P.3: To England Now

When Holbrook Jackson published his classic account of fin-de-siecle ideas in 1913, he drew attention to the 1890’s as the years during which "the beginning of the revival of mysticism" got under way. Just before the outbreak of war in 1914, those with a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation acknowledged that a general "spiritual renaissance" and "mystical revival" were part of the general milieu and a mark of the times. And by the end of the war mysticism road "become a household word." But Victorians had long been fascinated by a wide range of phenomena that might loosely be termed esoteric-occult. As George Bernard Shaw remarked, the later Victorians were "addicted to table-rapping, materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like," just as their parents had been fascinated by phrenology and mesmerism.

Mesmerism in particular provided some of the terminology and categories of thought later adopted by spiritualists, and introduced the Victorian public to the concept of an unseen universal fluid or force that could be manipulated at will. Significantly, mesmerism also popularized the idea of the mesmeric seance and its leitmotif, the induced trance state. Modern spiritualism arrived in England from the United States in the early 1850’s and during the next twenty years took the country by storm. Like mesmerism, spiritualism held huge appeal for women and men of all classes and shades of belief, and similarly eschewed supernatural explanation.

Spiritualists explained spirit communication and phenomena by proposing a hitherto undiscovered form of rarified matter that allowed spirits to manifest on the wordly plane. But for many of the thousands of Victorians who got caught up in the spiritualist craze, explanation was of secondary importance. They went wild for tables that jumped and cavorted as spirits made their presence known and obligingly ran through the repertoire associated with a first-rate seance.

Many spiritualists were practicing Christians who saw in spiritualism direct confirmation of their beliefs. Others were disillusioned with what they considered the dead hand of orthodox dogma and ritual but regarded the spiritualist seance as a religious gathering in the tradition of the early primitive church, with its prophesying and speaking in tongues. Still others eschewed all orthodoxy, and of these some were secularists and freethinkers while a small number favored the visionary path of forerunners such as the eighteenth-century Swedish seer Emanuel Swedenborg. Spiritualism had such broad appeal in part because it based its claims on commonsense criteria and the proof provided by the manifest existence of the spirits themselves.

One of the single most famous spiritualistic feats was the alleged levitation of Daniel Dunglas Home over a London street. This astounding event has been cited in the annals of spiritualism as a miraculous event; it is not unlike Jesus' walking on water. Arthur Conan Doyle, who maintained that Home had levitated more than a hundred times before reliable witnesses, gives an account of the most famous of all levitations.

It reportedly occurred on December 16, 1868, at Ashley House, in the apartment of Lord Adare. The witnesses were Lord Adare, Lord Lindsay, and Captain Wynne. According to Doyle, Home put himself into a trance state and then "floated out of the bedroom and into the sitting room window, passing seventy feet above the street." After he arrived in the sitting room Lord Adare was surprised and remarked that he could not understand how Home could have done this, at which point Home allegedly told Adare "to stand a little distance off." He then went through the open space head first quite rapidly, his body being nearly horizontal and apparently rigid. He came in again feet foremost" Doyle insists that the three eyewitnesses were "unimpeachable."

The circumstances surrounding this alleged feat, however, are far more cloudy than Doyle allows; they hardly meet the standards of objective impartial inquiry.

An account of the actual event was written up by Lord Adare in a book entitled Experiences in Spiritualism, which he published privately. Apparently only fifty copies were printed; and most of these were later withdrawn by Adare, who may have had second thoughts. He sent still another description of the strange event to a friend, Sir Francis D. Burand. Lord Lindsay also related his version of the story on two different occasions: before the Committee of the London Dialectical Society, which was interested in investigating spiritualistic phenomena, and in a letter to the Spiritualist, a weekly newspaper. The Dialectical Committee later held four controlled séances with Home, but without any significant results. There is also a letter from Wynne to Home testifying to the event.

Trevor Hall has investigated the subject with great care. He has a photograph of the building (which has since been torn down) where the event was said to have occurred, showing the windows and balustrades. Hall demonstrates that it could have been possible for Home to make his way from one balcony to the adjacent one by normal means. Hall further shows that Adare and Lindsay were unreliable witnesses, that they were given to seeing apparitions, and that Adare in particular came under the strong influence of Home's personality. Interestingly, Home and Adare lived together for a period of time and even shared the same bed (which is suggestive of a homosexual relationship), so that Adare's so-called impartiality has hardly been demonstrated. Hall hypothesizes that Adare's state of mind could have been abnormal and prone to Home's suggestive influence.

In any case, on that fateful evening, according to Adare's account, Home began to walk about the room. "He was both elongated and raised in the air. He spoke in a whisper, as though the spirits were arranging something." Adare next reports that Home told them, "Do not be afraid, and on no account leave your places." He then went out into the passage. Home's directions effectively precluded any scrutiny of his subsequent behavior. They are reminiscent of Moses' warning to the children of Israel never to climb the mountain, which Moses and Joshua alone were allowed to do, or of Joseph Smith's warning to his disciples not to look into the box containing the Golden Bible.

According to Lord Adare, Lindsay heard a spirit voice tell him that Home was going out one window and coming into the next. Then, says Adare, "We heard Home go into the next room, heard the window thrown up, and presently Home appeared standing upright outside our window. He opened the window and walked in quite coolly. 'Ah,' he said, 'You were good this time,' referring to our having sat still and not wished to prevent him. He sat down and laughed." Lindsay confirmed that he heard the window go up but indicated that he could not see it as he sat with his back to it. But he said that he "saw his [Home's] shadow on the opposite wall" and saw him floating out the other window. (Hall, "Enigma of Daniel Home")

But, according to Hall, Home could have left the window in one room, made his way along the ledge of the building, and climbed into the next window. He could even have placed a board between the two balconies (which an earlier critic had suggested), which Hall estimates to have been only 4 feet 2 inches apart (not 7 feet 4 inches as Adare said). Moreover, the height of the third floor was not 85, 80, or even 70 feet above the street, as different versions of the incident have alleged, but was approximately 32 feet. Hall maintains that it was possible for Home to move from one balcony to the next without much trouble; at least it was not impossible. Thus, instead of levitating, Home could have climbed out one window and come in the next while the three men remained seated in the darkened room.

Home's levitation was not corroborated by anyone in the street below or in adjacent or opposite apartments. Since the stories of Lindsay and Adare differ in many details and since the only light in the room was that of the moon, critics have a legitimate basis for skepticism. It is Hall's view that Home's principal secret was his ability to influence those who had contact with him and to suggest supernatural interpretations for his behavior. This explanation seems more plausible than the spiritualistic account; it is more in accordance with David.

 

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April 17, 2004