Vladimir Nabokov wrote that life is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. But there are still those who squint and stretch, groping and hoping to find something in that darkness.
We call them mediums.
In many cases, mediums are hucksters; pseudo Swamis who trot out the tricks of cold reading to convince doe-eyed marks they represent a portal to the afterlife.
"You have a scar on your knee, yes?""I'm sensing a pain in your past?""You went through a change - you were 12 or 13?"But there are mediums who aren't angling for a syndicated TV show and for whom a séance is a rite as sacred as any religious ritual.Leonard George, a Capilano University psychology professor with a curious streak, turned his curiosity toward those mediums, the ones who go into a trance and experience something they interpret as communication with the unseen."What are those experiences actually like?" George pondered. "And I thought: 'There's only one way to find out.'"The relationship between psychology and parapsychology is tangled and long. American psychologist William James trolled the countryside in the late 1800s looking for a genuine medium."If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black," he famously stated. "It is enough if you prove one single crow to be white."
It's a concept George kept in mind as he followed his curiosity from the confines of Capilano's Fir building to the Spiritualist capital of the United States, located in upstate New York.In the Spiritualist enclave of Lily Dale, George looked for a white crow.
"Thump."What was that?"Thump, thump."There it is again!In a wooden farmhouse in a town that no longer exists, Margaret Fox could hear something bumping in the night.
It was March 31, 1848 in Hydesville, New York.She'd heard those sounds before, but never so loud, so insistent.Fox lit a candle and followed the bumps until they led her to the room of her young daughters, Kate and Maggie.They'd heard it, too. In fact, the girls even had a name for the being behind the bumps: Mr. Splitfoot.Kate suggested it might be a prank, what with tomorrow being April Fool's Day and all, but their mother was certain it was something else.
She asked Mr. Splitfoot how many children she'd borne."Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump."Seven. She'd borne seven children.She asked how many children were still living.Six thumps for the six hearts still beating.The thing had more to say.
Mr. Splitfoot had been a peddler in life, but was now a wounded spirit. Someone had murdered him in that very farmhouse, cutting his throat and burying his body in the cellar. Fox raced across the street to fetch her neighbour.Mr. Splitfoot answered her questions as well, with the thumps signifying numbers or letters of the alphabet.The story spread across Hydesville.Townsfolk intent on justice shunned a man named Bell whom they believed responsible for Mr. Splitfoot's murder.The family home became known as the Old Spook House.
Fox's daughters were accused of consorting with the devil. They soon left Hydesville, touring much of the United States and
séances.Sir William Crookes, the English scientist who invented the radiometer, was fascinated by the sisters.
"I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means," he wrote.The spiritualist movement blossomed. Mediums and séances became commonplace and by some estimates there were one million followers of the practice.But in 1888, torn by a conflict between Spiritualism and her religious faith, Maggie Fox unburdened herself. That thumping noise from 40 years earlier
had been nothing more than an apple tied to a string bumping onto the floorboards.
Eve ate of the forbidden apple. Maggie Fox bruised it.
She and Kate also had an uncanny ability to crack their toes at a fantastic volume, which served them well when produce wasn't available. There'd been no murder in the farmhouse cellar. Bell was innocent."Spirituality is a fraud of the worst description," Margaret said. "I trust that this statement... will break the force of the rapid growth of Spiritualism."She said she was speaking before her God. She gave performances to illuminate the hoax she'd perpetrated. She later recanted her confession.
The Fox sisters perished in the 1890s.In 1904, bones were discovered in the farmhouse cellar.
"I wanted to go and drink from the source," George says of his trip to Lily Dale.
Visitors are welcome, but the former Fox residence itself is restricted to followers of Spiritualism. If the bucolic hamlet has the equivalent of a high priestess, it is Judith Rochester, whom George calls, "the medium's medium.""Most people outside of Spiritualism have never heard of her," he says. "She's never been on TV, she's not one of these flashy (John) Edward types, making money and putting on a show." While many skeptics
associate Spiritualism with a critical thinking deficit, George is quick to point out Rochester's PhD from the University of Toronto.
"Judith could tapdance around most of us in terms of hardcore logic," he says.
Under Rochester's direction, George began training as a medium, or as he put it, a "mini-medium."
Some mediums recite a poem or sing a hymn before falling into the trance.
Once in his trance, George set out to find his helpers. According to the orthodoxy of Spiritualists, we each have beings that watch over us like guardian angels.His dear departed cat returned to him, sauntering across the plains of his imagination.There were the stars he'd dreamed of all his life, lending him assurance. George had a sense of a body of light rising from his physical body. He explored the landscape, meeting a vaporous form of swirling rainbow colours who took him to a chamber he'd dreamed of 30 years earlier.He was imagining things. George is clear on that point, but the images of the trance were more vivid than any dream.Once George had surveyed the terrain, he gave his first reading.After a minimum of conversation with a woman who was the subject for the reading, he fell back into the trance.
"I found myself aware of a little house that was deep in the forest. A woman lived in the house, a short black woman. I had the sense of a name that was something like Mabel or Annabelle. Another striking thing was in the trees. .. someone had hung decorations," he recalls.He gave the woman his best interpretation of his vision. Her response was what George would call "a lightning strike.""She was looking at me and said, 'Let me tell you. When I was a child I lived in a rural part of the United States. Sometimes we got our water from a well with an electric pump. And sometimes when big storms would come through, the storms would knock out the electric
pump so we'd have to go to a neighbour's place to get water, and the nearest neighbour was this black woman who lived in the forest. Her name was Mabel and she had this eccentricity that she'd decorate the trees in the forest around her house with all kinds of interesting ornaments.'"My hair was starting to stand up," George says.
The core tenet of Spiritualism is service."If a medium can give you proof of the continuity of life, their attitude is: 'That's a tremendous gift to you,'" George explains. "Imagine if we could be certain, imagine if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt... ."Even among the predatory mediums, there is an occupational hazard. Magician and Hollywood maverick Orson Welles referred it as "becoming a shuteye," an affliction which besets the mentalist who begins to believe his own lies. "We have evolved to be exquisitely and unconsciously attuned to information leaking from other people," George explains.
Still, George remains boggled by what subconscious signs he may have picked up on that led him to that image of decorated trees surrounding the house in the forest.
Walking through Lily Dale's boulevards, George wondered if he could attain certainty of life after death, if he could cross that line from scientific proof to personal belief.
"I couldn't and I can't and I haven't," he says. "But I sure envied those who did."
For a spiritualist, the thread between life and death is a piece of a grand glory, similar to the way a star is part of a galaxy. Their worldview is "wildly optimistic," George says.George is going back to Lily Dale this summer to give a presentation about ancient oracles.
His curious streak is as wide as ever, and possibilities remain open."Wouldn't it be something if I crossed the line some day?"
