Survival of Consciousness After Death

I have no final conclusions to offer about ghosts, spirits, reincarnation, or any other manifestation suggestive of survival after death. As in most areas of consciousness exploration, a final opinion is of less value than an appreciation of and tolerance for ambiguity; as well as a willingness to carefully explore the evidence and claims, cultures and contexts. For the great by-product of the search for the life beyond is an extraordinary enrichment of our understanding of the life within.

In the first edition of this book, as I was writing about this topic, I found it difficult in my excitement to keep from floating off into romantic speculation about the great beyond. The feeling was something like looking at a mountain peak in the distance, being stimulated by the excitement of its beauty and majesty, just by knowing it is there. What The Roots of Consciousness is about (I had to remind myself) is the continuum of existence between birth and death. It is something like the space between sleeping and waking. Moving from one to the other is really a gradual process. Each step takes us to the next. Living and dying, breathing, sleeping, dreaming, being, communicating -- our consciousness touches all of these worlds. Yet, in the spirit of the early Wittgenstein (the twentieth century's great positivist philosopher), there is truly nothing meaningful I can say about existence beyond the veil of mortal life (if such there be). What I shall expound upon is the consciousness that we the living develop in relationship to the mystery of death. For we are all touched by its silence.
 

Ancient Egypt

In Egypt, life after death was thought to be a natural continuation of life on earth, and one senses another inner reality merging with their technology.

The shamanic practices of earlier tribes became incorporated into the organized Egyptian national priesthood. However, the Egyptian religion is no longer practiced, and the ancient language is largely lost. The evidence remaining regarding the different cults and their practices and theologies is still shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Yet, these people devoted themselves so intensely to their cult of the dead, it is easy to imagine that many of their seer-priests actually did see the spirits of their departed.

The following testament comes from the pyramid of Unas, a 5th Dynasty king:

The heavens drop water, the stars throb, the archers go round about, the bones of Akeru tremble, and those who are in bondage to them take to flight when they see Unas rise up as a soul, in the form of the god who liveth upon his fathers and who maketh food of his mothers. Unas is the lord of wisdom and his mother knoweth not his name ...The kas of Unas are behind him, the sole of his foot is beneath his feet, his gods are over him, his uraei are upon his brow, the serpent guides of Unas are in front of him and the spirit of the flame looketh upon his soul. The powers of Unas protect him: Unas is a bull in heaven, he directeth his steps where he will, he liveth upon the form which each god taketh upon himself, and he eateth the flesh of those who come to fill their bellies with the magical charms in the Lake of Fire.

The Egyptian concept of spiritual resurrection after death has a mythological basis in the story of Osiris -- the lord of creation who was also a king of Egypt.

At the height of his reign, Osiris is murdered by his jealous enemy Set. His body is enclosed in a chest that is placed at the mouth of the Nile, but eventually recovered by Osiris' wife, Isis. Set however, finds it once more and dismembers it into fourteen pieces he scatters throughout the land.

Isis searches for the pieces of Osiris' body and finds all of them except the phallus. At this point, Horus, the sun, the hawk god, appears on the scene. As the god of the sun, he always existed. In fact the hawk is probably the first living thing worshipped by the Egyptians, yet he is conceived by Isis from the dismembered body of Osiris lacking the progenitive organ! The appearance of Horus represents the resurrection of Osiris. Filled with his father's spirit, he defeats Set in battle.

The battle between Horus and Set is re-enacted each day. You can watch this epic drama as it unfolds in the sky by getting up several hours before dawn and silently observing the sunrise.

The ancient Egyptians believed that as the hawk arose from the dismembered body of Osiris, so would their awareness survive the bodily death. However they also seemed to believe that proper funeral rites were necessary to attaining afterlife in heaven. It seems we are dealing with mixed popular superstitions with higher philosophy and occult practice. In many ways the Egyptians seem to describe the afterlife as being quite physical and sensory -- but perhaps this is a description of how real it was for them. This physical imagery is, perhaps, a poetical metaphor for the images the ancient seers had of the afterlife.
 

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Buddhism, which originated in India, reached a height of consciousness exploration in Tibet. All states of existence for the Tibetan Buddhists other than pure Nirvana are reflections of the limited illusion of self-consciousness. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a major document within this tradition; it describes the passage of consciousness from death to rebirth. Existence is divided into six bardos, three of which are experienced from birth to death and three of which occur from death to rebirth. Yet, Buddhist philosophy teaches that birth and death are not phenomena that occur only once in a human life; they are part of an uninterrupted process. Every instant something within us dies and something is reborn. The different bardos represent the different aspects of this process in our own lives. All of these states are in flux.

chikhai bardo: The experience of the primary clear light and the secondary clear light at the moment of death.

chonyd bardo: The state of psychic consciousness. Experiencing lights, sounds and rays. Seeing the peaceful deities and then the wrathful deities.

sidpa bardo: Visions of the world into which one's karma leads one to be born. Visions of males and females in sexual union. Feelings of attachment and repulsion. Choosing and entering the womb.

bsam-gtan bardo: The dream state.

skye-gnas bardo: The everyday waking consciousness of being born into the human world.

These bardo states refer to the mental processes of the soul during the periods of life and rebirth. Outside of one's own consciousness there still remains another reality to be explored. Entrance to this reality is attained by recognizing at any point that the images and apparitions of the bardo state are merely the projections of one's own consciousness.

With every thought of fear or terror or awe 

for all apparitional appearances set aside 

May I recognize whatever visions appear as

reflections of mine own consciousness

May I not fear the bands of peaceful and wrathful deities, mine own thought-forms.

In the sidpa bardo, before rebirth, there occurs a judgment of the good and bad deeds of the soul of the dead. 

If thou neither prayest nor knowest how to meditate upon the Great Symbol nor upon any tutelary deity, the Good Genius, who was born simultaneously with thee, will come now and count out thy good deeds with white pebbles, and the Evil Genius, who was born simultaneously with thee, will come and count out thy evil deeds with black pebbles. Thereupon, thou wilt be greatly frightened, awed, and terrified, and wilt tremble; and thou wilt, attempt to tell lies, saying "I have not committed any evil deed."

Then the Lord of Death will say, "I will consult the Mirror of Karma."

So saying, he will look in the Mirror, wherein every good and evil act is vividly reflected. Lying will be of no avail.

Interestingly enough, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, has been used as a "constant companion" by Carl Jung whose psychological theories tend to unite scientific logic with mysticism. It was also used by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner as the basis for understanding the nature of the psychedelic experience.

The bardo states are accessible to everyone. Yet there is a subtle process involved in attaining all higher states of consciousness -- a kind of trying not to try -- which is embodied most clearly in the life of Tibet's great saint, Milarepa, who never uttered a word that did not come out in song and poetry. This delicacy of living is manifest also in Chinese Taoism.

Every culture has a set of beliefs regarding the afterlife. Some of the most interesting are those developed by scientists themselves.
 

The Visions of Gustav Theodore Fechner

The great psychophysicist Gustav Theodore Fechher -- one of the foremost instigators of modern, scientific psychology -- wrote extensive speculations in a work called the Book of Life After Death which G. Stanley Hall describes thus:

How now do the dead live on? First and chiefly in us. Fechner takes his leading concept from the mystic way in which Christ lives in his followers, who are members of his body and branches of his vine. To this larger life of his in the Church, his earthly career is only a grain of mustard seed. Gloriously his soul has gone marching on. Just so the dead press in upon us, yearning to add their strength to ours, for thus they not merely live, but grow. New impulsions and sudden insights in us are inspirations from them. Not only do the great and good dead influence and pervade us all the time, but we are exposed also to the bad. Many of them are always bad, and so if our will is weak and our personality unorganized, they may dominate us. Their visitation is insistent. They do not crave incarnation in the flesh, like Plato's spirits, but in our moral life, that therein they may be made perfect. We all have in us sparks from the lives of Luther, Goethe, Napoleon, etc., who think and act in us "no longer restrained by the limitations of the body, but poured forth upon the world which in their lifetime they moulded, gladdened, swayed, and by their personality they now supply us with influences which we never discern as coming from them." Each great dead soul extends itself into man and unites them in a spiritual organism. Thus, the dead converse wit each other in us. They also fight the good and bad in each other in us, causing strife in our souls....

There is, however, a higher soul in which we and all things live, move, and have our being, and in which and only in which spirits are real. We are, in fact, what we have become. The brain is a kind of seed which decays that the soul may live. The individual soul may mount on the collective souls of the dead as a sparrow is carried up on an eagle's back to heights it never could attain, but, when there, can fly off and even a little higher. At death the soul seems to drop below a threshold and the spark of consciousness might be conceived to go out but for the fact that the soul is not projected into an empty world but into one where it incessantly meets varying resistances that keep personality above the point of submergence or any other extinction without appeal to the conservation of energy. Just as attention moves about from point to point within the body, so after death the soul moves around the world.

Spiritualism

Spiritualism as a social movement apparently began in the small New York town of Hydesville in March of 1848, where several months earlier, the Fox family had taken over an old farmhouse about which the previous tenants had complained of strange noises. The Foxes themselves soon noticed unusual rapping sounds that occurred in the night frightening the two younger daughters, Margaret and Kate, who then insisted on sleeping with their parents. On the fateful evening of March 31, the youngest daughter Kate playfully challenged the raps to repeat the snapping of her fingers. Her challenge was answered. Within hours many of the neighbors were brought over to the house to witness the uncanny demonstration.

By asking the sounds be repeated twice for a negative answer and only once for an affirmative, the people assembled were soon able to carry on a `(!logue with the rapping -- which had revealed itself to apparently be coming from a spirit source. One of the neighbors, Deusler, suggested naming the letters of the alphabet and having the spirit rap when they reached certain letters in order to spell out letters and sentences. In this way the spirit revealed himself to have been a travelling peddler who was murdered in the house by a previous owner and buried in the cellar. Digging commenced, however a high water level prevented any immediate discoveries.

Meanwhile, hundreds of neighbors continued visiting the Fox house, day and night, listening to the spirit's rapping. They also formed an investigation committee to take testimony. The case was even studied by the Honorable Robert Dale Owen, a member of the U. S. Congress, and a founder of the Smithsonian Institute. In the summer of 1848, more digging unearthed human teeth, some fragments of bone and some human hair.

While the testimony is ambiguous, some neighbors reported that the raps continued in the Fox house even when family members were not present. However, it became apparent that this form of mediumship centered on the Fox sisters, though it soon spread to many other people as well.

Fifty-six years later in 1904, the gradual disintegration of one of the cellar walls of the Fox house exposed to view an entire human skeleton.

Other mediums, using the alphabet method, also claimed to be in contact with the spirits of the deceased. Their messages were generally not reliable however. It seems that for every apparently genuine medium there were many deluded or phony imitators.

During November 1849, the Spiritualists held their first public meeting in the largest hall available in Rochester, N.Y. Three different citizen's committees in Rochester were invited to investigate the Fox sisters. All three made favorable reports indicating that the sounds heard were not produced by ventriloquism or machinery. The public was outraged at these reports. A riot resulted and the girls had to be smuggled away from an angry crowd.

The Fox sisters made a career of their mediumship. They toured the country under the auspices of the showman, P. T. Barnum. While receiving the sympathetic attention of Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who later became a candidate for the U.S. presidency, the sisters remained a center of controversy. In 1871, Charles F. Livermore, a prominent New York banker, sent Kate Fox to England in gratitude for the consolation he had received through her powers.104 At that time she was examined by the physicist Sir William Crookes, who later received the Nobel prize for his discovery of thalium:

For several months I have enjoyed the almost unlimited opportunity of testing the various phenomena occurring in the presence of this lady, and I especially examined the phenomena of these sounds. With mediums, generally, it is necessary to sit for a formal seance before anything is heard; but in the case of Miss Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree -- on a sheet of glass -- on a stretched iron wire -- on a stretched membrane -- a tambourine -- on the roof of a cab -- and on the floor of a theatre. Moreover, actual contact is not always necessary; I have had these sounds proceeding from the floor, walls, etc., when the medium's hands and feet were held when she was standing on a chair when she was suspended in a swing from the ceiling -- when she was enclosed in a wire cage -- and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa. I have heard them on a glass hermonicon -- I have felt them on my own shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard them on a sheet of paper, held between the fingers by a piece of thread passed through one corner. With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means.

Nevertheless, in 1888, Margaret Fox made a public statement denouncing the spiritualists, claiming that she had made the noises by cracking her toes. Kate, who was with her at the time remained silent, as if in agreement. The following year, however, Margaret recanted, saying she had fallen under the influence of people who were inimical to spiritualism and who had offered her money. Both sisters were alcoholics at this time. At no time in their careers were they actually detected in a fraudulent act.

Crookes also recorded an experience of direct writing with Ms. Fox:

A luminous hand came down from the upper part of the room, and after hovering near me for a few seconds, took the pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, gradually fading into darkness.

The Spiritism of Allan Kardec

From the ranks of the spiritualists investigations were also conducted, although along somewhat different lines than the experimental work of the scientists. The former attempted to describe the world according to the teachings of the spirits themselves. This theorization of spiritualism was mainly due to L. H. D. Rivail (1803-1869) a doctor of medicine who became celebrated under the pseudonym Allan Kardec.

Kardec's theories were simple enough: After death the soul becomes a spirit and seeks reincarnation, which, as Pythagoras taught, is the destiny of all human souls; spirits know the past, present, and future; sometimes they can materialize and act on matter. We should let ourselves be guided by good spirits, Kardec maintained, and refuse to listen to bad spirits.

Kardec wrote many books which achieved enormous popularity in his own lifetime. His works also spread to Brazil, where he still has a huge following, and where postage stamps were recently issued in his honor. His intellectual energy certainly deserves admiration. However, he built his theory on the untenable hypothesis that mediums, embodying a so-called spirit, are never mistaken, unless their utterances are prompted by evil spirits. This notion does not of course, take into account the possi-bilities of suggestion, multiple personality, or unconscious influences which were quickly developed as alternative hypotheses to outright fraud by skeptical scientific investigators such as Michael Faraday.
 

Founding of the Society for Psychical Research

Sir William F. Barrett, a professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, had been conducting experiments in the 1880s testing the notion of thought-transference. Barrett conceived of the idea of forming an organization of spiritualists, scientists, and scholars who would join forces in a dispassionate investigation of psychical phenomena. F.W.H. Myers, Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgewick attended a conference in London that Barrett convened, and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was created with Sidgewick, who had a reputation as an impartial scholar, accepting the first presidency.

The Society set up six working committees, each with a specific domain for exploration:

1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, apart from any generally recognized mode of perception.

2. The study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain; clairvoyance and other allied phenomena.

3. A critical revision of Reichenbach's researches with certain organizations called "sensitive," and an inquiry whether such organizations possess any power of perception beyond a highly exalted sensibility of the recognized sensory organs.

4. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death, or otherwise, or regarding disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted.

5. An inquiry into the various physical phenomena commonly called spiritualistic; with an attempt to discover their causes and general laws.

6. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects.

The evidence for life beyond death comes from several sources. There are cases of hauntings and apparitions, mediumistic communications and automatic writings, possessions, incidences of child prodigies, and ostensible reincarnation data. A large amount of this evidence was gathered during the heyday of spiritualism in the nineteenth century, and is recorded in The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by F. W. H. Myers. Modern research places a much greater emphasis on laboratory studies and is predicated upon a much different approach to the evidence.

Many levels of the human personality clearly exist and are still generally unexplored and untapped. Yet a number of cases can be cited where even such explanations do not account for all the observed phenomena.
 

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

Many other phenomena were explored by the SPR during its early years. The major attempt to synthesize the great mass of data which had been gathered was undertaken by Frederick Myers and published in 1903 after his death in a work called The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Myers was widely read in all the fields of knowledge of his day. His work is a testimony to his wide-reaching and poetical mind and his deep interest in the work of the psychoanalysts. He was, in fact, the first writer to introduce the works of Freud to the British public, in 1893. His book is still regarded by many as the most important single work in the history of psychical research. Even those who do not accept his hypothesis of the survival of the soul are indebted to his explorations of the unconscious and subliminal regions of the personality.

Myers maintained that the human personality was composed of two active coherent streams of thoughts and feelings. Those lying above the ordinary threshold of consciousness were considered supraliminal while those that remain submerged beneath consciousness are subliminal. The evidence for the existence of this subliminal self derives from such phenomena as automatic writing, multiple personalities, dreams, and hypnosis. These phenomena all expose deeper layers of the personality that normally remain unseen. In many cases the deeper layers seem autonomous and independent of the supraliminal self. For example, certain memories are uncovered through hypnosis and dreams which are normally inaccessible to the conscious mind. Or in the case of certain people of genius, complete works of art will emerge from dreams. Automatic writers can sometimes maintain two conversations at once, each unaware of the other one.

Myers examined all of these phenomena carefully and felt that they were part of a continuum ranging from unusual personality manifestations to telepathic communications, travelling clairvoyance, possession by spirits, and actual survival of the subliminal layers of personality after the death of the body. He felt each experience in this spectrum was integrally related to the other states of being. This insight was his deepest theoretical penetration into the roots of consciousness.

Myers began his analysis by looking at the ways in which the personality was known to disintegrate. Insistent ideas, obsessing thoughts and forgotten terrors lead up to hysterical neuroses in which the subliminal mind takes over certain body functions from the supraliminal. Gradually these maladies merge with cases of multiple personalities. He noted the subliminal personalities often represented an improvement over the normal conscious self, and suggested that:

As the hysteric stands in relation to ordinary men, so do we ordinary men stand in relation to a not impossible ideal of sanity and integration.

In addition to people of genius, Myers included saintly men and women whose lives have absorbed "strength and grace from an accessible and inexhaustible source."

From neurosis, genius and sainthood Myers moved to a state of being all individuals experience -- sleep, which he describes as the abeyance of the supraliminal life and the liberation of the subliminal. The powers of visualization, for instance, are heightened during the hypnogogic state as one passes into sleep and in the hypnopompic state as the dream lingers into waking consciousness. Myers also discerned the heightened powers of memory and reason that occur in some dreams, and further cases of clairvoyance and telepathy in dreams. And he cited cases of what seem to be "psychical invasions" in dreams by spirits of both living and departed persons. He concluded by suggesting that sleep is every person's gate to the "spiritual world."

Hypnosis was described as the experimental exploration of the sleep phase of human personality. The unusual phenomena that occur in hypnosis were ascribed to the power of the subliminal self that is appealed to in such states. The subliminal self appears to enjoy greater control over the body than the supraliminal. Myers also pointed out the relationship of hypnosis to other phenomena such as faith healing, the miraculous cures at Lourdes, and the use of magical charms. He emphasized the experimental work done in telepathic hypnotic induction at a distance as well as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition observed in the hypnotized subject.

From hypnosis Myers moved to visual and auditory hallucinations psychical researchers have labelled sensory automatisms. When hearing a sound or seeing a color or form carries with it an association of images from another sense, this process is within the brain and is termed entencephalic. The stages leading from such percepts to ordinary vision include entoptic impressions due to stimuli from the optic nerve or eye and after-images which are formed in the retina. Stages leading further inward from entencephalic vision include memory images, dreams, images of the imagination and hallucinations. Many hallucinations cited were shown to contain information that was later verified. Other hallucinations clearly seemed to hold positive benefits for the personality and were not associated in any way with disease. Crystal gazing is a possible positive use of the mind's ability to hallucinate. Other hallucinations include the phantasms of the living and the dead which we have already discussed.

From sensory automatisms Myers moved to motor automatisms -- including automatic writing and speaking in tongues. Most of these phenomena can be attributed to the subliminal mind within the automatist's own brain. Other cases lead one to suspect telepathy and possible communication from deceased spirits. There are cases of automatic writing, for example, in which the handwriting of a deceased person is alleged. A further development of this would be possession by another personality other than the subliminal self. However, it is very difficult to distinguish cases of spirit possession from cases of multiple personality. The personal identity of such a spirit must be clearly distinguished by its memory and its character. Yet this is a phenomena common to all religious traditions that has also been observed at least once, Myers felt, by SPR researchers. He noted that such possession did not appear to have an injurious effect on the medium.

It is on the basis of this continuum of experiences that Myers asserted the subliminal self is able to operate free from the brain in ways that modify both space and time as they appear to the supraliminal self. Just as the subliminal self is able to control physiological functions of the brain and body, as best exemplified through hypnotic experiments, so is it able to exert force on other physical objects accounting for levitations, materializations, spirit rapping, etc.
 

The Watseka Wonder

The case of the Watseka Wonder is listed by Myers as an incidence of multiple personality strongly suggesting the spiritualist hypothesis. It was originally published in the Religio-Philosophical Journal in 1879 and later in pamphlet form with the title "The Watseka Wonder," by E. W. Stevens. The editor of the journal, highly regarded as a skillful and honest investigator by Myers, spoke highly of Dr. Stevens and claimed to have taken great pains to "obtain full corroboration of the astounding facts" from competent witnesses. The case briefly is the alleged possession of thirteen year old Lurancy Vennum by the spirit of Mary Roff, a neighbor's daughter who had died at the age of eighteen when Lurancy was a child of about fifteen months.

Myers quotes Dr. Stevens, with his abridgements in square brackets:

[Mary Lurancy Vennum, the "Watseka Wonder," was born April 16th, 1864, in Milford township, about seven miles from Watseka, Illinois. The family moved to Iowa in July 1864 (when Lurancy was about three months old), and returned to within eight miles from Watseka in October 1865 (three months after the death of Mary Roff). Lurancy was then about a year and a half old. After two other moves in the neighbourhood, the family moved into Watseka on April 1st, 1871], locating about forty rods from the residence of A. B. Roff. They remained at this place during the summer. The only acquaintance ever had between the two families during the season was simply one brief call of Mrs. Roff, for a few minutes, on Mrs. Vennum, which call was never returned, and a formal speaking acquaintance between the two gentlemen. Since 1871 the Vennum family have lived entirely away from the vicinity of Mr. Roff's, and never nearer than now, on extreme opposite limits of the city.

"Rancy," as she is familiarly called, had never been sick, save a light run of measles in 1873.

[On July 11th, 1877, she had a sort of fit, and was unconscious for five hours. Next day the fit recurred, but while lying as if dead she described her sensations to her family, declaring that she could see heaven and the angels, and a little brother and sister and others who had died. The fits or trances, occasionally passing into ecstasy, when she claimed to be in heaven, occurred several times a day up to the end of January 1878; she was generally believed to be insane, and most friends of the family urged that she should be sent to an insane asylum.

At this stage Mr. and Mrs. Asa B. Roff, whose daughter, Mary Roff, as we shall see, had had periods of insanity, persuaded Mr. Vennum to allow him to bring Dr. E. W. Stevens of Janesville, Wisconsin, to investigate the case.]

On the afternoon of January 31st, 1878, the two gentlemen repaired to Mr. Vennum's residence, a little out of the city. Dr. Stevens, an entire stranger to the family, was introduced by Mr. Roff at four o'clock P.M.; no other persons present but the family. The girl sat near the stove, in a common chair, her elbows on her knees, her hands under her chin, feet curled up on the chair, eyes staring, looking every like an "ol` hag." She refuses to be touched, even to shake hands, and was reticent and sullen with all save the doctor, with whom she entered freely into conversation giving her reasons for doing so; she said he was a spiritual doctor, and would understand her.

[She described herself first as an old woman named Katrina Hogan, and then as a young man named Willie Canning, and after some insane conversation had another fit, which Dr. Stevens relieved by hypnotizing her. She then became calm, and said that she had been controlled by evil spirits. Dr. Stevens suggested that she should try to have a better control, and encouraged her to try and find one. She then mentioned the names of several deceased persons, saying there was one who wanted to come, named Mary Roff.

Mr. Roff being present, said: "That is my daughter; Mary Roff is my girl. Why, she has been in heaven twelve years. Yes, let her come, we'll be glad to have her come." Mr. Roff assured Lurancy that Mary was good and intelligent, and would help her all she could; stating further that Mary used to be subject to conditions like herself. Lurancy, after due deliberation and counsel with spirits, said that Mary would take the place of the former wild and unreasonable influence. Mr. Roff said to her, "Have your mother bring you to my house, and Mary will be likely to come along, and a mutual benefit may be derived from our former experience with Mary."

[On the following morning, Friday, February 1st, Mr. Vennum called at the office of Mr. Roff and informed him that the girl claimed to be Mary Roff, and wanted to go home. He said, "She seems like a child real homesick, wanting to see her pa and ma and her brothers."

Mary Roff was born in Indiana in October 1846. Mary had had fits frequently from the age of six months, which gradually increased in violence. She had also had periods of despondency, in one of which, in July 1864, she cut her arm with a knife until she fainted. Five days of raving mania followed, after which she recognized no one, and seemed to lose all her natural senses, but when blindfolded could read and do everything as if she saw. After a few days she returned to her normal condition, but the fits became still worse, and she died in one of them in July 1865. Her mysterious illness had made her notorious in the neighbourhood during her life-time, and her putting his own aballeged clairvoyant powers are said to have been carefully investigated "by all the prominent citizens of Watseka, including newspaper editors and clergymen.

It was in February 1878 that her supposed "control" of Lurancy began. The girl then became mild, docile, polite, and timid, knowing none of the family, but constantly pleading to go home," and "only found contentment in going back to heaven, as she said, for short visits."]

About a week after she took control of the body, Mrs. A. B. Roff and her daughter, Mrs. Minerva Alter, Mary's sister, hearing of the remarkable change, went to see the girl. As they came in sight, far down the street, Mary, looking out of the window, exclaimed exultantly, "There comes my ma and sister Nervie!" -- the name by which Mary used to call Mrs. Alter in girlhood. As they came into the house she caught them around their necks, wept and cried for joy, and seemed so happy to meet them. From this time on she seemed more homesick than before. At times she seemed almost frantic to go home.

On the 11th day of February, 1878, they sent the girl to Mr. Roff's, where she met her "pa and ma," and each member of the family, with the most gratifying expressions of love and affection, by words and embraces. On being asked how long she would stay, she said, "The angels will let me stay till some time in May;"...

The girl now in her new home seemed perfectly happy and content, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and calling by name those who were friends and neighbours of the family from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period of her sojourn at Mr. Roff's she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or neighbours, yet Mr. and Mrs. Vennum and their children visited her and Mr. Roff's people, she being introduced to them as to any strangers. After frequent visits, and hearing them often and favourably spoken of, she learned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with Mrs. Roff three times.

One day she met an old friend and neighbour of Mr. Roff's, who was a widow when Mary was a girl at home. Some years since the lady married a Mr. Wagoner, with whom she yet lives. But when she met Mrs. Wagoner she clasped her around the neck and said, "0 Mary Lord, you look so very natural, and have changed the least of any one I have seen since I came back." Mrs. Lord was in some way related to the Vennum family, and lived close by them, but Mary could only call her by the name by which she knew her fifteen years ago, and could not seem to realize that she was married. Mrs. Lord lived just across the street from Mr. Roff's for several years, prior and up to within a few months of Mary's death; both being members of the same Methodist church, they were very intimate.

One evening, in the latter part of March, Mr. Roff was sitting in the room waiting for tea, and reading the paper, Mary being out in the yard. He asked Mrs. Roff if she could find a certain velvet head-dress that Mary used to wear the last year before she died. If so, to lay it on the stand and say nothing about it, to see if Mary would recognize it. Mrs. Roff readily found and laid it on the stand. The girl soon came in, and immediately exclaimed as she approached the stand, "Oh, there is my head-dress I wore when my hair was short!" She then asked, "Ma, where is my box of letters? Have you got them yet?" Mrs. Roff replied, "Yes, Mary, I have some of them." She at once got the box with many letters in it. As Mary began to examine them she said, "Oh, ma, here is a collar I tatted! Ma, why did you not show to me my letters and things before?" The collar had been preserved among the relics of the lamented child as one of the beautiful things her fingers had wrought before Lurancy was born, and so Mary continually recognized every little thing and remembered every little incident of her girl-hood....

In conversation with the writer about her former life, she spoke of cutting her arm as hereinbefore stated, and asked if he ever saw where she did it. On receiving a negative answer, she proceeded to slip up her sleeve as if to exhibit the scar, but suddenly arrested the movement, as if by a sudden thought, and quickly said, "Oh, this is not the arm; that one is in the ground," and proceeded to tell where it was buried, and how she saw it done, and who stood around, how they felt, &c., but she did not feel bad. I heard her tell Mr. Roff and the friends present, how she wrote to him a message some years ago through the hand of a medium, giving name, time, and place. Also of rapping and of spelling out a message by another medium, giving time, name, place, &c., &c. which the parents admitted to be all true....

During her stay at Mr. Roff's her physical condition continually improved, being under the care and treatment of her supposed parents and the advice and help of her physician. She was ever obedient to the government and rules of the family, like a careful and wise child, always keeping in the company of some of the family, unless to go in to the nearest neighbours across the street. She was often invited and went with Mrs. Roff to visit the first families of the city, who soon became satisfied that the girl was not crazy, but a fine, well-mannered child.

As the time drew near for the restoration of Lurancy to her parents and home, Mary would sometimes seem to recede into the memory and manner of Lurancy for a little time, yet not enough to lose her identity or permit the manifestation of Lurancy's mind, but enough to show she was impressing her presence upon her own body.

[On May 19th, in the presence of Henry Vennum, Lurancy's brother, Mary left control for a time, and "Lurancy took full possession of her own bod recognizing Henry as her brother. The change of control occurred again when Mrs. Vennum came to see her the same day.]

On the morning of May 21st Mr. Roff writes as follows: -- 

"Mary is to leave the body of Rancy to-day, about eleven o'clock, so she says. She is bidding neighbours and friends good-bye. Rancy to return home all right to-day. Mary came from her room upstairs, where she was sleeping with Lottie, at ten o'clock last night, lay down by us, hugged and kissed us, and cried because she must bid us good-bye, telling us to give all her pictures, marbles, and cards, and twenty-five cents Mrs. Vennum had given her to Rancy, and had us promise to visit Rancy often."

[Mary arranged that her sister, Mrs. Alter, should come to the house to say good-bye to her, and that when Lurancy came at eleven o'clock she should take her to Mr. Roff's office, and he would go to Mr. Vennum's with her. There was some alternation of the control on the way, but the final return of the normal Lurancy Vennum took place before they reached Mr. Roff's office, and on arriving at her own home she recognized all the members of her own family as such, and was perfectly well and happy in her own surroundings. A few days later, on meeting Dr. Stevens, under whose care she had been at Mr. Roff's house, she had to be introduced to him as an entire stranger, and treated him as such. The next day she came to him spontaneously, saying Mary Roff had told her to come and meet him, and had made her feel he had been a very kind friend to her, and she gave him a long message purporting to be from Mary.

I have no doubt that the incidents occurred substantially as described in the narrative by Dr. Stevens, and in my view the only other inter-pretation of the case -- besides the spiritistic -- that seems at all plausible is that which has been put forward as the alternative to the spiritistic theory to account for the trance-communications of Mrs. Piper and similar cases, viz., secondary personality with supernormal powers. It would be difficult to disprove this hypothesis in the case of the Watseka Wonder, owing to the comparative meagreness of the record and the probable abundance of "suggestion" in the environment, and any conclusion that we may reach would probably be determined largely by our convictions concerning other cases. My personal opinion is that the "Watseka Wonder" case belongs in the main manifestations to the spiritistic category.

Apparitions and Hauntings

Working as honorary secretary of the SPR and active on the literary committee, Edmund Gurney soon discovered that the largest single class of occurrences reported were what came to be labelled crisis apparitions. These occur when the figure or the voice of a living person who is experiencing a crisis--such as an accident or a death--is seen or heard.

Probably you or your friends have had such experiences, that are strangely confirmed by the news, later on, of the actual crisis.

Within one year of its organization, the SPR had collected over 400 reports of such cases and in 1886, Gurney published a 1,300 page document entitled Phantasms of the Living in which 702 different apparition cases were analyzed. All of the evidence was obtained first-hand from the percipients and was generally backed by corroboratory testimony. Witnesses were also interviewed by SPR members who appraised the value of all testimony.

Gurney described several categories of apparition cases. These are cases of spontaneous telepathy, which occur when the sender is undergoing some shock or strong emotion. For example a lady lying in bed may feel a pain in her mouth at the exact moment when her husband is accidently struck in the jaw. Then come cases where the percipient's experience is not an exact reproduction of the agent's experience, but is only founded upon it, the receiver building a detailed picture from his or her own mind. There are many cases of this type where a person about to arrive at a location is actually seen there by someone not expecting him before his arrival. It is very unlikely that the agent will have in his mind the image of himself as others see him. Finally Gurney refers to the cases in which the agent may be dead or dying while the phantom appears in quite normal behavior and clothing.

Gurney felt that these cases could be explained as hallucinations induced in the mind of the percipient by means of a telepathic message from the agent. What was harder to explain were collective apparitions in which several people independently perceive the identical phantom. There were also reciprocal cases whereby a person imagining himself to be at a distant scene is actually seen at that location by others. 

Phantasms of the Living was soon criticized by the eminent American philosopher C. S. Pierce and several others on the grounds that the cases reported did not meet sufficient conditions to be acceptable as evidence. Most of these critical individuals simply did not read the entire book. Their criticisms focused on the weakest cases and overlooked certain cases that were very well documented in all regards. However, Gurney felt that if only a few single cases were strongly evidential, the conclusions for crisis telepathy were inescapable. He stressed the extent to which the skeptical arguments would have to be pushed in order to dismiss the entire bundle of data:

Not only have we to assume such an extent of forgetfulness and inaccuracy, about simple and striking facts of the immediate past, as is totally unexampled in any other range of experience. Not only have we to assume that distressing or exciting news about another person produces a havoc in the memory that has never been noted in connection with stress or excitement in any other form. We must leave this merely general ground, and make suppositions as detailed as the evidence itself. We must suppose that some people have a way of dating their letters in indifference to the calendar, or making entries in their diaries on the wrong page and never discovering the error; and that whole families have been struck by the collective hallucination that one of their members had made a particular remark, the substance of which had never entered that members head; and that it is a recognized custom to write mournful letters about bereavements which have never occurred; and that when a wife interrupts her husband's slumber with words of distress or alarm, it is only for fun, or a sudden morbid craving for underserved sympathy; and that when people assert that they were in sound health, in good spirits, and wide-awake, at a particular time which they had occasion to note, it is a safe conclusion that they were having a nightmare, or were the prostrate victims of nervous hypochondria. Every one of these improbabilities is perhaps, in itself a possibility; but as the narratives drive us from one desperate expedient to another, when time after time we are compelled to own that deliberate falsification is less unlikely than the assumptions we are making, and then again when we submit the theory of deliberate falsification to the cumulative test, and see what is involved in the supposition that hundreds of persons of established character, known to us for the most part and unknown to one another, have simultaneously formed a plot to deceive us -- there comes a point where reason rebels.

Phantasms of the Living did not deal with apparitions of persons who had been dead for more than twelve hours. However,according to an article published by Mrs. Eleanor Sidgewick, the society had some 370 cases in its files "which believers of ghosts would be apt to attribute to agency of deceased human beings." While the majority of these cases might be dismissed as hallucinations, there were four types of cases that did seem to support the notion that some aspect of personality survives death.

1. Cases in which the apparition conveyed to the percipient accurate information that was previously unknown to him.

2. Cases in which the "ghost" seemed to be pursuing some well-defined objective. The spirit of Hamlet's father who makes Hamlet swear to seek revenge for his murder is a famous literary example of this.

3. Cases in which the phantom bears a strong resemblance to a deceased person who is unknown to the percipient at the time of the manifestation. A case of this sort, incidentally, recently made headlines in the Berkeley Gazette, as the phantom was observed in the Faculty Club of the University of California

4. Cases in which two or more people had independently seen similar apparitions: Into this category falls your typical haunting ghost or apparitions associated with a particular location. Often such phantoms are seen by individuals who are ignorant of previous sightings. These phantoms rarely seem to speak or take notice of humans, although voices and noises may be associated with them, and they are generally not seen for more than a minute before they vanish.

Apparitions and personal experiences of seeing the dead still occur and there is a great need for people to feel comfortable discussing them openly. The following article with a front-page headline appeared in the Berkeley Gazette on March 19, 1974. The reason for the headline was not that this experience with a phantom was unusual; but rather that it was uncommon -- and commendable -- for a person of professional standing in the community to speak so directly about his experiences.

Dr. Noriyuki Tokuda did not believe in ghosts until he encountered some recently in his room at the Faculty Club on the University of California campus here.

The visiting Japanese scholar, described by a local friend as "an intelligent, rational man," had no pat explanation to give for what he saw the evening of March 9.

In a half-somnolent state, he recalls, he saw a "very gentlemanly" looking Caucasian man, sitting on a chair and peering at him. As Dr. Tokuda shook out of his sleep, he next saw "something like two heads, floating, flying high across the room."

A moment later the apparitions had vanished.

LATER, WHEN Dr. Tokuda told club personnel about his unsettling experience, they told him the room in which he was staying had been occupied for 36 years by a University of California professor who died two years and a week BEfore Tokuda checked into the room.

Officials described the professor. To Tokuda, there seemed to he a resemblance.

Tokuda says he, his wife and children lived in Berkeley from 1967 to 1969. "I love Berkeley very much." Given this feeling, he discounts any possibility of his vision being engendered by being in a strange place.

HE RECALLS what happened:

"On March 9 I flew to Berkeley from Boston. Prof. Chalmers Johnson of the political science department took me from the airport to the faculty club. He advised me to take a short nap because of the three hour gap in time. I was tired, so I took a nap."

"At 7 p.m., while sleeping, l had a funny impression -- felt some kind of psychological pressure. I was almost awake. I saw something in my dream. I felt some old gentleman -- Western, white -- sitting on the chair by the bed, watching quietly. It was quite strange.

"I opened my eyes then and saw a funny picture -- two heads with a body passing out of my sight and disappearing."

WITH THAT Dr. Tokuda opened his eyes very wide and saw nothing strange. "1 was surprised. Maybe it was a dream or a fantasy. I went out to dinner, came back and slept. 1 wasn't visited again."

After a trip to Stanford, Dr. Tokuda returned to the faculty club. By then he had told his strange story to his friends, Prof. Chalmers Johnson and his wife Sheila. They insured that he did not get Room 19 during the second stay.

When Tokuda checked out of the club yesterday, an official there told him his former room had for 36 years been the home of a solitary professor who died (not in the room) in March 1971.

"YOU'RE KIDDING me. Don't scare me," Tokuda responded.

"I cannot believe in ghosts," says Tokuda, a political scientist specializing in modern China.

But still, he smiled and said: "I think perhaps Prof. X still likes to live there and doesn't want to leave."

Tokuda, 42, is senior researcher and chairman of East Asian studies at the Institute of Developing Countries in Tokyo. He teaches at Keio University in Japan's capital.

"We have lots of ghost stories in Japan, too," the scholar says, "but I have never been so serious about it except when I was a child."

(1) Both figures would stand out in space and be equally solid.

(2) We could walk around the apparition and view it from any perspective as vividly as the normal individual.

(3) The two figures would appear the same in any sort of lighting conditions, whether good or bad.

(4) On approaching the apparition, one could hear it breathing and making other normal noises, such as the rustling of its clothes.

(5) The apparition would behave as if aware of our presence. It might even touch us, in which case it would feel like an ordinary human touch.

(6) The apparition could be seen reflected in a mirror just as a real person.

(7) The apparition might speak and even answer a question, but we would not be able to engage it in any long conversation.

(8) If we closed our eyes, the apparition would disappear from view just as the ordinary person would.

(9) The apparition would appear clothed and with other normal accessories such as a stick or a package, perhaps even accompanied by a dog.

(10) Many times, when close to, or touched by, the apparition, we would feel an unusual sensation of coldness.

(11) If we tried to grab hold of the apparition, our hand would go through it without encountering any resistance. The apparition may disappear when cornered in this fashion.

(12) The apparition would generally not remain more than half an hour. It might vanish through the walls or floor. Or it might simply open the door and walk out.

(13) Apparitions differ in the extent to which they are able to actually effect physical objects, open doors, cast a shadow, be photographed. The "perfect apparition" cannot really cause any objectively measurable effects, although it may cause the subjective appearance of doing so.

Collective cases of this sort account for approximately eight percent of the total number of reported apparitions. Naturally, many times only one person is present to see the phantom. Collective cases are more common when several potential observers are present. In a group situation, if one person sees an apparition, there is about a forty percent likelihood that others will share his perception.

However, even collective cases of apparitions of a person known to be dead do not provide certain evidence for survival. The research on out-of-body experiences suggests that it may be possible for one to cause one's own apparition to appear to others. Likewise, there is evidence an individual, through concentration, can create the apparitional appearance of a different person as well. Such experiments were documented in 1822 by H. M. Wesermann, who was the Government Assessor and Chief Inspector of Roads at Dusseldorf. The account of the appearance is recorded by one of the percipients, a Lieutenant S. He says Herr n had come to spend the night at his lodgings.

After supper and when we had undressed, I was sitting on my bed and Herr n was standing by the door of the next room on the point also of going to bed. This about half-past ten. We were speaking partly about indifferent subjects and partly about the events of the French campaign. Suddenly the door out of the kitchen opened without a sound, and a lady entered, very pale, taller than Herr n, about five foot four inches in height, strong and broad in figure, dressed in white, but with a large black kerchief which reached down to the waist. She entered with bare head, greeted me with the hand three times in a complimentary fashion, turned around to the left toward Herr n, and waved her hand to him three times; after which the figure quietly, and again without creaking the door, went out. We followed at once in order to discover whether there were any deception, but found nothing.

Wesermann's experiments were conducted at a time when many researchers, including the French government commission, were reporting unusual effects with Mesmerism. Wesermann himself acknowledged that the successful production of such a phantom was, indeed, a rare event. 

The point of such evidence is that the human mind seems capable of generating apparitional appearances identical to those often attributed to "departed spirits." However, in nearly all apparitions, there is no living individual attempting to create the appearance. It is unlikely that most apparitions were consciously created although they may have been unconscious human productions.

Furthermore, even if an apparition results from efforts by a once-living person, the apparition itself is not yet evidence of a fully conscious disembodied spirit. Such phenomena may well be mere images or thought-forms hanging around in the psychic space. Very rarely do they show the characteristics of a well-developed personality, even though they exhibit some independent consciousness. The apparition evidence suggests we are continually swimming in a sea of thoughts and images that exist independently of our own minds and that occasionally intrude dramatically into our conscious awareness.
 

Near Death Experiences

Some interesting data relating apparitions to survival appears in a survey of physicians' and nurses' observations of dying patients. The 640 respondents to the survey, conducted by Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research, had witnessed over 35,000 incidents of human death. 

Of these, only about ten percent of the patients were conscious in their last hours. These dying individuals often experienced states of exultation or hallucination that could not be attributAd to the nature of their illness, or to drug usage. While many patients had visions of spiritual worlds opening up to them in accordance with their particular religious beliefs, most of the hallucinations were of individuals already dead. Half of the percipients stated the apparitions were coming to help them "enter the other world." The education, age or sex of the patients seemed to have nothing to do with the manifestation of such apparitions. However the apparitions seemed most likely when the dying patient was in a state of physiological and psychological peace and equilibrium. Oddly enough a number of these apparitions were of individuals whose death was unknown to the dying patient.

Dr. Raymond Moody, is a psychiatrist whose classic book, Life After Life, published in 1976, was a major impetus for a new wave of research on the phenomenon of near-death experience. A founding member of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, he is a professor of psychology at West Georgia College. He is also author of Reflections on Life After Life and The Light Beyond.

In an InnerWork interview he summarizes his years of investigation into near-death experience:

When patients have a cardiac arrest -- they have no heartbeat, no detectible respiration -- very often their physicians will say something such as, "Oh my God, he's dead, we've lost him." The patients tell us that from their perspective they feel more alive than ever. They say they float up out of their bodies, and they watch the resuscitation going on from a point of view immediately below the ceiling of the operating room. From this perspective they can see exactly what is going on down below. They can understand the remarks and the thoughts of the medical personnel who are around. It does not seem to make any sense to them. 

After a while they realize that although they can see clearly and understand perfectly what is going on, no one seems to be able to see or to hear them. So they undergo an experience in which they realize that this is something to do with what we call death, and at this point they experience what we might characterize as a turning inward of the sense of identity. 

One woman described this to me by saying, "In this experience, at this point, you are not the wife of your husband, you are not the mother of your children, you are not the child of your parents. You are totally and completely you."

And at this point, at this moment of isolation and realizing that this is what we call death, then very unusual, transcendental experiences begin to unfold. I call them transcendental partly because the patients say that these later steps of the near-death experience are absolutely ineffable. Try as they may, they can not find any words to describe the amazing feelings and experiences.

They say they become aware of what is described as a tunnel, a passageway, a portal, and they go into this tunnel, and when they come out, they come out into a very brilliant, warm, loving and accepting light. People at this point describe just amazing feelings of peace and comfort. 

In this light they say that relatives or friends of theirs who have already died seem to be there to help them through this transition. 

Another thing they will often tell us is that at this point they are met by some religious figure. Christians say Christ, Jews say God or an angel. This being, in effect, asks them a question. Communication does not take place through words as you and I are now using, but rather in the form of an immediate awareness: "What have you done with your life? How have you learned to love?"

At this point, they say, they undergo a detailed review of everything they have done in their lives. This is displayed around them in the form of a full-color, three-dimensional panorama, and it involves every detail of their life, they say, from the point of their birth right up to the point of this close call with death.

The people who go through this say that clock time is not a factor in these experiences. Interestingly enough, patients often report that they review the events of their lives from a third-person perspective, displaced out to the side or above. They can also empathetically relate to the people with whom they have interacted.

They take the perspective of the person that they have been unkind to. Accordingly, if they see an action where they have been loving to someone, they can feel the warmth and good feelings that have resulted. The patients who go through this tell us that no one asks them about their financial well-being or how much power they have had. Rather they were faced with the question of how they had learned to love, and whether they had put this love into practice in their lives.

It certainly does not give us scientific evidence in a rigorous sense, or proof, that we live after we die. But I do not mind saying that after talking with over a thousand people who have had these experiences, it has given me great confidence that there is a life after death. As a matter of fact, I must confess to you in all honesty, I have absoutely no doubt, on the basis of what my patients have told me, that they did get a glimpse of the beyond.

It gives them a great sense of peace. Never again do they fear death -- not that any of them would want to die in a painful or unpleasant way, or that they would actively seek this out. As a matter of fact, they all say that life is a great blessing and a wonderful opportunity to learn, and that they do not want to die anytime soon. But what they mean is that when death comes in its natural course of events, they are not going to be afraid. They do not fear it in the least anymore as being a cessation of consciousness.

We see this again and again -- no more fear of death, renewed commitment to loving others, living in the present and not worrying about the future and a great sense of contentment.

Mediumship

The classic line of argumentation for human survival beyond death comes from is based upon cases of spiritualistic mediumship -- an area fraught with fraud and chicanery. Another problem with this type of mediumship was that the information coming spontaneously from the medium might have already been stored in the unconscious memory. What was needed to counter this objection was a medium who could consistently produce accurate information on demand and without advance notice. 
 

Mrs. Piper

Perhaps the best claimant to successful mediumship was Mrs. Leonora E. Piper of Boston, Massachusetts. Her mediumship began spontaneously in 1884, on the occasion of going into a trance during the seance of another medium. At first her controlling spirits rather pretentiously claimed to be Bach and Longfellow. Then appeared a self-styled French doctor who gave the name of Phenuit and spoke in a gruff male voice full of Frenchisms, Negro patois, and vulgar Yankee slang, nevertheless offering successful diagnoses and prescriptions. Often the deceased relatives of the sitters would speak through Mrs. Piper at her seances.

In 1886 William James, the great American psychologist, anonymously attended one of her seances. He was sufficiently impressed with the information that she revealed to him he sent some 25 other people, using pseudonyms, to her. Fifteen of these people reported back to James that they had received from her names and facts it was improbable she should know. In 1886, James issued a report to the SPR:

My own conviction is not evidence, but it seems fitting to record it. I am persuaded of the medium's honesty, and of the genuineness of her trance; and although at first disposed to think that the "hits" she made were either lucky coincidences, or the result of knowledge on her part of who the sitter was and of his or her family affairs, I now believe her to be in the possession of a power as yet unexplained.

The results with Mrs. Piper in England were mixed. On a good day she was able to produce a mass of detailed information about the sitters which generally left them dumbfounded. On a bad day, her control, Phenuit, would behave in a most obnoxious manner, keeping up a constant babble of false assertions and inane conversation, blatantly fishing for information, and generally provoking the sitters. On no occasions was it concluded that Phenuit was anything more than a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper's.

During one seance Mrs. Piper revealed to Sir Oliver Lodge a great deal of information regarding an uncle of his who had been dead for twenty years. Lodge sent an agent to inquire in the neighborhood where the uncle had lived. In three days he was unable to unearth as much information as Mrs. Piper had provided. All of her remarks were eventually verified by surviving relatives.

In 1890 Mrs. Piper returned to the United States where she worked very closely with Richard Hodgson who spent the next fifteen years investigating her mediumship.

Psychiatrist Nandor Fodor gives us a picture of Hodgson's research with Mrs. Piper:

His first report on the Piper phenomena was published in 1892....In it no definite conclusions are announced. Yet, at this time Hodgson had obtained conclusive evidence. But it was of a private character and as he did not include the incident in question in his report, he did not consider it fair to point out its import. As told by Hereward Carrington in The Story of Psychic Science, Hodgson when still a young man in Australia had fallen in love with a girl and wished to marry her. Her parents objected on religious grounds. Hodgson left for England and never married. One day, in a sitting with Mrs. Piper, the girl suddenly communicated, informing Dr. Hodgson that she had died shortly before. This incident, the truth of which was verified, made a deep impression on his mind.

At first Hodgson felt that Mrs. Piper's knowledge came to her telepathically. However, during a sitting in March of 1892 a new controlling spirit came who identified himself as a George Pellew, a prominent young man who had been killed a few weeks earlier and who was casually known to Hodgson. Five years previously he had had one anonymous sitting with Mr Piper. Pellew eventually replaced Phenuit as the main control and as the intermediary between the sitters and the spirits of their deceased friends. This particular control was very realistic and seemed to Hodgson to be more than a mere secondary personality. He showed an intimate knowledge of the affairs of the actual George Pellew, by recognizing and commenting on objects that had belonged to him. Out of 150 sitters who had been introduced to him he recognized exactly those thirty people with whom the living Pellew had been acquainted. He even modified the topics and style of conversation with each of these friends, and showed a remarkable knowledge of their concerns. Very rarely did the Pellew personality slip up.

To credit spiritualism, he based his arguments for this position largely on the fact that a good amount of verified evidence Pellew produced was unknown to anyone in the room at that time, and therefore could not have been picked up telepathically by any of the sitters.

In 1897, Hodgson published a report on Mrs. Piper in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research:

At the present time I cannot profess to have any doubt that the chief communicators to whom I have referred in the foregoing pages are veritably the personages that they claim to be, and that they have survived the change that we call death, and that they have directly communicated with us whom we call living, through Mrs. Piper's entranced organism.

Eventually several other spirits seemed to take control over Mrs. Piper's mediumship including that of the departed Reverend Stainton Moses. 

In the presence of William James, America's foremost psychologist, the "Hodgson control" was able to describe incidents that Hodgson and James had intimately experienced together in life and were unknown to other individuals. The personality was quite clear and distinct. At other times this was not the case and the "spirit" seemed like an obvious personation from Mrs. Piper's mind. In analyzing this data, James suggested several factors were at play:

Extraneous "wills to communicate" may contribute to the results as well as a "will to personate," and the two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, though capable of helping each other out. The will to communicate, in our present instance, would be, on a prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson's surviving spirit; and a natural way of representing the process would be to suppose the spirit to have found that by pressing, so to speak, against "the light," it can make fragmentary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say mix with the rubbish of the trance-talk on this side. The two wills might thus strike up a sort of partnership and reinforce each other. It might even be that the "will to personate" would be comparatively inert unless it were aroused to activity by the other will. We might imagine the relationship to be analogous to that of two physical bodies, from neither of which, when alone, mechanical, electrical or thermal activity can proceed. But, if the other body be present, and show a difference of `potential, action starts up and goes on apace.

I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably there -- that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper's dream-life, even if equipped with telepathic powers, accounts for all the results found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson's, or be some mere spirit counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty or a hundred years.

Cross-Correspondences

One of the more significant cases of mediumistic communication concerns the many messages received by Sir Oliver Lodge from his deceased son Raymond. An eminent physicist, Lodge pioneered in the development of radio technology, which actually was as much his brainchild as it was Marconi's, although he did not pursue its commercial development to the same extent as his Italian colleague. Lodge (an SPR founder) was already satisfied with the evidence for survival which had been gathered by Myers and others before his son's death during a mortar attack on September 14, 1915.

Actually, the story of Raymond's "spirit communications" begins a few weeks before his death, on August 8, when a message allegedly came from the spirit of Myers through Mrs. Piper in America. Hodgson's "spirit" claimed to be in control of the medium at the time he delivered a message for Lodge which he claims to have received from Myers. The enigmatic message stated:

Now Lodge, while we are not here as of old, i.e. not quite, we are here enough to take and give messages. Myers says you take the part of the poet and he will act as Faunus. Yes. Myers. Protect. He will understand. What have you to say, Lodge? Good work. Ask Verrall, she will also understand.

On September 25, Raymond's mother, Mrs. Lodge, attended a sitting with a reputable medium, Mrs. Osborne Leonard. The visit was anonymous, and there was no intention of contacting Raymond; the purpose being, rather, to accompany a grieving friend whose two sons had also been killed in the war. In fact, it seemed as if the spirits of those sons did communicate through Mrs. Leonard. However on that occasion, a message also came through purporting to be from Raymond:

R: Tell father I have met some friends of his.

ML: Can you give any name?

R: Yes. Myers.

...Feda sees something which is only symbolic; she sees a cross falling back on you; very dark, falling on you; dark and heavy looking; and as it falls it gets twisted round and the other side seems all light, and the light is shining all over you....The cross looked dark and then it suddenly twisted around and became a beautiful light....Your son is the cross of light.

That afternoon, after seeing Mrs. Leonard, Lady Lodge visited another medium, separately and strictly anonymously. The following is a transcript of Mrs. Lodge's sitting, with Sir Oliver's own annotations in brackets:

Was he not associated with chemistry? If ng$, someone associated with him was, because I see all the things in a chemical laboratory. That chemistry thing takes me away from him to a man in the flesh [0. J. L., presumably as my laboratory has been rather specially chemical of late]; and connected with him, a man, a writer of poetry, on our side, closely connected with spiritualism. He was very clever he too passed away out of England.

[This is clearly meant for Myers, who died in Rome.]

He has communicated several times. This gentleman who wrote poetry -- I see the letter M--he is helping your son to communicate. If your son didn't know the man he knew of him.

[Yes, he could hardly have known him, as he was only about twelve at the time of Myers' death.]

At the back of the gentleman beginning with M, and who wrote poetry, is a whole group of people. [The SPR group, doubtless.] They are very interested. And don't be surprised if you get messages from them even if you don't know them.

Two days later, Sir Oliver also had a sitting, anonymously, with the same medium and received material from the "spirit control":

Your common-sense method of approaching the subject in the family has been the means of helping him to come back as he has been able to do; and had he not known what you had told him, then it would have been far more difficult for him to come back. He is very deliberate in what he says. He is a young man that knows what he is saying. Do you know F W M?

O. J. L. -- Yes I do.

Because I see those three letters. Now, after them, do you know S T; yes, I get S T, then a dot, and then P? These are shown to me; I see them in light; your boy has shown these things to me.

O. J. L. -- Yes, I understand. [Meaning that I recognized the allusion to F. W. H. Myers poem St. Paul.]

Well he says to me: "He has helped me so much more than you think. That is F W M."

O. J. L. -- Bless him!

No, your boy laughs, he has got an ulterior motive for it; don't think it was only for charity's sake, he has got an ulterior motive, and thinks that you will be able by the strength of your personality to do what you want to do now, to ride over the quibbles of the fools, and to make the Society, the Society, he says, of some use to the world.

Communications from Raymond, filled with evidential material, continued for many years through Mrs. Leonard and also through other mediums. Lodge's entire family participated in these sittings and all became convinced of the reality of Raymond's departed spirit. On one occasion sittings were held simultaneously at two different locations and Raymond successfully managed to convey information from one group to the other. The complete account of these many sittings is recorded in Lodge's book Raymond, published in 1916, which was written to further the cause of spiritualism.

Raymond clearly conveys the excitement which Lodge and his family felt at the time. However Raymond himself never actually seems to control a medium. He either speaks through a "spirit control" or through automatic writing or table-rapping. There was a consistency to his personality, but not with the vividness of the Hodgson or the Pellew controls experienced through Mrs. Piper.

Mrs. Leonard's integrity has never been called into question. For over forty years her mediumship was the subject of exhaustive study by members of the SPR. Throughout this time, Feda was her only "control," although with a few sitters she would sometimes allow other spirits to speak directly through the medium. In these cases, the characterizations were brilliant and seemed to go much beyond mere reproduction of mannerisms. For years, one occasional communicator, a person Mrs. Leonard had never met in life, gave message after message to former loved ones without ever speaking out of character or using inappropriate emotional inferences. If one refuses to accept the survival hypothesis to explain such cases, one must at least acknowledge extraordinary ESP capabilities on the part of the medium.

The super-telepathy theory is strained somewhat in dealing with the phenomena of cross-correspondences. The Faunus message which was received by Sir Oliver Lodge and then alluded to by another psychic is a minor example. The idea is creating a kind of jig-saw puzzle in the messages coming through different mediums. Any individual piece, when taken alone, seems to have no meaning. But when the separate pieces are put together, they form a coherent whole, and provide evidence for a constructive mind behind the entire design.

The major messages seem to have been directed by the spirit of F. W. H. Myers who died in 1901. Records show that the notion never occurred to him while he was alive. Other deceased members of the SPR also seem to have originated cross-correspondence messages. The mediums received these messages about the same time in places as distant from each other as London, New York, and India. Often the messages were filled with Greek and Latin allusions which were beyond the understanding of the different mediums. In fact, the messages seemed to contain the type of humor, style, and scholarship which was characteristic of the deceased researchers. The messages were often so complex that the puzzles could only be understood by classical language scholars.
 

The "Margery" Mediumship

A baffling cross-correspondence series occurred in the United States, supposedly originating through "Walter," the deceased brother of Mina Crandon. Mrs. Crandon, the wife of a professor of surgery at Harvard University, has been one of the most controversial mediums of the twentieth century. Her psychokinetic manifestations were verified by many researchers throughout the world under apparently strict conditions. Yet at other times she was accused of fraud.

The Crandons lived in Boston; however Walter also appeared through other mediums in New York, Niagara Falls, and Maine. On one occasion he announced a cross-correspondence in which "Margery" (as Mrs. Crandon was called) would make up a problem and two other mediums would each provide half of the answer. The problem written automatically by the medium was: "11 X 2 -- to kick a dead." The mediumistic circle in New York was rung by telephone and told by Judge Cannon that Walter had given a message: "2 -- no one stops." The next morning a telegram was received from Niagara Falls announcing this fragment: "2 horse." When the fragments are put together, one can see that the problem which Walter worked out and communicated -- assuming there was no conspiracy to cheat -- was this: "11 X 2 = 22. No one stops to kick a dead horse."

One might argue this case is an instance of group telepathy as the medium obviously knew the entire puzzle. Other evidence, however, also strengthens the case for Walter's autonomous existence. At times he was able to speak with a "direct voice -- without using the vocal cords of either the medium or the sitters. His voice just appeared in the room. Furthermore, some cross-correspondences devised by Walter were in Chinese -- a language which Margery did not know. Walter claimed he was getting help from some Chinese spirits. Even if telepathy were at play in the transmission of information, it is hard to explain the actual design of the puzzles with that hypothesis.
 

Reincarnation

Another approach to the question of survival focuses on reincarnation. The popular view of reincarnation is that after a person dies, the spirit of that person is reborn in another body. This process, of entering the womb, is vividly described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The concept is much more complex, however, when considered in the light of mystical philosophies which see one underlying reality beyond and within all time and individuality.

A belief in reincarnation has been held throughout the world. Lyall Watson, noted biologist and author of Supernature, and The Living World of Animals, has commented extensively on reincarnation in his book, The Romeo Error: A Matter of Life and Death:

No other single notion has ever received so widespread a cultural endorsement. It could be argued that this in itself might have kept a meaningless concept alive for a long time, but the belief stems from so many diverse and culturally unconnected origins that I cannot believe it has not basic biological validity.

Let him reflect on the transmigrations of men, caused by their sinful deeds, on their falling into hell, and on the torments in the world of Yama [hell], on the separation from their dear ones, on their union with hated men, on their being overpowered by age and being tormented by diseases, on the departure of the individual soul from this body and its new birth in another womb, and on its wanderings through ten thousand millions of existences, on the infliction of pain on embodied spirits, which is caused by demerit, and the gain of eternal bliss, which is caused by the attainment of their highest aim, gained through spiritual merit.

He remembers manifold former existences (pubbenivasanussati), such as one birth, two, three, four and five births ... hundred thousand births, remembers many formations and dissolutions of worlds: 'There I was, such name I had ... and vanishing from there I reappeared here.' Thus he remembers, always together with the marks and peculiarities, many a former existence. 

All souls are subject to the trials of transmigration; and men do not know the designs of the Most High with regard to them; they know not how they are being at all times judged, both before coming into this world and when they leave it. They do not know how many transmigrations and mysterious trials they must undergo; how many souls and spirits come to this world without returning to the palace of the divine king.

"The souls must reenter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God.

Not the powerto remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. if the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness. According to the Jewish view we make the transition under the overlordship of the Angel of Forgetfulness. But it sometimes happens that the Angel of Forgetfulness himself forgets to remove from our memories the records of the former world; and then our senses are haunted by framentary recollections of another life. They drift like torn clouds above the hills and valleys of the mind, and weave themselves into the incidents of our current existence....then the effect is exactly the same as when, listening to a concert broadcast through the air, we suddenly hear a strange voice break in, carried from afar on another ether-wave and charged with another melody. 

The concept of reincarnation existed in Christianity until it was attacked in 543 A.D. by the Byzantine emperor, Justinian and finally condemned by the Second Council in Constantinople in 553 A.D. Recent evidence advanced by Catholic scholars throws a new light on the whole matter.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (under "Councils of Constantinople") gives some information permitting the conclusion on technical grounds, that there is no barrier to belief in reincarnation for Catholic Christians. For example, Pope Vigilius, although he was in Constantinople at the time, refused to attend, in protest for the way in which the Emperor Justinian exerted absolute control over the Church patriarchy.

Catholic scholars are beginning to disclaim that the Roman Church actually took any official part in the anathemas against the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul, suggesting that during the many centuries when the Church believed it had condemned reincarnation, it was mistaken. 

While reincarnation is not emphasized in contemporary Islamic faith, the Koran (2.28) explicitly asks, "How can you make denial of Allah, who made you live again when you died, will make you dead again, and then alive again, unti you finally return to him?" 

One of the most eloquent testimonials to the beauty of reincarnation comes from the writings of the great Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi (died 1273) who wrote:

Like grass I have grown over and over again. I passed out of mineral form and lived as a plant. From plant I was lifted up to be an animal. Then I put away the animal form and took on a human shape. Why should i fear that if I died I shall be lost? For passing human form I shall attain the flowing locks and shining wings of angels. And then I shall become what no mind has ever conceived. O let me cease to exist! For non-existence only means that I shall return to Him. 

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes....There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss -- without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. 

Hypnotic regressions to ostensible "past lives" are fascinating psychological events that have attracted attention in professional journals and in the popular press. A large number of case reports have been published, but few of these cases were researched exhaustively, few were based on extensive hypnotic interviews, and few authors reported negative as well as positive findings.

One recently reported case developed a methodology for research in this area: 60 hypnotic interviews were conducted with a single subject, all relevant archives were exhausted, and negative as well as positive data was reported. The reincarnation hypothesis was juxtaposed with a more conventional hypothesis emphasizing normal factors such as suggestion, role-playing, loss of inhibition, dissociation (including cryptomnesia), and desire to please the hypnotist. A method was introduced in which information found in public libraries and popular texts was contrasted with information found in foreign archieves. The results of this rigorous procedure led to the acceptance of conventional explanations for the reported.

Still another explanation for so-called reincarnation evidence would be simple spirit possession.

Even if we were to conclude from other evidence that reincarnation was real, we need not assume it always occurs. Some cultures maintain the belief, for example, that one only reincarnates if one dies prematurely by accident.

The cases which are coming under serious scientific scrutiny are typically those in which a small child, two to four years old, begins talking to the parents about another lifetime. Generally, the parents will dismiss such talk as nonsense -- even in cultures where reincarnation is believed to occur. However, the child may persist and even insist upon visiting the community of his former residence. If the child supplies many details the parents may initiate an inquiry. Ideally at this stage, a scientific investigator is introduced to the scene. Careful records are made of all the child's statements. Verification can then begin by visiting the indicated community. If a family exists meeting the child's descriptions of his former household, the investigator can arrange for the two families to visit. Tests are then arranged to determine if the child can recognize places, objects, and people. Often it seems these memories are lost as the child grows older.

Unfortunately, most investigations do not proceed so smoothly. Nevertheless over a thousand such cases have now been investigated and a very suggestive body of evidence is accumulating. As an example of an actual study, the case of Swarnlata Mishra is instructive.

On March 2, 1948, Swarnlata was born the daughter of the district school inspector in Chhatarpur, Madya Pradesh, India. At the age of three and a half, while on a trip with her father passing through the town of Katni, she made a number of strange remarks about her house in this village. The Mishra family had never lived closer than 100 miles from this town. Later she described to friends and family further details of a previous life. Her family name, she claimed, had been Pathak. She also performed unusual dances and songs which she had had no opportunity to learn.

At the age of ten Swarnlata recognized a new family acquaintance, the wife of a college professor, as a friend in her former lifetime. Several months later, this case was brought to the attention of Sri H. N. Banerjee, of the Department of Parapsychology, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. He interviewed the Mishra family; then, guided by Swarnlata's statements, he located the house of the Pathak family in Katni. Banerjee found that Swarnlata's statements seemed to fit the life history of Biya, a daughter of the Pathak family and deceased wife of Sri Chintamini Panday. She had died in 1939.

In the summer of 1959, the Pathak family and Biya's married relatives visited the Mishra family in Chhatarpur. Swarnlata was able to recognize and identify them. She refused to identify strangers who had been brought along to confuse her. Later Swarnlata was taken to Katni and the neighboring towns. There she recognized additional peo`�e and places, commenting on changes which had been made since Biya's death. Unfortunately Sri Banerjee was not present during these reunions.

It was not until the summer of 1961 that Dr. Ian Stevenson, an eminent psychiatrist and psychical researcher from the University of Virginia, visited the two families and attempted to verify the authenticity of the case.

Stevenson determined that of 49 statements made by Swarnlata only two were found to be incorrect. She accurately described the details of Biya's house and neighborhood as they were before 1939. She described the details of Biya's disease and death as well as the doctor who treated her. She was able to recall intimate incidents known only to a few individuals. For example, she knew Sri Ciantimini Pandey had taken 1200 ruples from a box in which Biya had kept money. He admitted this, when questioned, and stated no one but Biya could have known of the incident. She accurately identified former friends, relatives, and servants in spite of the efforts of the witnesses to deny her statements or mislead her. Most of the recognitions were given in a way which obliged Swarnlata to provide a name or state a relationship. It was not a case of asking, "Am I your son?" but rather, "Tell me who I am."

Perhaps because of her family's tolerance, Swarnlata's impressions of Biya's life have not faded. In fact, Swarnlata continues to visit Biya's brothers and children and shows great affection for them. Remarkably she continues to act as an older sister to the Pathak brother--men forty years older than her. Furthermore, the Pathak family was rather westernized and did not believe in reincarnation before their encounter with Swarnlata.

Swarnlata also talked about another intermediate life as a child named Kamlesh in Sylket, Bengal, where she died at the age of nine. While this claim has not been verified in detail, many of her statements were found to correlate with the local geography. Her songs and dances were also verified as Bengali, although she had lived all her life only among Hindi speaking people.

If one rules out the possibility of fraud in such cases -- and there are many which are as evidential as this one--one might assume a child like Swarnlata was recalling the memories of stories which she had overheard during her very early childhood or infancy. The other explanation -- as with mediumship -- involves ESP along with a remarkable skill for impersonation.
 

Xenoglossy

Perhaps the most extraordinary cases which challenge the super-ESP hypothesis are those which involve xenoglossy or the ability to speak a language one has never learned. The Bengali songs and dances which Swarnlata was able to recite offer a minor example of xenoglossy. Other cases are far more intriguing.

Dr. Ian Stevenson documents the case of a Russian-Jewish woman living in Philadelphia who, under hypnosis, claimed to be a Swedish peasant named Jensen Jacoby. Furthermore, she was able to carry on rather involved conversations in this state using a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian with proper grammar and inflectional intonations. Speaking in a gruff male voice, she vividly portrayed the personality of the illiterate peasant and was also able to accurately identify objects borrowed from the American Swedish historical museum in Philadelphia. Most of these hypnotic sessions were taperecorded.

Stevenson spent over six years researching this case, interviewing witnesses and family members in order to determine if there was any possibility the subject had been exposed to the Swedish language at any time in her life. The case was not merely a question of reciting memorized or remembered passages -- but rather one of carrying on an active dialogue. After extensive and thorough research, Stevenson felt that there was no period in the subject's life when she would have been able to acquire the languages spoken in trance.

The lady and her husband, the medical doctor who hypnotized her, were both subjected to a battery of personality, language, aptitude, and lie detector tests. The indications from these tests further added to the authenticity of the case. Stevenson feels that while ESP might account for the informational aspects of a foreign language, it does not necessarily explain the skill of using the language conversationally in a meaningful way. Thus the case strongly points toward the survival hypothesis -- even though the historical existence of the Swedish peasant has not been fully documented.

It is impossible to base an airtight argument for survival after death upon cultural traditions, apparitions, near death experience, mediumship, possession, cross-correspondences, reincarnation, or xenoglossy -- either individually or in combination. Nevertheless as one investigates the extraordinary depths of the human personality which are illustrated in the range of well-documented survival material, it does become apparent that events and processes do occur which seem to challenge all of our conceptions.
 

. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead. New York: Dover, 1967, pp. lviii-lxx. A classic.

. E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris: the Egyptian Religion of Resurrection. New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1961. First published in 1911.

. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. The text contains commentaries by Carl Jung, Lama Anagarika Govinda, & Sir John Woodroffe.

. Ibid., p. 103.

. Ibid., pp. 165-166.

. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert & Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience.

. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibet's Great Yogi, Milarepa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

. Ibid., 133-136.

. Sir William Crookes, "Notes of an Inquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual," in R. G. Medhurst (ed.), Crookes and the Spirit World. New York: Taplinger, 1972. This volume contains descriptions of Crookes' experiments as well as his replies to his critics.

. Nandor Fodor, Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. London: Arthur's Press, 1933, p. 95. Crookes is quoted by Fodor.

. Charles Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, trans. by Stanley de Brath. New York: Macmillan, 1923.

. Camille Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces.Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1907. The famous French astronomer recounts his own personal experiences with Kardec.

. Pedro McGregor, The Moon and Two Mountains. London: Souvenir Press, 1966. A first-hand account of spiritualism in Brazil.

. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, I, 1882, p. 34.

. F. W. H. Myers, The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1954, p. xxix. Originally published in 1903, this book is possibly the greatest classic of psychical research.

. Ibid, p. 333. Myers is quoting from Wordworth's "Prelude," Book VI.

. F. W. H. Myers, The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, pp. 360-366. Myers quotes the report published by Dr. E. W. Stevens in the Religio-Philosophical Journal, Chicago, 1879.

. Ibid., 367-368. Myers quotes Hodgson's report published in the Religio-Philosophical Journal for December 20, 1890.

. Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers & Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970, pp. 163-164. This passage is quoted in Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research, pp. 165-166.

. "Notes on the Evidence Collected by the Society for Phantasms of the Dead," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, IIII, 1885, pp. 69-150. This information is cited in Gauld, op. cit.

. G. N. M. Tyrrell, Apparitions. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1961, pp. 69-70. Originally published in 1953.

. Ibid., pp. 77-80.

. Ibid., pp. 132-133. The original material comes from H. M. Wesermann, Der Magnetismus und die Allgemeine Weltsprache, 1822.

. Karlis Osis, Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1961.

. Raymond Moody, Life After Life (#W417), an InnerWork videotape available from Thinking Allowed Productions, 2560 9th Street, # 123, Berkeley, CA 94710. 

. Gauld, op. cit., p. 253. Gauld here is quoting William James from The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1886.

. Nandor Fodor, Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, 170.

. G. N. M. Tyrrell, Science and Psychical Phenomena. New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1961, pp. 175-179. The actual quote is from William James in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 28, pp. 117-121.

. Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond or Life and Death. New York: George H. Doran, 1916, p. 90. 

. Ibid., pp. 98-99.

. Ibid., p. 100.

. Ibid., p. 102.

. Rosalind Heywood, Beyond the Reach of Sense. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974, p. 118. A researcher as well as a sensitive, Heywood was one of the grand ladies of psychical research. 

. Tyrrell, op. cit., pp. 230-250.

. Nandor Fodor, Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. London: Arthur's Press, 1933, pp. 71-72. 

. Ibid., pp. 67-68.

. Many of the historical quotes cited under this heading were collected in J. Head & S. L. Cranston (eds.), Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery. New York: Julian Press, 1977.

. Jonathan Venn, "Hypnosis and the Reincarnation Hypothesis: A Critical Review and Intensive Case Study," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, October 1986, 80(4), 409-426.

. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. New York: American Society for Psychical Research, 1966.

. Ian Stevenson, "Xenoglossy: A Review and Report of a Case," Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 31, February 1974.