DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND FAIRIES

Our present task, then, is to extend the examination beyond incarnate consciousness into the realm of the new psychology or physical research, where, as a working hypothesis, it is assumed that there is discarnate consciousness, which by the Celtic peoples is believed to exist and to exhibit itself in various individual aspects as fairies.

As to what science demands as proof of the survival of human consciousness after death, there has been no clear consensus of opinion. To prove merely the existence of ‘ghosts’ would not do; it is necessary to show by a series of proofs (1) that discarnate intelligences exist, (2) that they possess complete and persistent personal energy wholly within themselves, (3) that they are the actual unit of consciousness and memory known to have manifested itself on this plane of existence through particular incarnate personalities now deceased. Various psychical researchers assert that they have already reached these proofs and are convinced, often in spite of their initial scientific attitude of antagonism toward all psychic phenomena, of the survival of the human consciousness after the death of the human body; and we shall proceed to present the testimony of some of them. (p. 472)

In chapter vii, concerning Phantasms of the Dead, forming part of Frederick W. H. Myers’s Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, and in the two chapters which follow, on Motor Automatism, and on Trance, Possession, and Ecstasy, all the necessary proofs above noted have been adduced; and the author was thereby one of the very first psychical researchers to have recorded before the world his conversion from the non-animistic hypothesis to the ancient belief that Man is immortal; for he admits his conviction that the human consciousness does incontestably survive the decay of the physical body. Types of some of these well-attested and proved cases offered as evidence by Myers may be briefly summarized as follows :– Repeated apparitions indicating intimate acquaintance with some post-mortem fact like the place of burial; single apparitions with knowledge of the affairs of surviving friends, or of the impending death of a survivor, or of spirits of persons dead after the apparition’s decease; cases where professed spirits manifest knowledge of their earth-life, as of some secret compact made with survivors; cases of apparitional appearances near a corpse or a grave; occasional cases of the appearance of the dead to several persons collectively. 1 Under motor automatism, some of the most striking phenomena tending toward proof are cases where automatic writing has announced a death unknown to the persons present; knowledge communicated in a séance, not known to any person present, but afterwards proved to have been possessed by the deceased; automatic writing by a child in language unknown to her.

In chapter ix trance or possession is defined by Myers, in the same list of proofs, as ‘a development of Motor Automatism resulting at last in a substitution of personality’; and this harmonizes with the theory of the control of a living organism by discarnate spirits, and is supported by an overwhelming mass of scientific experiment. Telepathy suggests the possibility of communication between the living and the living and between the living and the dead, and, we (p. 473) may add, between the dead and the dead — as in Fairyland — without the consideration of space or time as known in the lower ranges of mental action; and that the communication does not depend upon vibrations from a material brain-mass. Telepathy in these first two aspects has been likewise accepted as a scientific fact by workers in psychical research like Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, William James, and by many others. All such phenomena as these, now being so carefully investigated and weighed by men thoroughly trained in science, are, so to speak, the protoplasmic background of all religions, philosophies, or systems of mystical thought yet evolved on this planet; and in all essentials they confirm the x-quantity presented in the evidence of the Fairy-Faith.

Dr. G. F. Stout, an able representative of the school of non-converts to the theories in psychology propounded by Myers and by psychical research, states his position thus :– ‘But, at least, my doubt is not dogmatic denial, and I agree with Mr. Myers that there is no sufficient reason for being peculiarly sceptical concerning communications from departed spirits. I also agree with him that the alleged cases of such communication cannot be with any approach to probability explained away as mere instances of telepathy.’ 1 In addition, Dr. Stout says :– ‘The conception which has been really useful to him is that of telepathy. Given that communication takes place between individual minds unmediated by ordinary physical conditions, we may regard intercourse with departed spirits as a special case of the same kind of process. And clairvoyance, precognition, &c., may perhaps be referred to telepathic communication either with departed spirits or with other intelligences superior to the human.’ 1 In this last phrase, ‘intelligences superior to the human’, Dr. Stout assumes our own position, that hypothetically there is good reason for thinking that discarnate non-human intelligences — such as the Irish call the Sidhe — may exist and communicate with, or influence in some unknown way, the living, as during ‘mediumship’ and in ’seership’. (p. 474)

Mr. Andrew Lang points out, in his reply to Dr. Stout’s criticism, that the only legitimate scientific resource for overthrowing Myers’s position, since the evidence is ‘mathematically incapable of explanation by chance coincidence’, is to say that several people are deliberate forgers and liars. And he adds :– ‘To myself (but only to myself and a small circle) the evidence is irrefragable, from our lifetime knowledge of the percipient.’ 1 But the animistic position does not by any means depend upon the evidence presented by Myers, no matter how incontestably reliable it is. We have only to examine the voluminous publications of the Society for Psychical Research (London) to realize this, and especially the Report on the Census of Hallucinations of Modern Spiritualism, by Professor Sidgwick’s Committee (P. S. P. R., London).

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