Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?: The Evidence Given by Sir A.C. Doyle and Others Drastically ExaminedMcCabe, Joseph
Religion
Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?: The Evidence Given by Sir A.C. Doyle and Others Drastically Examined
McCabe, Joseph
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859-1930; Mediums -- Practice; Spiritualism
We must remember, also, that the distinction between "paid" and "unpaid"
is not quite so plain as some think. Daniel Dunglas Home is always
described by Spiritualists as an unpaid medium, but I will show
presently that he lived in great comfort all his life on the strength of
his Spiritualist powers. Florence Cook, Sir William Crookes's famous
medium, is described as "unpaid," because she did not (at that time)
charge sitters; but she had a large annual allowance from a wealthy
Spiritualist precisely in order that she should not charge at the door.
To take a living medium, and one very strongly recommended to us by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle under the name of "Eva C." (though it has been openly
acknowledged by her patrons on the continent for six years that her name
is Marthe Beraud): she has lived a luxurious life with people far above
her own station in life for fifteen years, in virtue of her supposed
abnormal powers.
The distinction is, in any case, useless. When Spiritualists try to
conciliate us to their wonderful stories by telling us that the medium
was "unpaid," they do not know the history of their own movement. The
most extraordinary frauds have been perpetrated, even in recent years,
by unpaid mediums, or ladies of good social position. Flammarion,
Maxwell, Ochorowicz, Carrington, and all other experienced investigators
give hundreds of cases. Not many years ago Professor Reichel, tired of
examining and exposing professional mediums, heard that the daughter of
a high official in Costa Rica was producing wonderful materializations.
He actually went to Costa Rica to study her, and he found that she was
tricking (dressing a servant girl as a ghost) in the crudest fashion, as
I will tell later. The daughter of an Italian chemist, Linda Gazerra
cheated scientific and professional men for three years (1908-11), but
was at last found to conceal her "ghosts" and "apports" in her false
hair and her underclothing. There is no such thing as a guarantee
against fraud in the character of the medium. Every case has to be
examined with unsparing rigour.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets the difficulty by cheerfully distinguishing
between white, black, and grey mediums: the entirely honest, the
entirely fraudulent, and those who have genuine powers, but cheat at
times when their powers flag and the sitters are impatient for
"manifestations." It is a familiar distinction. To some extent it is a
sound distinction. We all admit black mediums. The chronicle of
Spiritualism, short as it is, contains as sorry a collection of rogues,
male and female, as any human movement _could_ show in seventy years.
Politics is spotless by comparison. Even business can hold up its head.
For a "religion" the situation is remarkable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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