Chapter 4

Sir Oliver Lodge and Frederick Meyers, fellow-founder of Society for Psychical Research with Edmund Gurney and Henry Sedgwick

(1) Photography and the Occult by BY ARIELLA BUDICK
STAFF WRITER NEWSDAY.COM

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/arts/ny-ffart4446639oct02,0,7479297.story?coll=ny-homepage-mezz

(2) New Exhibit Looks at Occult Photography
Updated: Tuesday, Sep. 27, 2005 - 4:18 PM By DEEPTI HAJELA
AssociatedPressWriter

http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=114&sid=578019

(3) The 1933 Preface and Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Psychic Science by Sir Oliver Lodge O.M. and Dr. Nandor Fodor.

 

(1)

Science and spiritualism occupy separate zones of experience. One defines the mainstream and concerns itself with all that is quantifiable, provable and profoundly rational. The other exists at the periphery and has become the province of eccentrics and kooks. Photography connects them, negotiating between the tangible and the transcendental.

The Metropolitan Museum's mesmerizing exhibit, "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," explores a time when the supernatural fascinated a cohort of committed rationalists. Belief in the occult was at its height between the 1860s and World War II. William James, Thomas Mann, William Butler Yeats and even Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most methodical detective, all consulted mediums.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the scientific community embraced psychic phenomena as a legitimate part of its purview. Physicists Pierre and Marie Curie, astronomer Henri Chrétien and neuropsychiatrist Gilbert Ballet were among the dozens of erudite observers at seances conducted by the medium Eusapia Palladina under the auspices of the Institut Géneral Psychologique in Paris.

As Palladina tossed furniture

with her mind, researchers armed with a formidable array of dynamographs, electroscopes, barometers, compasses, thermometers and electrometers monitored every condition they could think of. The results were utterly inconclusive.

Seances were suspect because they took place in the dark, so believers and skeptics alike turned to mechanical reproduction to prove or disprove the existence of immaterial worlds. Photography was the perfect tool because it, too, required dimness and resulted in a transfiguration of sorts, a miraculous passage between dimensions. A visionary art born of the Industrial Revolution, photography used the technology of emulsions, chemicals and timed exposures to document emanations and ectoplasm.

The Met's exhibit puts the copious evidence of these studies on display, letting the viewer decide which cheesy special effects, creepy abstractions and shimmering nebulae merit scientific or artistic respect. The curatorial team, led by Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit, declines to cry humbug except in cases of documented fraud.

Suspending doubt

This discretion may be strategic. Many of the works were loaned by such institutions as the American Society for Psychic Research and the College of Psychic Studies in London. Suspending doubt also helps us commune with the spirit of the time, when image makers were part of the investigative apparatus aimed at the paranormal.

"The Perfect Medium" is, above all, about the meeting of romanticism and naturalism. Scrutinizing the spirit by scientific means was a typical 19th century endeavor. The show and its indispensable catalog escort viewers into the irresistible confluence of aesthetics, sensationalism and social history. Until recently, the Lower East Side had the Freakatorium, a tiny storefront cabinet of vintage mysteries. This is its Upper East Side counterpart.

Spiritualism was linked to death and, therefore, also to war. Even as Matthew Brady produced pictures of the Civil War's massed corpses, early photographer-mediums sold images of the living dead. William Mumler maintained a studio in New York City where customers could sit for formal portraits with their beloved ghosts, who materialized beside them as gauzy white forms.

It's difficult to believe that anyone was tricked by Mumler's primitive manipulations, and he was, in fact, suspected of charlatanism and even tried for fraud, but no deception could ever be proven. Some of his colleagues were clumsier or less fortunate, and their wizardry was unmasked.

Ectoplasm and orifices

After ghosts, the show moves on to spiritual fluids. This section is the least compelling, full of fuzzy palmprints, flying thoughts in the form of glimmering blobs and force fields flowing from fingertips. Things get more interesting with the photographs of mediums at work, which have the dramatic immediacy of reportage.

Among the mysteries that fascinated researchers most was ectoplasm, which ostensibly flowed from the orifices of the medium's body. In a common episode that acquired the semiscientific term "mediumistic labor," a clairvoyant would grunt and grimace and bring forth a fibrous substance, often from between her legs.

Sometimes ectoplasm was said to coalesce into recognizable shapes. "Margery," the wife of a prominent Boston surgeon, was famous for producing the hand of her dead brother from her navel. As her celebrity escalated, so did controversy. In 1923, her claims were investigated by a Harvard psychologist, followed by a British researcher and a second Harvard team. The best minds of two continents could not resolve the matter.

Photographic evidence was rarely definitive. The German doctor, sexologist, criminologist, psychotherapist and photographer Albert von Schrenck-Notzing spent four years studying the medium Marthe Béraud, alias Eva C., and published a book on his research in 1913. Like many of his colleagues, Schrenck-Notzing was converted by the mystical performance art, illuminated only by the camera's flash. Where he saw Eva breathing ectoplasm, however, others saw nothing in his photographs but a woman masticating burlap. His solution was to continue believing, but to stop taking pictures.

A photograph, he wrote, "reproduces only an instant abstracted from the flow of the living event ... the effect it produced could only be crude and deceptive."

And yet Schrenck-Notzing's pictures capture the ritual's riveting theatricality in weirdly disjointed compositions. In one, a woman in a kimono, her hair elaborately arranged, clutches her jaw in astonishment as Eva C. gives birth to a hunk of ectoplasm. In another photo, a stream of spiritual stuff materializes like cigar smoke from the mouth of Stanislawa P., passing through a veil of netting and glowing against the inky background.

Eventually, the development of infrared photography made fraud easier to detect. One surreptitious 1930 photo of a Paris seance showed a medium whose hands were supposedly immobilized reaching toward a table to rearrange some objects while her audience sat in the pitch dark. The picture has a dull, depressing solidity: It's simply a shot of people sitting around. Where the flash had once given credence to invisible phenomena, the new technology sapped the occult of its romance.

How certain are we?

It would be easy to stroll through these galleries with a sense of sophisticated superiority, a certainty about where the physical leaves off and the psychic begins. But those were times when science itself challenged the limits of rational thought. Physicist Werner Heisenberg's discoveries and Einstein's theories seemed to skirt the unknowable. Freud developed techniques for analyzing phenomena lurking beneath the threshold of consciousness. What was ectoplasm but the literal manifestation of forces that the era's certified geniuses insisted were absolutely real?

(2)  

NEW YORK (AP) - Ghostly, pale images of the dead hovering near those still living. Self-proclaimed mediums with streams of "ectoplasm" from the spirit world spewing from their mouths. Levitating tables.

Just in time for the spookiest part of the year, a new exhibition looks at how photography was used by those attempting to capture evidence of the paranormal. "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult" opened Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and runs through Dec. 31.

The exhibition features about 120 photographs from collections all over the world, and arrives in New York after a showing in Paris. Most of the images date from about the 1860s until World War II, a period when people were greatly interested in spiritualism and the paranormal. Using photography to document any images or incidents became a popular way of trying to get proof.

"When scientists started getting interested in this, they used photography as an investigative tool," said Mia Fineman, who coordinated the show for the Met. "Scientists would organize seances specifically for the purpose of being photographed. They really were going at this from a scientific perspective."

The show is divided into three sections. The first features images of "ghosts" or "spirits," while the second section has photographs about mediums and their seances. The third sections looks at pictures of what people thought were the vital life forces emanating from human beings.

There's the photo from William H. Mumler, of Fanny Conant with the pale outline of a little Native American girl by her side, taken toward the end of the 19th century. In the section on mediums, Germany photographer Albert Von Schrenck-Notzing took an image in 1912 of Eva C., when a strange object shaped like a slipper appeared on top of her head. And from March 1896, there are images taken when a hand was placed on a photographic plate, by Russian photographer Jacob Von Narkiewicz-Jodko.

The museum doesn't offer any opinions on whether the images in the photographs are real, but does provide historical information about some of the controversies, including how Mumler was acquitted of fraud charges in 1869. French spirit photographer Edouard Isidore Buguet wasn't so lucky. He was arrested for fraud in 1875 and during his trial, acknowledged faking his images using double exposures. He was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.

The show also contains images from critics of spiritualists, such as illusionist Henri Robin. One photograph shows him in the grasp of a ghostly skeleton, an image he openly admitted creating through a double exposure of the film plate.

There are also images of the Cottingly Fairies, pictures taken in 1917 by young English girls of what they said were fairies. Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in by the hoax, which wasn't revealed until about 60 years later when one of the photographers admitted that the images were just cardboard cutouts, propped up with hat pins and shot in ways that made them look like the girls were interacting with them.

The museum has scheduled a series of lectures, films and gallery talks to coincide with the exhibit. The show will not travel.

(3) The original Preface and Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Psychic Science by Sir Oliver Lodge O.M. and Dr. Nandor Fodor. The Encyclopedia was published by Arthurs Press Limited, 34 Bloomsbury Street, London in 1933

Preface

An encyclopaedia of Psychic Science! - I had not thought that such a preparation was possible, nor would it have been possible without a combination of great energy with considerable knowledge such as is possessed by the Hungarian Dr. Nandor Fodor. He has gone through the records of a century in the most industrious manner, and has succeeded in making a very readable book out of the material. Wherever an investigator has indicated doubts about a phenomenon those doubts are indicated by the compiler; and though his scepticism does not come quite up to S.P.R. standard it may be said that he has not excluded hostile opinion, and on the whole has surveyed the whole subject with fairness and ability. To anyone entering anew upon the enquiry the present work will be of special assistance.           There is much that will explain the repulsion felt by orthodox scientific people, and some that will be regarded as incredible. I do not suppose that Dr. Nandor Fodor's judgment as to what he should include is infallible, but it may be claimed that he has exercised a sound judgment in a difficult task.

The opposition of scientific workers in the past when really good material was available is regrettable, but the time is coming when they can no longer plead that things even violently incredible do not occur. Soon it will be impossible for them to shut their eyes to a whole department of knowledge, to ignore it, and leave it to a few pertinacious explorers. It is remarkable that these still persist in their assertions and uphold what they conceive to be true, in spite of the ridicule and determined opposition of the majority of those who claim to be the unprejudiced upholders of natural knowledge. I realise the cause of this hostile prejudice, and cannot help sym­pathising to some extent. They have their authentic method of procedure and are fully occupied with orthodox science, and yet are asked to step outside their well-explored territory, whose problems they well know how to tackle and where their victories have been won, and enter an unfamiliar and apparently grotesque jungle, which has hitherto been abandoned to the vagaries of superstition. They see themselves introduced to people in an abnormal state, asked to take note of their utterances, to pay critical attention to phenomena which may or may not be simulated, and to make sure of the facts; in the expectation that thereby they will be led to a deeper understanding of the mental aspect of the universe and into regions which cannot be explored by the present methods of science.

Yet when we consider our own composite nature we ought not to be surprised or incredulous at asserted occurrences that testify to an existence beyond and apart from the obvious bodily organs with which we are provided.       The facts only seem incredible if we limit our attention to the obvious features of mundane life. If we really believe that we have a psychic existence more real and permanent than anything connected with this normal and transitory body, we shall not be incredulous about evidence for supernormal facts, nor rebellious at the novel methods found appropriate for dealing with them.

Introduction

PSYCHIC science embraces both psychical research and spirit­ualism. The facts championed by the spiritualists differ but in their interpretation from those we meet with in psychical re­search. Basically they are the same, though in spiritualistic experience they steep deeper into the marvellous. To the facts of psychical research, by the exercise of great care, I added, from books and periodicals, many strange accounts which seem to rest on good authority though, from the experimental viewpoint, wanting in evidential value. For only by so doing could I hope to illuminate the full domain of this coming science.

Of occultism, theosophy and mysticism I steered clear. The issues of psychical research and spiritualism are purely empirical and merge into orthodox science. The inquirer needs no initia­tion, no preparation, no mystic disposition, no special faculties. The claims withstand the same deliberate, dispassionate and exact inquiry which built up our knowledge of the visible world. This will be amply borne out by the records associated with many brilliant names. The captions given to these scientists, I am confident, could have been considerably increased in number. Of the lesser lights I might have also given personal treatment to many more, but this is not an Encyclopaedia of a movement but of a new science and I drew the line where public records would arouse the layman's interest.

First attempts in the encyclopedic line are usually fraught with enormous difficulties. I should have been assisted by an editorial committee to make this work perfect. Future editions may take care of deficiencies. In the meantime, I trust, it will be judged by its merits, by what it contains and not by what it does not.

I wish to acknowledge a great debt of obligation to Mr. Stanley de Brath for reading the entire MS. and making notes and sugges­tions for its improvement. I am similarly indebted to Count Cesar Baudi de Vesme, of Paris, for a last minute reading of the French and Italian items. My thanks are due to the Council of the S.P.R., for their kind permission to quote from the Pro­ceedings and the Journal and for the loan of some photographs, to the Institut Metapsychique Internationale, to the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, to the British College of Psychic Science, to the London Spiritualist Alliance, to Dr. Hereward Carrington of New York, to Dr. L. R. G. Crandon of Boston, and Dr. Glen Hamilton of Winnipeg, for courteously providing the illustrations of the book, and finally to Mr. Y. Leutscher of Haren, Holland, for his data on Nostradame.

DR. NANDOR FODOR