A Magician Amongst the Spirits
Cambridge University Press 2011 Pb, xix, 294pp, illus, ind, £26.99, ISBN 9781108027489
The introduction to this facsimile of Houdini’s 1924 sceptical masterwork, in which he sought to expose mediums and psychics as frauds and charlatans, explains the great magician’s motivation: at the beginning of his career, he put on fake séances as an entertainment, not realising the degree to which such deceit toyed with the sentiments of his audience.
When Houdini suffered a bereavement, he declared that he would have given the greater part of his wealth in exchange for just one word from his much loved departed mother. Only then did he understand the visitors’ need to repeatedly attend séances and to pay for private readings with mediums. Such desperation is reminiscent of fellow sceptic Eric Dingwall (mentioned several times) who, despite having exposed numerous mediums as fakes during his investigative career with the Society for Psychical Research, tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to make contact with his wife Margaret following her sudden death in 1976.
Houdini’s tours of Europe in the early 1920s showed him how the “medium craze” had swept the continent in the aftermath of the First World War; he regarded Spiritualism as a world menace that threatened those possessed of a highly-strung psychological character who had suffered a bereavement.
Like his friend Harry Price, Houdini had accumulated a huge library of books dealing with all aspects of the supernatural: Spiritualism, witchcraft, demonology, ghosts and all manner of psychic phenomena. But unlike the equally wellread Price, Houdini stated that throughout over 30 years of investigation, he had not once come across a medium whom, he felt, had demonstrated genuine psychic ability. As members of the Magic Circle, Price and Dingwall were able to recognise techniques of sleight-of-hand, misdirection and other conjuring tricks employed by mediums. How much better equipped, then, was Houdini, a magician of international renown.
A Magician Amongst the Spirits is composed of two elements; firstly, a sceptical overview of the Spiritualist movement from its inception in 1848 with the Fox sisters, through to the Davenport brothers, Daniel Dunglass Home (Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge’), Eusapia Palladino and others, all of whom are dismissed as fakes, on the basis of the evidence of contemporary witnesses’ statements taken from his vast library. The second part deals with those mediums whom Houdini encountered in person.
But even those he did not investigate personally – stars of Spiritualism before his time such as the celebrated Dr William Slade of ‘spirit slate writing’ fame – he still subjected to close analysis, by virtue of his extensive knowledge of the equipment employed by stage magicians. Indeed, an entire chapter is devoted to the devices with which writing upon a slate by an unseen hand could be simulated.
The book’s mood of unrelenting suspicion concerning human nature – the cynicism of those who gull their audiences and the gullibility of those audiences – is leavened by the apparently genuine friendship between Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Whilst completely at odds over the veracity of the Spiritualist movement, Houdini writes of Doyle as his friend, and as a man whose sincere belief in the psychic world he respects. (Houdini is too diplomatic to suggest that Conan Doyle’s interest in mediumship was not an objective scientific inquiry, but motivated by the loss of his brother and son, and a desire to make contact with them. A similar motivation may be ascribed to Sir Oliver Lodge, that other man of letters who championed the Spiritualist movement and whose son Raymond fell in the Great War.) One of the most compelling and moving chapters of the
book deals with a séance held by Conan Doyle, his wife, and Houdini, at which Lady Doyle claimed to be the conduit for a letter addressed to Houdini from his dead mother. “I was willing to believe, even wanted to believe,” the great illusionist writes.
Houdini’s respect for Conan Doyle’s sincerity is contrasted by anger and outrage at what he saw as the cynicism and immorality exhibited by fake mediums. More than once, he writes of their ‘evil’ or their ‘vice,’ their ‘crimes’ and ‘moral perversion’ at fooling a needy public.
Whilst by no means an objective examination of the Spiritualist movement, this unashamedly passionate condemnation of psychical fakery is a useful historical account of mediumship during the late 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th. It’s also a historical document, a time capsule that testifies to an era when psychic investigation was taken seriously – with scientists, psychologists and major literary figures participating in its research – rather than being pushed to the Channel Four fringes of popular culture as it is today.
Fortean Times Verdict
A Passionate Denunciation Of Psychical Fakery 8