Chapter 15

Let us examine a few instances of the ghost who visibly moves material objects. We take one (already cited) from Mrs. Sidgwick's own article. {205} In this case a gentleman named John D. Harry scolded his daughters for saying that _they_ had seen a ghost, with which he himself was perfectly familiar. 'The figure,' a fair woman draped in white, 'on seven or eight occasions appeared in my bedroom, and twice in the library, and on one occasion _it lifted up the mosquito-curtains_, and looked closely into my face'. Now, could a hallucination lift a mosquito-curtain, or even produce the impression that it did so, while the curtain was really unmoved? Clearly a hallucination, however artful, and well got up, could do no such thing. Therefore a being--a ghost with very little maidenly reserve--haunted the bedroom of Mr. Harry, if he tells a true tale. Again (p. 115), a lady (on whose veracity I am ready to pledge my all) had doors opened for her frequently, 'as if a hand had turned the handle'. And once she not only saw the door open, but a grey woman came in. Another witness, years afterwards, beheld the same figure and the same performance. Once more, Miss A. M.'s mother followed a ghost, who _opened a door_ and entered a room, where she could not be found when she was wanted (p. 121). Again, {206} a lady saw a ghost which, 'with one hand, the left, _drew back the curtain_'. There are many other cases in which apparitions are seen in houses where mysterious thumps and raps occur, especially in General Campbell's experience (p. 483). If the apparition gave the thumps then he (or, in this instance, she) was material, and could produce effects on matter. Indeed, this ghost was seen to take up and lay down some books, and to tuck in the bed-clothes. Hallucinations (which are all in one's eye or sensory centre, or cerebral central terminus), cannot draw curtains, or open doors, or pick up books, or tuck in bed-clothes, or cause thumps--not real thumps, hallucinatory thumps are different. Consequently, if the stories are true, _some apparitions are ghosts_, real objective entities, filling space. The senses of a hallucinated person may be deceived as to touch, and as to feeling the breath of a phantasm (a likely story), as well as in sight and hearing. But a visible ghost which produces changes in the visible world cannot be a hallucination. On the other hand Dr. Binns, in his Anatomy of Sleep tells us of 'a gentleman who, in a dream, pushed against a door in a distant house, so that those in the room were scarcely able to resist the pressure'. {207a} Now if this rather staggering anecdote be true, the spirit of a living man, being able to affect matter, is also, so to speak, material, and is an actual entity, an astral body. Moreover, Mrs. Frederica Hauffe, when in the magnetic sleep, 'could rap at a distance'.

These arguments, then, make in favour of the old-fashioned theory of ghosts and wraiths, as things objectively existing, which is very comforting to a conservative philosopher. Unluckily, just as many, or more, anecdotes look quite the other way. For instance, General Barter sees, hears, and recognises the dead Lieutenant B., wearing a beard which he had grown since the general saw him in life. He also sees the hill-pony ridden by Mr. B., and killed by him--a steed with which, in its mortal days, the general had no acquaintance. This is all very well: a dead pony may have a ghost, like Miss A. B.'s dog which was heard by one Miss B., and seen by the other, some time after its decease. On mature reflection, as both ladies were well- known persons of letters, we suppress their names, which would carry the weight of excellent character and distinguished sense. But Lieutenant B. was also accompanied by two grooms. Now, it is too much to ask us to believe that he had killed two grooms, as he killed the pony. {207b} Consequently, they, at least, were hallucinations; so what was Lieutenant B.? When Mr. K., on board the Racoon, saw his dead father lying in his coffin (p. 461), there was no real coffin there, at all events; and hence, probably, no real dead father's ghost,--only a 'telepathic hallucination'. Miss Rose Morton could never _touch_ the female ghost which she often chased about the house, nor did this ghost break or displace the threads stretched by Miss Morton across the stairs down which the apparition walked. Yet its footsteps did make a noise, and the family often heard the ghost walking downstairs, followed by Miss Morton. Thus this ghost was both material and immaterial, for surely, only matter can make a noise when in contact with matter. On the whole, if the evidence is worth anything, there are real objective ghosts, and there are also telepathic hallucinations: so that the scientific attitude is to believe in both, if in either. And this was the view of Petrus Thyraeus, S.J., in his Loca Infesta (1598). The alternative is to believe in neither.

We have thus, according to the advice of Socrates, permitted the argument to lead us whither it would. And whither has it led us? The old, savage, natural theory of ghosts and wraiths is that they are spirits, yet not so immaterial but that they can fill space, be seen, heard, touched, and affect material objects. Mediaeval and other theologians preferred to regard them as angelic or diabolic manifestations, made out of compressed air, or by aid of bodies of the dead, or begotten by the action of angel or devil on the substance of the brain. Modern science looks on them as hallucinations, sometimes morbid, as in madness or delirium, or in a vicious condition of the organ of sense; sometimes abnormal, but not necessarily a proof of chronic disease of any description. The psychical theory then explains a sifted remnant of apparitions; the coincidental, 'veridical' hallucinations of the sane, by telepathy. There is a wide chasm, however, to be bridged over between that hypothesis, and its general acceptance, either by science, or by reflective yet unscientific inquirers. The existence of thought- transference, especially among people wide awake, has to be demonstrated more unimpeachably, and then either the telepathic explanation must be shown to fit all the cases collected, or many interesting cases must be thrown overboard, or these must be referred to some other cause. That cause will be something very like the old-fashioned ghosts. Perhaps, the most remarkable collective hallucination in history is that vouched for by Patrick Walker, the Covenanter; in his Biographia Presbyteriana. {209} In 1686, says Walker, about two miles below Lanark, on the water of Clyde 'many people gathered together for several afternoons, where there were showers of bonnets, hats, guns, and swords, which covered the trees and ground, companies of men in arms marching in order, upon the waterside, companies meeting companies. . . . and then all falling to the ground and disappearing, and other companies immediately appearing in the same way'. This occurred in June and July, in the afternoons. Now the Westland Whigs were then, as usual, in a very excitable frame of mind, and filled with fears, inspired both by events, and by the prophecies of Peden and other saints. Patrick Walker himself was a high-flying Covenanter, he was present: 'I went there three afternoons together'--and he saw nothing unusual occur. About two-thirds of the crowd did see the phenomena he reckons, the others, like himself, saw nothing strange. 'There was a fright and trembling upon them that did see,' and, at least in one case, the hallucination was contagious. A gentleman standing next Walker exclaimed: 'A pack of damned witches and warlocks, that have the second sight, the deil ha't do I see'. 'And immediately there was a discernable change in his countenance, with as much fear and trembling as any woman I saw there, who cried out: "O all ye that do not see, say nothing; for I perswade you it is matter of fact, and discernable to all that is not stone-blind".' Those who did see minutely described 'what handles the swords had, whether small or three-barred, or Highland guards, and the closing knots of the bonnets, black or blue. . . . I have been at a loss ever since what to make of this last,' says Patrick Walker, and who is not at a loss? The contagion of the hallucination, so to speak, did not affect him, fanatic as he was, and did affect a cursing and swearing cavalier, whose prejudices, whose 'dominant idea,' were all on the other side. The Psychical Society has published an account of a similar collective hallucination of crowds of people, 'appearing and disappearing,' shared by two young ladies and their maid, on a walk home from church. But this occurred in a fog, and no one was present who was not hallucinated. Patrick Walker's account is triumphantly honest, and is, perhaps, as odd a piece of psychology as any on record, thanks to his escape from the prevalent illusion, which, no doubt, he would gladly have shared. Wodrow, it should be said, in his History of the Sufferings of the Kirk, mentions visions of bonnets, which, he thinks, indicated a future muster of militia! But he gives the date as 1684.

SCRYING OR CRYSTAL-GAZING

Revival of crystal-gazing. Antiquity of the practice. Its general harmlessness. Superstitious explanations. Crystal-gazing and 'illusions hypnagogiques'. Visualisers. Poetic vision. Ancient and savage practices analogous to crystal-gazing. New Zealand. North America. Egypt. Sir Walter's interest in the subject. Mr. Kinglake. Greek examples. Dr. Dee. Miss X. Another modern instance. Successes and failures. Revival of lost memories. Possible thought-transference. Inferences from antiquity and diffusion of practice. Based on actual experience. Anecdotes of Dr. Gregory. Children as visionaries. Not to be encouraged.

The practice of 'scrying,' 'peeping,' or 'crystal-gazing,' has been revived in recent years, and is, perhaps, the only 'occult' diversion which may be free from psychological or physical risk, and which it is easy not to mix with superstition. The antiquity and world-wide diffusion of scrying, in one form or other, interests the student of human nature. Meanwhile the comparatively few persons who can see pictures in a clear depth, may be as innocently employed while so doing, as if they were watching the clouds, or the embers. 'May be,' one must say, for crystal-seers are very apt to fall back on our old friend, the animistic hypothesis, and to explain what they see, or fancy they see, by the theory that 'spirits' are at the bottom of it all. In Mrs. de Morgan's work From Matter to Spirit, suggestions of this kind are not absent: 'As an explanation of crystal-seeing, a spiritual drawing was once made, representing a spirit directing on the crystal a stream of influence,' and so forth. Mrs. de Morgan herself seemed rather to hold that the act of staring at a crystal mesmerises the observer. The person who looks at it often becomes sleepy. 'Sometimes the eyes close, at other times tears flow.' People who become sleepy, or cry, or get hypnotised, will probably consult their own health and comfort by leaving crystal balls alone.

There are others, however, who are no more hypnotised by crystal- gazing than tea-drinking, or gardening, or reading a book, and who can still enjoy visions as beautiful as those of the opium eater, without any of the reaction. Their condition remains perfectly normal, that is, they are wide awake to all that is going on. In some way their fancy is enlivened, and they can behold, in the glass, just such vivid pictures as many persons habitually see between sleeping and waking, illusions hypnagogiques. These 'hypnagogic illusions' Pontus de Tyard described in a pretty sonnet, more than three hundred years ago. Maury, in his book on dreams has recorded, and analysed them. They represent faces, places, a page of print, a flame of fire, and so forth, and it is one of their peculiarities that the faces rapidly shift and alter, generally from beautiful to ugly. A crystal-seer seems to be a person who can see, in a glass, while awake and with open eyes, visions akin to those which perhaps the majority of people see with shut eyes, between sleeping and waking. {214} It seems probable that people who, when they think, see a mental picture of the subject of their thoughts, people who are good 'visualisers,' are likely to succeed best with the crystal, some of them can 'visualise' purposely, in the crystal, while others cannot. Many who are very bad 'visualisers,' like the writer, who think in words, not in pictures, see bright and distinct hypnagogic illusions, yet see nothing in the crystal, however long they stare at it. And there are crystal-seers who are not subject to hypnagogic illusions. These facts, like the analogous facts of the visualisation of arithmetical figures, analysed by Mr. Galton, show interesting varieties in the conduct of mental operations. Thus we speak of 'vision' in a poet, or novelist, and it seems likely that men of genius 'see' their fictitious characters and landscapes, while people of critical temperament, if they attempt creative work, are conscious that they do not create, but construct. On the other hand many incompetent novelists are convinced that they have 'vision,' that they see and hear their characters, but they do not, as genius does, transfer the 'vision' to their readers.

This is a digression from the topic of hallucinations caused by gazing into a clear depth. Forms of crystal-gazing, it is well known, are found among savages. The New Zealanders, according to Taylor, gaze in a drop of blood, as the Egyptians do in a drop of ink. In North America, the Pere le Jeune found that a kind of thought reading was practised thus: it was believed that a sick person had certain desires, if these could be gratified, he would recover. The sorcerers, therefore, gazed into water in a bowl expecting to see there visions of the desired objects. The Egyptian process with the boy and the ink, is too familiar to need description. In Scott's Journal (ii. 419) we read of the excitement which the reports of Lord Prudhoe {215} and Colonel Felix, caused among the curious. A boy, selected by these English gentlemen, saw and described Shakspeare, and Colonel Felix's brother, who had lost an arm. The ceremonies of fumigation, and the preliminary visions of flags, and a sultan, are not necessary in modern crystal-gazing. Scott made inquiries at Malta, and wished to visit Alexandria. He was attracted, doubtless, by the resemblance to Dr. Dee's tales of his magic ball, and to the legends of his own Aunt Margaret's Mirror. The Quarterly Review (No. 117, pp. 196-208) offers an explanation which explains nothing. The experiments of Mr. Lane were tolerably successful, those of Mr. Kinglake, in Eothen, were amusingly the reverse. Dr. Keate, the flogging headmaster of Eton, was described by the seer as a beautiful girl, with golden hair and blue eyes. The modern explanation of successes would apparently be that the boy does, occasionally, see the reflection of his interrogator's thoughts.

In a paper in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (part xiv.), an anonymous writer gives the results of some historical investigation into the antiquities of crystal-gazing. The stories of cups, 'wherein my lord divines,' like Joseph, need not necessarily indicate gazing into the deeps of the cup. There were other modes of using cups and drops of wine, not connected with visions. At Patrae, in Greece, Pausanias describes the dropping of a mirror on to the surface of a well, the burning of incense, and the vision of the patient who consults the oracle in the deeps of the mirror. {216a} A Christian Father asserts that, in some cases, a basin with a glass bottom was used, through which the gazer saw persons concealed in a room below, and took them for real visions. {216b} In mirror-magic (catoptromancy), the child seer's eyes were bandaged, and he saw with the top of his head! The Specularii continued the tradition through the Middle Ages, and, in the sixteenth century Dr. Dee ruined himself by his infatuation for 'show-stones,' in which Kelly saw, or pretended to see, visions which Dr. Dee interpreted. Dee kept voluminous diaries of his experiments, part of which is published in a folio by Meric Casaubon. The work is flighty, indeed crazy; Dee thought that the hallucinations were spirits, and believed that his 'show-stones' were occasionally spirited away by the demons. Kelly pretended to hear noises in the stones, and to receive messages.

In our own time, while many can see pictures, few know what the pictures represent. Some explain them by interpreting the accompanying 'raps,' or by 'automatic writing'. The intelligence thus conveyed is then found to exist in county histories, newspapers, and elsewhere, a circumstance which lends itself to interpretation of more sorts than one. Without these very dubious modes of getting at the meaning of the crystal pictures, they remain, of course, mere picturesque hallucinations. The author of the paper referred to, is herself a crystal-seer, and (in Borderland No. 2) mentions one very interesting vision. She and a friend stared into one of Dr. Dee's 'show-stones,' at the Stuart exhibition, and both beheld the same scene, not a scene they could have guessed at, which was going on at the seer's own house. As this writer, though versed in hallucinations, entirely rejects any 'spiritual' theory, and conceives that, she is dealing with purely psychological curiosities, her evidence is the better worth notice, and may be compared with that of a crystal-seer for whose evidence the present writer can vouch, as far as one mortal may vouch for that of another.

Miss X., the writer in the Psychical Proceedings, has been able to see pictures in crystals and other polished surfaces, or, indeed, independently of these, since childhood. She thinks that the visions are:--

1. After-images, or recrudescent memories (often memories of things not consciously noted).

2. Objectivations of ideas or images, consciously or unconsciously present to the mind.

3. Visions, possibly telepathic or clairvoyant, implying acquirement of knowledge by supernormal means. The first class is much the most frequent in this lady's experience. She can occasionally refresh her memory by looking into the crystal.

The other seer, known to the writer, cannot do this, and her pictures, as far as she knows, are purely fanciful. Perhaps an 'automatic writer' might interpret them, in the rather dubious manner of that art. As far as the 'scryer' knows, however, her pictures of places and people are not revivals of memory. For example, she sees an ancient ship, with a bird's beak for prow, come into harbour, and behind it a man carrying a crown. This is a mere fancy picture. On one occasion she saw a man, like an Oriental priest, with a white caftan, contemplating the rise and fall of a fountain of fire: suddenly, at the summit of the fire, appeared a human hand, pointing downwards, to which the old priest looked up. This was in August, 1893. Later in the month the author happened to take up, at Loch Sheil, Lady Burton's Life of Sir Richard Burton. On the back of the cover is a singular design in gold. A woman in widow's weeds is bowing beneath rays of light, over which appears a human hand, marked R. F. B. on the wrist. The author at once wrote asking his friend the crystal-gazer if she had seen this work of art, which might have unconsciously suggested the picture. The lady, however, was certain that she had not seen the Life of Sir Richard Burton, though her eye, of course, may have fallen on it in a bookseller's shop, while her mind did not consciously take it in. If this was a revival of a sub-conscious memory in the crystal, it was the only case of that process in her experience.

On the other hand Miss X. can trace many of her visions to memories, as Maury could in his illusions hypnagogiques. Thus, Miss X. saw in the crystal, the printed announcement of a friend's death. She had not consciously read the Times, but remembered that she had held it up before her face as a firescreen. This kind of revival, as she says, corresponds to the writing, with planchette, of scraps from the Chanson de Roland, by a person who had never _consciously_ read a line of it, and who did not even know what stratum of Old French was represented by the fragments. Miss X. seems not to know either; for she calls it 'Provencal'. Similar instances of memory revived are not very uncommon in dreams. Miss X. can consciously put a group of fanciful characters into the crystal, while this is beyond the power of the seer known to the writer, who has attempted to perceive what a friend is doing at a distance, but with no success. Thus she tried to discover what the writer might be about, and secured a view of two large sunny rooms, with a shadowy figure therein. Now it is very probable that the writer was in just such a room, at --- Castle, but the seer saw, on the library table, a singular mirror, which did not exist there, and a model of a castle, also non-existent. The knowledge that the person sought for was staying at a 'castle,' may have unconsciously suggested this model in the picture.

A pretty case of revived memory is given by Miss X. She wanted the date of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Later, in the crystal, she saw a conventional old Jew, writing in a book with massive clasps. Using a magnifying glass, she found that he was writing Greek, but the lines faded, and she only saw the Roman numerals LXX. These suggested the seventy Hebrews who wrote the Septuagint, with the date, 277 B.C., which served for Ptolemy Philadelphus. Miss X. later remembered a memoria technica which she had once learned, with the clue, 'Now Jewish elders indite a Greek copy'. It is obvious that these queer symbolical reawakenings of memory explain much of the (apparently) 'unknown' information given by 'ghosts,' and in dreams. A lady, who had long been in very bad health, was one evening seized by a violent recrudescence of memory, and for hours poured out the minutest details of the most trivial occurrences; the attack was followed by a cerebral malady from which she fortunately recovered. The same phenomenon of awakened memory has occasionally been reported by people who were with difficulty restored after being seven-eighths drowned.

The crystal ball, in the proper hands, merely illustrates the possibility of artificially reviving memory, while the fanciful visions, akin to illusions hypnagogiques, have, in all ages, been interpreted by superstition as revelations of the distant or the future. Of course, if there is such a thing as occasional transference of thought, so that the idea in the inquirer's mind is reflected in the crystal-gazer's vision, the hypothesis of the superstitious will fix on this as a miracle, still more will that hypothesis be strengthened, if future or distant events, not consciously known, are beheld. Such things must occasionally occur, by chance, in the myriad confusions of dreams, and, to the same extent, in crystal visions. Miss X.'s three cases of possible telepathy in her own experience are trivial, and do not seem to rise beyond the possibility of fortuitous coincidence: and her possible clairvoyant visions she leaves to the judgment of the reader, 'to interpret as clairvoyance, or coincidence, or prevision, or whatever else he will'. The crystal-gazer known to the author once managed to see the person (unknown to her) who was in the mind of the other party in the experiment. But she has made scarcely any experiments of this description.