Knobs and Knockers.

"The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living" - Cicero.

What do we imagine when we think of seances? Thanks to movies like Beetlejuice, The Others, What Lies Beneath, and even Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey our idea of what a seance is these days is somewhat Hollywood and, unsurprisingly as the bulk of films featuring seances are horror movies, they're often quite scary or spooky.

But in the Victorian heyday of seances it was quite a different story. An 1873 newspaper report about a seance tells of singing, prayer, invisible friends, and a spirit called Sam requesting that all the accordions in the room were tied down to the furniture before then playing one in what was reported as a most melodious of styles.

Seances, in their Victorian iterations, were one part revivalist meeting, one part magic show, and one part party. Men would wear suits and ladies would wear posh frocks to attend. Quite different from the attire I was dressed in when I laid on my bed in Tadley and tuned in to last Monday's online (you know why) London Fortean Society talk, Calling the Spirits - A History of Seances.

A talk that seemed likely to cover much of the same ground as Dr Romany Reagan's The Victorian Seance:From the Occult to the Gin Parlour at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub last February but would, hopefully, be different enough to warrant both attending and writing about. Which it proved to be. With our host Scott presenting, aided by the excellent Conway Hall, from his garden shed in Lewisham, our speaker, Lisa Morton, Zoomed in from the far more glamorous, and no doubt warmer, location of southern California.

Lisa spoke of how, before seances, (supposed) communion with the dead had been a solitary activity partaken of by witches and necromancers and featured in both Greek (Homer's Odyssey) and Roman literature. In the Hebrew Bible King Saul, the first king of Israel, consults The Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of prophet Samuel so that he can seek his counsel in the upcoming, and disastrous - as foretold by Samuel, battle against the Philistines.

Less than a century later when the United Kingdom of Israel was ruled over by Solomon the witches and middle men were cut out and Solomon consulted his own grimoires to summon up the spirits. For the next two thousand years this was how communion with the dead, though rarely even considered, was imagined. Necromancers standing in circles repeating the same incantation three times was our ancestor's standard and accepted imagining of how we had conversations with spirits.

The Renaissance era didn't so much as see an end to that as much as it witnessed a juicing of it. It was the start of the time of the great necromancing conmen. The 16c Worcester born occultist, and assistant to John Dee, Edward Kelley was one such man. Kelley had had both his ears removed as a punishment for counterfeiting and forgery but that didn't stop him convincing Dee he could use crystal-gazers to contact the dead and it didn't stop Dee from believing him.

With a magical powder and a book of spells he'd supposedly discovered in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, Kelley toured his medicine show and became hugely successful and massively wealthy as a result. Kelley, like Dee, was also a keen alchemist and travelled to Bohemia where he was knighted by Rudolph II. 

Things appeared to deteriorate quickly in their relationship as soon after Kelley was arrested on Rudolf's order and imprisoned in Krivoklat Castle outside Prague. Ostensibly for the murder of an official named Jiri Hunkler in a duel but it was suspected that Kelley had been incarcerated so that he could not leave the country before he produced any gold. On his release he failed, unsurprisingly, to turn base metals to gold and was put in prison again. This time in Hnevin Castle in Most where Kelley died, still in his early forties.

 

Two hundred years later the German born doctor, and friend of Mozart, Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in France and introduced the French people to his belief that there was an "invisible super fine fluid" that surrounded each and every body in the entire universe and that this fluid, or force, could have powerful healing qualities. Mesmer named it 'animal magnetism' but so interlinked was he with his theories many came to know it as mesmerism. A mesmerism that begat hypnotism and went on to birth the very word 'seance'.

The invention of spiritualism by the Fox sisters in Rochester, New York in 1848 (an event covered in my previous blog about Dr Reagan's talk - link above) took place at an apposite time in human history and found a willing, and susceptible, audience who, with belief in mainstream religion fading, were, perhaps trying to fill that, cliche warning, God shaped hole in their lives.

Soon, across America, there was a craze for superstar mediums. Many of them, like Agnes Guppy-Volckman, Florence Cook, and the abstract art pioneer Georgiana Houghton (whose Serpentine Gallery show I visited and wrote about back in 2016) were women and their shows would consist of levitating objects, instruments that played themselves, and production of ectoplasm. Far from replacing religion, Spiritualism had become a religion. A showbiz religion for the new age of entertainment.

But though the shows were fun they were also taken very seriously. Many believed that science could, and would, prove Spiritualism to be the one true religion even at a time when it had been remarked that Florence Cook's spirit, known as Katie King, looked remarkably like Florence herself who was supposedly hid in a cupboard so as not to upset Katie!

Hmmm! In 1871, at Ashley House in Westminster, the Scottish clairvoyant, medium, psychic, and, let's not put too fine a point on this, fraudster Daniel Dunglas Home was seen to enter into a trance, step outside a seventy foot high window and levitate for some time before swinging back in to the room via an adjacent window. Many believed his psychic powers had made him able to do this. Others suspected it was a trick and the dark night he chose to perform this act only hardened theirs (and my) belief towards this.

These levitations and spiritualist shows, as well as psychics making claims they could read the minds of the living, were the material of great debate and in 1882 The Society for Psychical Research was formed. Now known as a skeptical organisation the SPR was initially formed as an alliance between those who hoped to prove scientifically that spiritualism and communion with the dead was real and those who wished to debunk. They were to work together for the common good to find out the truth behind these claims.

In the early 1900s both the SPR and the general public started to wise up. In 1878 Francis Monk became the first person in England to be tried under the Vagrancy Act of 1824 for his nomadic lifestyle of mentalist shows and the Fox sisters had long admitted their act was fraudulent. People didn't want to believe their confession, too much had been invested into Spiritualism, then but fifty years later things were different.

The story of Spiritualism didn't end there though. When World War I brought about the loss of so many loved ones on the battlefields there was a demand, and many happy to supply that demand, from some of the bereaved for communication with those that had passed. Spirit communication was back in vogue and this time it came with a new gadget - the ouija board.

They were sold, initially, as parlour games but once the Catholic church, predictably, denounced them they soon gained more prestige. Budapest born Harry Houdini was one who'd started out as a believer in Spiritualism but by the 1920s he'd turned to debunking fraudulent psychics and mediums. A career that inspired the likes of Penn & Teller, Derren Brown, and the recently departed James Randi in their work.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini's friend, remained convinced of the authenticity of various mediums and, in 1922, after Doyle's wife had started practising mediumship, him and Houdini fell out. At least Louisa Doyle's stage act didn't, like some others, involve her using her surgically enhanced vagina to hide fake ectoplasm. The French medium Eva Carriere, keen to prove she had not resorted to this trick, had an assistant finger her live on stage before and after performances to show she was 'empty'!

You'd think Carriere's shows would be the ones making the front pages but the story that really caught the public attention was the trial of the fraudulent medium, and Fortean favourite, Helen Duncan. The trial took place in 1944, during World War II, and was so sensational it briefly replaced the war on the front pages of the papers. Much to the annoyance, apparently, of Winston Churchill.

Duncan, whose act consisted of bringing up fake ectoplasm made of cheesecloth with a photograph of a face cut out from a magazine attached to it - which sounds brilliantly crap, had apparently predicted the sinking of the HMS Barham by a Nazi submarine. An event which cost 862 lives and one which was hushed up for three months presumably so as not to depress people or deter the war effort at a crucial time.

Families of the lost were, however, informed of the sinking and with 862 lost that amounts to several thousand people. As Duncan had been appearing in Portsmouth during the time it's not impossible to believe that one of these people informed her of the event - especially when you consider she promised she could make contact with the dead. In fact it's far easier to believe this event than it is to believe Duncan had any real psychic powers. 

But that didn't stop her being one of the last people ever tried under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and being sentenced to six months in prison. When she died twelve years later some were suspicious but before she was even sent to jail she was so obese she could barely move and suffered serious heart problems. You do the maths.

Some now still seek historical pardoning and though that's an irrelevance with somebody who died sixty-four years ago I think a better idea would be to admit she was a fraud rather than a witch. Frauds as useless as Duncan are rare now but they've not gone away. They've simply been replaced by ever more elegant and convincing modern versions. You know who they are and I won't do them the service of naming them.

Lisa Morton's talk was an interesting forty-five minute journey through the history of seances and spiritualism, as promised, and if didn't answer any questions regarding why so many people continue to believe in this patent bullshit then that's not necessarily the remit of the London Fortean Society. The Skeptics groups can pick up the slack on that.

A Q&A took in sexual healing, Freud, Jung, medium detectives both in fact and fiction, the Welsh mining industry, and Federico Fellini and it rounded off a fab evening which began with knockers (the Fox sisters knocking on their bedposts in Rochester) and ended with knobs (Uri Geller and the like). Next month Stacy Hackner is with the LFS to talk about Paleo-fantasy and Ancient Alien Contact and I'll be taking a break from writing about that one not because it's not interesting (it is) but because I've already attended, and written, about that talk (at London Skeptics in Camden last January). If you've any interest in this kind of stuff, though, you should log on.

"Knock knock"

"Is anybody there?"

"No, of course not"