by their side.)
If the spirits were the real agents, they would surely transcend human
power more clearly. One would think that
it would be as easy for a spirit to move a house as to move a piano, and to
answer the hardest question that can be imagined should be to them no more
difficult than to answer easy questions.
Yet we never hear of spirits moving anything heavier than furniture, and
no spirit has yet succeeded in revealing the number of a certain £100 note of
the Bank of England which a gentleman has shut up in a box and promised to any spiritualist
who can guess its number.
Everything that is said to have been done by the spirits so far may reasonably be explicated, and until something is done
which is distinctly not amenable to such an explanation we may reasonably
refuse to believe in supernatural interferences with terrestrial events. »
(page 2)
OBSERVATIONS
I agree in part with what this writer said, but in the latter he is also
wrong because the difference in weight between a house and a piano easily
explains why "spirits" can lift the latter and not the former. And I put the word spirits in quotation marks because theosophy explains
that the entities that spiritists communicate with are rarely human spirits and
the vast majority of the time they are astral entities.
I cannot
tell you if these stories are true or not, but esotericism explains that
levitation and teleportation are possible. The detail is that supernatural
interferences are not used, but very natural interferences, only that they are
not yet known to science.
And as for
Blavatsky, this individual did not investigate her seriously because in the previous
posts I have compiled the information that I have found about these phenomena she
produced, and after having analyzed it, I have come to the conclusion that these
phenomena most likely were authentic.
But the
editor of this newspaper had a particular animosity towards Blavatsky since in
a previous article he had been insinuating that she was a charlatan, and that
is why Blavatsky wrote him a letter that you can read here.
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