22.11.11 A 21st-Century Séance (Dr Susan Blackmore)

Abstract When Susan Blackmore attended her first séance back in 1971 she already knew something of the history of spiritualism: its beginnings with two young girls in New York State in 1848, its rapid spread across America and Europe, and the Victorian rage for private séances where a medium might be gagged and bound inside a curtained cabinet while astonished sitters in the blacked-out room awaited “physical phenomena” such as disembodied voices, wisps of ectoplasm from the medium’s orifices, or even materialised spirits. She never experienced any such inexplicable thrills! Indeed after Michael Faraday’s conclusive experiments in 1853, and countless subsequent exposures of fraud one might have expected the whole circus to disappear. But no – it is still with us. After a decade of avoiding the paranormal, curiosity tempted her to accept an invitation to just such a séance in October 2011. She will report on what precautions she took, what happened, and whether or not she witnessed the promised inexplicable physical phenomena.

Susan Blackmore hadn’t been to a séance for thirty years when she received an email from “Clare” (not her real name) to a 21st-century séance. Sue got out of research into the paranormal and is now a thoroughgoing atheist unbeliever, but that transition resulted in her getting quite a bit of upsetting hate mail from believers who couldn’t understand how she could betray her former beliefs. (She pointed out that she never received hate mail from sceptics when she was a believer.)

The email contained the classic “open mind” line and Clare revealed that she regarded Sue as a project, a challenge, “a really hard nut sitting at the top of the pile of sceptics” whom she wanted to win over to belief. Sue accepted the invitation to a physical séance.

Physical mediumship is characterized by the following (supposed) spiritual phenomena:

• direct voice
• levitation
• apports (appearances out of thin air)
• transfiguration
• ectoplasm (the really exciting bit)
• full materialization and de-materialization

Sue admitted she wasn’t an expert on fraudulent séances, but she performed a few cursory checks of the garden shed where the great experience was due to happen. What was striking was how similar the setup was to Victorian seances – nothing much had changed in a hundred years. One of the few concessions to modernity was the use of plastic cable ties instead of leather straps around the arms of the medium. (Such binding is not much use if the arms of the chair are removable and the medium can just get up and walk about, but the arms of this chair seemed well fixed.)

Sue was expecting something special – not the otherworldly manifestations Clare was expecting, of course, but a ritual and solemn approach appropriate to the nurturing of altered states of consciousness. There was, however, a lack of seriousness, and no sense of spirituality even when the opening prayer was read out, or rather dictated like a shopping list. Instead, to accompany the tedious moaning and banging of the medium there was an Abba soundtrack.

When one of the participants felt the hand of the materialized spirit, she said, “It feels warm just like a real person.” At which point Sue had to hold back from shouting, “That’s because it is a real person!”

Sue was apologetic that she didn’t have more answers: “I don’t know what to make of it. Why do they do it?” Why are they convinced by a spirit calling himself “Yellow Feather” and doing a bad impersonation of a Native American Indian?

In a follow-up email, Clare reported that one of the others present (Jerry) had found the evening stimulating: “I’ve been trying to think of words to adequately describe what I felt and saw but it’s impossible.” And because of the rule against taking in any kind of recording device that might help with that description, we’ll never know what it was Jerry couldn’t describe. (See the Atman blog on the difficulties of transcribing experience.)

The participants in séances often express the desire to do good, although the good is couched in terms of the triumph of the “spiritual” over the “material”. They, like the rest of us, are natural-born dualists, but unlike some of us they don’t question the assumption that there is a non-physical, immaterial, independent “soul” separate to the body and which can survive death and communicate with the living.

Sue was glad to have taken part in the séance, but couldn’t see anything spiritual about the experience. She’s not religious, and so spiritual for her means asking the basic questions about what it is to be human, how we express kindness, love, wonder, purpose in our lives, what makes a good life. The trouble with the séance was that it fell short on pretty much all counts.

One reason why people engage in such activities is that it’s fun. (Spending two hours in a blacked-out shed with a bunch of spiritualists is not my idea of fun, although the tea and cake after would be nice.)

I personally can’t think of many worse ways of spending an evening. At least in church you might hear some fine music, and you could always doze off during the sermon. What really gets my motor running is theatre, which has its own rituals and special places, where experiences of all kinds can be had, without being weighed down with mumbo jumbo.

The Greeks had a word – eudaimonia – for a certain kind of happiness which translates literally as “good spirit” but which probably means something more like “human flourishing” or “life well lived” (Gilbert 2007, p. 36). I’m not sure they would be rushing to apply this word to the antics of these particular Abba afficionados. After two millennia, shouldn’t we have moved on from such activities? Or perhaps we should not be so quick to judge the quality of other people’s subjective experiences, as Gilbert elsewhere suggests?