The Shady Side of Spiritualism
The Shady Side of Spiritualism is an article written by Minnermus published in The Freethinker on 23 march 1919.
The Shady Side of Spiritualism
- "My aunt seen a ghost wanst," said Mr. Hennessy.
- "Everybody's aunt has seen a ghost," replied Mr. Dooley.
- — Finlay Dunne, "Mr. Dooley Says."
Since Sir A. Conan Doyle forsook the flat of "Sherlock Holmes" in Baker Street, and began to frequent the haunts of "Sludge the medium," it has been hard to be just to him. As a novelist, Sir Arthur's gifts are plain as a pikestaff, and no one can be blind to them. Nor have we any wish to underrate his literary gifts, his artistry in words, and his talent in story-telling; but as the St. Paul of Spiritualism he is unconvincing.
A short time since, Sir A. Conan Doyle published an article in the London Daily Chronicle, in which he sought to show that life after death was a fact, and that the doings of Spiritualists, from the Davenport Brothers to Stainton Moses, deserved real consideration. Conan Doyle is an imaginative man, as well as an exponent of Spiritualism, and he could not help decorating his ideas, as when he spoke of Spiritualism as "psychic religion," and as the most tremendous subject which had ever engaged the mind of man. In another passage he said that the "silent revolution" of the last seventy years had now reached a climax which "puts religion in the fore front of reconstruction," and completes "the magnificent spiritual conception of the Christ." The messages of Spiritualism, according to Conan Doyle, "teach that what St. Paul calls our spiritual body is the exact counterpart of our present one." The next world is "enhanced by the consciousness of God's tender care," although "for the wicked there are chastening spheres." Replying to the saucy suggestion that the messages are "diabolical," he added: "if the Devil, is engaged in proving that materialism is a fallacy," then Satan is, indeed, "a reformed character."
Materialists may well be pardoned if they require something more illuminative. As our Transatlantic cousins put it: "It does not cut any cake." It all seems the rhetorical echo of theological platitudes, and, for the rest, the suggestions are sufficiently fanciful for the pulpit. As a fact, the article is of little evidential value, for Sir Arthur is largely content to refer inquirers to books. And few hard-shell Materialists, we assume, will be converted from the error of their ways by reading the masterly and inspiring Life of D. D. Home, by his second wife." Conan Doyle can hardly help himself, for he suffers from the defect of his qualities. The novelist is always elbowing aside the student, and jumping from the springboard of actuality into the waters of fancy. The chief value of his article, however, was the tacit admission that the ordinary Christian conception of a hereafter, comprising a pawnbroker's paradise for the minority, and a red-hot poker department for the majority, no longer appeals to religious folk.
As explained in the clever camouflage of Conan Doyle, the newest and most up-to-date Spiritualism is very like the old. The hand may seem the hand of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob. Behind all the verbiage of telepathy, clairvoyance, automatic writing, precognition, there is always "D. D. Home" as presented by his second wife, and "Sludge the Medium." Sir Arthur sees this himself, for he admits the "excesses" perpetrated by "unscrupulous camp-followers of the movement." The position, too, has its humorous side. Reduced to a plain statement, the Spiritualist position, as explained by Conan Doyle, is that this life is the "temporary ante-room to something grander beyond"; but, just as the timorous and time-serving Christians, Spiritualists prefer the irksome ills they know to the boundless bliss beyond. It is a conclusion sufficiently humorous to wrinkle with smiles the faces of the lions in Trafalgar Square.
The present recrudescence of Spiritualism is largely caused by the heavy death-toll of the great War. There is a quite natural desire among the bereaved to seek for consolation through almost any channel. These credulous folk are told that this or that medium has given most astonishing revelations. So what has been vouchsafed to others can quite as well be revealed to them. Hence the demand for "mediums," who so readily trade upon their credulity. It never seems to enter their heads that if a dead man could return at all, it would be to them direct that his return would be manifested, and not to an individual to whom he had never been introduced, and who was receiving money for his services. For the money the "medium" rakes in is the flow of tears from the sorrowful and distressed, and is one of the shadiest of shady businesses.
For Spiritualism is a money-making game. That is one of the reasons we hear so much of it. With some it is an honest belief; but with so many it is obviously a means of making a living. It is the credulity of the believer which gives the necessary seriousness to the movement, and, at the same time, makes possible much of the chicanery attached to it. As for the Spiritualistic theory that discarnate intelligences haunt chairs and tables, play with accordions, mandolines, and tarn bourines, scratch nonsense into locked slates, dictate doggerel from "the other side" — ordinary hard-headed folk will have none of it. It will be time enough to worry about it when they find themselves dallying with banjos and concertinas and ringing bells in the fourth dimension. The materialistic view of death is at least free from such foolish imaginings. To the Secularist, death is represented as rest, as the close of a banquet, as the universal law of Nature, which befalls all living beings, though the immense majority encounter it at an earlier period than man. Like the ancients, we think of it simply as sleep, dreamless, undisturbed, the final release from the anxieties and labours of life. As wise old Epicurus says: "Why should we fear death? Where death is, there are we not; and where we are, there death is not."
MIMNERMUS.
