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Author: Mark Russell Bell
"A White Hand Ringing a Bell."
Caption from Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena:
"This photograph shows the exact position of the medium's hands and feet during the production of this remarkable phenomenon. It will be seen that her hands are held on the extreme opposite corners of the table."
Different modalities of mediumship encompass clairvoyance relating to mental images, clairaudience involving auditory experiences deriving from unseen sources, 'physical' or 'materialization' manifestations with the medium typically entering a trance state, 'automatic writing,' and 'Direct Voice' phenomena where seance sitters have conversed with voices of people who'd passed over to another realm of being. 'Spirit contact' became better understood as seance communicators spoke about inhabiting an 'astral body' while inhabiting other 'spheres' of existence.
During the Spiritualism Movement that became prominent in the world during the mid-Nineteenth Century, people found themselves experiencing a thought-provoking gamut of unexplained phenomena. Unfortunately, some researchers seem predisposed to support a conclusion of fraud in regard to many fully documented cases where there may be found discriminating testimonials explaining the authenticity of the observed phenomena. Skeptical investigators of Spiritualism have often relied upon superficial and cursory data by others who similarly may be ignorant of the evidence offered in qualitative nonfiction sources. One such case is that of the 'physical' (manifestation) medium Eusapia Palladino, whose mediumship is chronicled in Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena (1909) by Hereward Carrington, among other accounts. Dealing with the question of fraud, Carrington quoted remarks of physicist and author Oliver Lodge —
"I happen to have had only good sittings with Eusapia, and my own experience of what was likely to happen in the others was based upon what happened when she was not entranced at all. Judging from that experience, I thought it not unlikely that she may sometimes somnambulicly attempt to achieve effects which she thinks desired, in what may readily appear a fraudulent manner."
". . . All danger of unfair accusation will be avoided if sitters will only have the common sense to treat her not as a scientific person engaged in a demonstration, but as a delicate piece of apparatus, wherewith they themselves are making an investigation. She is an instrument, whose ways and idiosyncrasies must be learned, and to a certain extent humored, just as one studies and humors the ways of some much less delicate piece of physical apparatus turned out by a skilled instrument maker."
Continues
Copyright©Mark Russell Bell
Reproduced courtesy of Mark Russell Bell
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