Michael Prescott's Blog

The de Vere code

File this under the category of "fun stuff." I don't know if it has any significance, but it's kind of neat.

As regular readers know, I think it's likely that the works of Shakespeare were written by the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. There are many reasons to suspect that "the Stratford man" lacked the education, life experience, and courtly sophistication to pen these works. Frankly, I would think that Love's Labour's Lost alone would cast almost fatal doubt on the Stratfordian thesis, since the play is obviously a satire written by a court insider for the amusement of an aristocratic audience. Just about the only Stratfordian explanation for it would be that Will, newly arrived from a provincial farming town, promptly fell in with aristocratic patrons who regaled him with gossip and news so he could write from an insider's perspective. It's not impossible, but it strikes me as most unlikely.

People who suspect that the works were written by someone other than Will have always been prone to look for coded messages in the text. The most notorious example is Delia Bacon, who tried to prove that the real author was Francis Bacon (no relation) by discovering countless hidden communications. Sadly, most of these supposed messages proved as elusive as the canals of Mars when other people looked for them. Delia's case was not strengthened when she suffered a mental breakdown later in life, allowing her critics to say (rather unfairly) that she had been crazy all along. 

Today, most people avoid the whole subject of codes and cyphers in Shakespeare, probably fearful of following in Delia's footsteps all the way to the sanitarium. But occasionally a valiant attempt is still made, and often it involves the introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets, which - because of its peculiar layout and enigmatic language - looks an awful lot like it ought to be a cryptogram of some kind. 

As you can see, the whole thing is rather odd. It consists of three triangular blocks of text, of 6, 2, and 4 lines. Periods separate words. The sentence structure is confused; it's unclear whether the "adventurer ... setting forth" is "Mr. W.H.," setting forth on some private adventure, or the reader, setting forth on the adventure of reading the book. The term "only begetter" is unusual, and may mean the person who wrote the sonnets, or who inspired them, or who obtained a copy for publication.

Since the Sonnets themselves are famously recondite, suggesting a deeper story hidden between the lines, it is only natural to think that this introductory page is similarly multi-layered. The Elizabethans were addicted to codes and word games, and often used them to convey messages that could not pass muster with the censors; Elizabethan England was, after all, a police state with a network of spies and informers, a secret tribunal (the Star Chamber), an official torturer (Topcliffe), and a paranoid monarch whose closest confidant was the nation's top spymaster (Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley). It was also a country facing a succession crisis and leaning perilously toward civil war. Under the circumstances it would have been astonishing if the educated public had not found ways of sending or publishing concealed messages.

But is there a message hidden here? Many attempts at finding one have been made, and most are not very convincing. One of them, however, strikes me as simple and elegant enough to possibly - just possibly - have some merit.

I read about it in the Summer 2006 edition of Shakespeare Matters, the journal of the Shakespeare Fellowship, which is online in PDF form here. The article is "Some Principles of Sonnet Dedication Solutions," by David Moffat, and it starts on page 18. After examining some unsatisfactory solutions to the supposed crypotogram, Moffat tentatively offers his own. 

He notes, as have many others, that the periods between words serve as "delimiters," telling us what counts as a full word and what doesn't. Thus, "Mr. W. H." counts as three words, or three delimited items. The hyphens, as in "ever-living," are printed to resemble periods and serve the same purpose.

Now if we count the lines, we note that they come in clusters of 6, 2, and 4. One simple system of cryptography uses the layout to provide the key to the code. In this case, the key provided by the clusters and the periods might be that we are intended to read every sixth word of the first cluster, every second word of the second cluster, and every fourth word of the third cluster.  

If we do this, Moffat observes, we obtain the following:

These all by ever poet adventurer. 

Not very impressive, you say? But wait. Three details require mentioning. 

First, the name of Edward de Vere could be represented as E. Vere, or sometimes E. Ver (Ver being the older form of the family name), and, in poetry, "Ever." The word ever is also an anagram of Vere. 

Second, de Vere was certainly an adventurer. He traveled widely throughout Europe, met with many of the outstanding intellectual and political figures of his day, excelled at jousting, served his country in wartime, and was one of the most colorful figures at Elizabeth's court. He was also a highly regarded poet in his own right.

Finally, the name Edward de Vere consists of three blocks of letters: 6, 2, and 4. This may be a coincidence, but it's an interesting one. 

With only a few changes in punctuation, then, the message - if there is one - can read:

These all by E. Ver, poet, adventurer. 

Proof of anything? Not really. Even Moffat doesn't say so. 

But it does make you think ...

Merry Christmas!

Book review: Randi's Prize

There are thousands of books about the paranormal, but few of them approach the subject as judiciously as Randi's Prize, by Robert McLuhan. 

Though the title suggests that the main focus will be James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, the book actually ranges much more widely, as McLuhan examines skeptical responses to such reported phenomena as poltergeists, apparitions, telepathy, mediumship, near-death experiences, and children's memories of past lives. In each case he shows that the skeptical explanation, while superficially persuasive, falls short when subjected to close analysis. His conclusion is that most skeptics do not really engage with the material they are critiquing; in their rush to explain it away, they tend to fasten on the first non-paranormal interpretation they can think of, even if it does not fit all the facts or is grossly implausible in its own right. McLuhan describes this tendency as "rational gravity" - the pull exerted by the "rational," mechanistic worldview that instinctively rejects anomalous phenomena. 

What I appreciated above all about Randi's Prize was the care shown by McLuhan in approaching these controversial claims. This is not one of those books that take all paranormal accounts at face value. Quite the opposite. Throughout the book, McLuhan details his struggle to determine the truth about cases that have been subject to starkly different interpretations by skeptics on one hand and parapsychologists on the other. In this respect, the book reminded me of Sittings with Eusapia Palladino, by Everard Feilding, which documented the gradual change in attitude on the part of Feilding and other investigators at the famous Naples séances. Fittingly, the first item that McLuhan has made available in his new archive of original paranormal literature is Feilding's report on the Naples investigation.

A good example of McLuhan's cautious approach is found in his treatment of the celebrated Tina Resch poltergeist case early in the book. First he provides a brief summary similar to what we would read in any standard skeptical account:

[Paul] Kurtz mentions an episode that occurred in Columbus, Ohio in 1984. In March of that year stories started appearing in the local press about strange goings on in the home of the Resch family, which some speculated were caused by a poltergeist. Eventually a press photographer snapped the spook in action, and the photo was syndicated around the world -- causing a sensation. In reality, Kurtz says, the effects were being caused by the family's fourteen-year-old foster child, Tina, as James Randi discovered when he went to investigate. 

A few pages later he returns to the case and presents the skeptical side in more detail, pointing out that when Randi appeared in Columbus, the Resch family would not let him into their house. To debunk the story, Randi examined the famous newspaper photo and some unpublished frames, concluding that Tina could have faked the effect captured on film. He also viewed a videotape that clearly showed Tina simulating some of the subsequent "phenomena." Unaware that the camera was still running, Tina, in Randi's words, "reached up and pulled a table-lamp toward herself, simultaneously jumping away, letting out a series of bleating noises, and feigning, quite effectively, a reaction of stark terror." Furthermore, Randi found that the reporters covering the case were unimpressed with it, and he cast doubt on the capabilities of the parapsychologist, William Roll, who investigated and vouched for the claims.

McLuhan observes, "All this struck me as effective debunking. It didn't demonstrate beyond doubt that the Columbus affair was a hoax, but it did weaken any sense I might have had that the incident was paranormal." 

But he doesn't end there. As he read many other accounts of poltergeist incidents, McLuhan couldn't help noticing repetitive patterns. The Columbus case was not an isolated episode; it fit into a larger framework, an ongoing series of similar events reported throughout history. He notes:

Despite their decidedly odd character, the claims are quite uniform. When Gauld and Cornell analyzed their five hundred cases [in their 1979 book Poltergeists] they found that nearly half began with noises that were described as raps or 'knockings' or sometimes as loud thumps or thuds or 'bangings'. The descriptions suggested that they often occurred after dark, often close to someone who was sleeping, although they were sometimes also heard in daylight hours.

He gives specific examples, one from the mid-19th century and three from the mid- to late-20th century, noting that "these examples make up only about three per cent of Gauld and Cornell's data." 

Then there was the psychological context. McLuhan writes:

If you read the literature on the subject you'll find that poltergeist incidents tend to be extraordinarily fraught. The people involved are overcome with panic and confusion, not just for a few hours but four days and weeks on end. This isn't an effect one expects to result from your children's pranks. And ... I often wondered how these children managed to create such convincing illusions and remain undetected.... When it comes to the anomalous movement of objects, it's striking how insistent witnesses are that no one present was responsible. They could see no link between the disturbance and any human action -- and it completely spooked them.

Again he gives specific examples. 

Returning to the Columbus case, he tells us, "There is a quantity of suggestive detail in the investigators' accounts that creates a rather different picture from the one provided by skeptics.... Immediately prior to the incidents Tina had been in growing conflict with her adoptive parents, particularly with her father John." Strange incidents with digital clock radios soon followed. Although Tina's parents initially suspected her of tricking them, they eventually found that the phenomena continued even when Tina could not possibly be at fault.

McLuhan writes:

The accumulated effect of reading [various poltergeist accounts] was to create in my mind the sense of a very distinct natural phenomenon, one which is widely (if infrequently) reported and quite unlike any other feature of human experience, yet which can be identified by the same group of curious features.

It was with this thought in mind that I started to review Randi's debunking in a different light. I realized that his article didn't get to grips with the goings on in Columbus in any depth; his approach was mostly centred on a single detail -- that is the photograph.... If you think about it, an image that claims to show psychokinesis in action is a moot object: there is nothing it could depict that could not easily be faked.... 

So Randi was simply adding substance to what many people would suspect anyway. But by doing so, and in such detail, he created the illusion that he had penetrated the whole mystery, despite the fact that he had not observed any of the claimed effects at first hand or interviewed any of the main witnesses....

Then there's Randi's off-repeated insistence that witnesses jump to conclusions: I did not feel this was really confirmed in the research literature. People who experience these disturbances, I found, tend to react exactly as one might expect -- and probably as you or I would. They don't instantly imagine that something paranormal is occurring; on the contrary, they start by assuming that a trick is being played, and, if a child seems to have something to do with it, treat him or her as the likely culprit.

Professional investigators also do the obvious things -- like taking up the floorboards to see if the noises have some concealed source, or setting traps that might reveal hoaxing by family members. As I say, in some cases they decide that trickery is probably the whole cause; in others they suspect it has a genuine basis, but subsequent trickery by the child makes that conclusion difficult to insist on. In other cases, the force of repeated observations at close quarters compels them to drop the idea of trickery altogether and look for something else. In short, they show what most people would consider to be proper judiciousness, discrimination and caution....

My impression is that the sceptics are not particularly concerned by [the psychological dimensions of the cases]. Nor do they seem bothered about the level of conjuring skill that their scenarios require -- something which I have to say has left me more than somewhat sceptical. I don't mean just the skill needed to achieve the effects that witnesses describe, but also the fact that the children seem to acquire such skills without ever giving anything away. I could accept that an emotionally confused girl like Tina Resch might want to attract attention, but it was a stretch to imagine that a person in her state of mind could spend months clandestinely preparing for her venture by learning how to make furniture come alive, let alone put this into effect without being detected.

He goes on to observe that the professional skeptics, in approaching poltergeist cases, generally cite only "a single contemporary investigator -- William Roll" and mostly refer to a handful of popularized incidents -- "Amityville and Borley, neither of which parapsychologists take very seriously, and which in any case are not really typical; Columbus and Seaford, which were dealt with respectively by Randi and [Milbourne] Christopher but ineffectually, as neither of them gained access to the houses involved, or interviewed the main witnesses, or observed any of the phenomena in question; and various incidents in Christopher's clutch of press cuttings, which give too little information to draw any reliable conclusions from." He writes:

The skeptics say they can't be expected to check out the truth of every claim.... Most people would consider this to be a perfectly fair argument. But they will be less impressed when they discover that debunking skeptics have made little attempt to investigate any such incidents. The implications the critics artfully convey is false: there is no independent body of cases that they have examined at first hand and satisfactorily explained in non-paranormal terms.

I might add that one argument sometimes made by skeptics to discredit Tina is that, later on, as a young adult, she got into trouble with the law. The implication they draw is that she was never trustworthy to begin with. But it would be at least equally valid to point out that the focal figures in most poltergeist cases are troubled adolescents, who of course are not unlikely to grow into troubled adults.

Coverage of poltergeists takes up only a small part of Randi's Prize. The book is crowded with specific cases in a variety of areas, examined in detail. For instance, in the second chapter, McLuhan looks at an argument made by British skeptic Richard Wiseman, who has claimed that Eusapia Palladino could have been assisted by an accomplice who entered the locked seance room through a trapdoor. McLuhan writes:

Much later, when I had spent some time reading and thinking about Palladino, I returned for another look [at the skeptical argument], and it was only then that I grasped how cheeky Wiseman was being. As his critics pointed out, Palladino was tested many times in many different situations and [Wiseman's suggested] modus operandi could not apply to all of them (in the south of France she was tested successfully in the open air). One would think that a method that involves clambering through a hole in the wall a few feet away from three investigators on the look-out for tricks, concealed merely by a flimsy curtain, is hard to sustain. In any case, the report [of Palladino's sittings in Naples] mentions three occasions when the investigators looked behind the curtain, which would at once have given the game away.... On one occasion the phenomena continued after the sitting had ended, when they had turned up the lights and pulled back the curtain.

Here, looking at the case in detail doesn't merely weaken the skeptical explanation; it demolishes it. But skeptics like Wiseman seem to count on the fact that most of their readers are unfamiliar with the details, leaving them free to offer facile interpretations that reassure their audience, even while ignoring bothersome facts that they themselves must be aware of. 

All told, Randi's Prize is a brisk, bracing look at this continuing controversy, exhaustively researched and offering 48 pages of endnotes and a 28-page bibliography. It's a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in parapsychology and its critics. 

What's more, the author is currently giving away free copies of the e-book to anyone who asks! I don't know how long this promotion will last, so if you're interested in the book, you'll never have a better time to get a copy. And I think readers of this blog will find it highly worthwhile.

Just don't expect a detailed treatment of the Million Dollar Challenge. Robert McLuhan has bigger fish to fry.  

Se7en

One of the most common objections to the idea of mediumistic communication is that no voice from beyond the grave has succeeded in revealing the contents of a sealed envelope containing a posthumous message. Yet I recently came across a case which contradicts this claim, at least in part. 

The first account I read of this case is found in Trevor Hamilton's 2009 biography, Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death. In a section on the so-called cross-correspondences, Hamilton writes:

For example, in 1904 JG Piddington of the SPR [Society for Psychical Research] sealed an envelope containing the phrase that if he were a spirit he would try to transmit the number seven in some form or another. Over the next few years six mediums received scripts playing with the number seven in various ways and on the 27th of January 1909, Mrs Verrall wrote: 'Has he (Piddington) found the bits of his sentence scattered among you all?' Mrs Verrall did not get to know of Piddington's sealed letter till 30th of March 1909. This, of course, destroyed the purpose of Piddington's original sealed envelope, which was intended to provide some kind of after-death puzzle which the discarnate Piddington could solve, thus 'proving' his survival. However, it did suggest discarnate awareness of the process and some element of co-ordinated design to demonstrate that awareness. [p. 293]

This intrigued me, so I did a little Googling and came across a 1954 book by Alson J. Smith titled Immortality: The Scientific Evidence. On pages 76-77, Smith writes:

A number of years ago Mr. J.G. Piddington of the society for psychical research wrote a letter which was not to be opened until after his death. He then sealed it and put it away in a safe to which only he had access. In the letter he commented on his tendency, both as a child and as an adult, to play constantly with the number seven. He counted railroad cars in groups of seven, counted up to seven before making a decision, walked in a seven-step rhythm, etc. In psychology this is known as they "tic," and Piddington referred to it as a tic in his "posthumous" letter. Piddington said nothing to anyone about the letter.

Three years later, with the letter still reposing unopened in the safe and Piddington still alive, the automatists -- Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Holland, and Mrs. Piper (who was an automatist as well as a trance medium) began to get a lot of references to "seven" in their scripts. The phrase "we are seven" appeared, and also constant references to the clock with its "tick, tick." So often did the references to "seven" and to "tick" appear that it was obvious that they had some significance. Finally Piddington revealed the contents of his letter.

How account for this? Had the mind of Piddington leaked the information telepathically to the automatists? Or had they exercised clairvoyance to see the contents of the sealed letter in the safe?

Both of these possibilities are intriguing in themselves, but there was still another and even more interesting possible explanation. At the same time that Piddington had been writing his "posthumous" letter in London, the automatic script of Mrs. Verrall in Cambridge had been full of messages that purported to come from Frederic W. H. Myers, who had died sometime before. Even as Piddington wrote his letter, Mrs. Verrall had been writing: "Note the hour -- in London half the message has come ... surely Piddington will see that this is enough and should be acted upon." Later "Myers" wrote again through Mrs. Merrill: "Has Piddington found the bits of his sentence scattered among you all?" Remember, all this time Mrs. Verrall and the other automatists had no conscious knowledge that Piddington had written any letter at all. The third possibility, therefore, was that the appearance of bits of Piddington's letter in the scripts of the automatists was due to deliberate action on the part of a deceased personality (Myers) who had chosen this method of indicating his survival to his friends.

Finally I looked for the source cited by Trevor Hamilton in his biography -- pages 175-181 of a book called Zoar; or, The Evidence of Psychical Research concerning Survival, by W. H. Salter, published in 1961. Happily, this book is available on Google Books, and most of the relevant pages are present, though a couple are omitted. Salter's book provides the fullest account of this episode that I've read, though an article in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, cited by Salter, evidently goes into even more detail. 

Salter writes:

The Sevens case (Proc. XXIV, 222-253) was much more diffuse and complex. In all its stages it was spread over four and half years, from July 1904 to January 1909, but with a stage of marked activity between the 20th of April and 24th of July 1908. Seven persons were involved, three of them being the principal members at that time of the SPR group of automatists (Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Holland, and my wife, H.V.). The other four were the medium, Mrs. Piper, two minor automatists, Mrs. Frith and Mrs. Home, and Piddington....

On the 13 July 1904, at some time in the middle of the day that cannot be exactly fixed, Piddington wrote a "posthumous letter" at the Society's room in London, sealed it, and gave it to Alice Johnson to keep. The letter began as follows: --

"If ever I am a spirit, and if I can communicate, I shall endeavour to remember to transmit in some form or other the number SEVEN.

"As it seems to me not improbable that it may be difficult to transmit an exact word or idea, it may be that, unable to transmit the simple word seven in writing or as a written number, 7, I should try to communicate such things as: 'The seven lamps of architecture', 'The seven sleepers of Ephesus', 'unto seventy times seven', 'We are seven', and so forth. The reason why I select the word seven is because seven has been a kind of tic with me ever since my early boyhood...."

He continues by referring to his habit of taking it as a good omen for his golf if he saw from the links a railway engine drawing seven carriages, and added that he had purposely cultivated "this tic", as the memory of it might "survive the shock of death".

On the same day at 11.15 a.m. Mrs. Verrall, who was then in Surrey, wrote a script which, after some nonsensical Latin and Greek words, continued: --

"But that is not right -- it is something contemporary that you are to record -- note the hour -- in London half the message has come."

The rest of the script purports to give the contents of Myers's "posthumous" envelope [a different posthumous test, with ambiguous results] ... and ends "Surely Piddington will see that this is enough and should be acted on. F.W.HM." This is, I think, the only instance of any direction in all Mrs. Verrall's scripts to "note the hour" because "something contemporary" was to be recorded. The only "contemporary" event relevant to communications from Myers was Piddington's "posthumous" letter. Although this was probably not written until shortly after Mrs. Verrall's script, and although the phrase "half the message" is not altogether appropriate to this opening move in a cross-correspondence involving six other persons, nevertheless the script may, without too great a strain, be regarded as referring to Piddington's "posthumous" letter, of the existence of which Mrs. Verrall had no normal knowledge.

Salter then gives examples of the number seven appearing in the automatists' scripts and utterances from 1907 onward. These include:

Helen Verrall (Salter's wife "H.V.") wrote, "A rainbow in the sky ... The sevenfold radiance from a single light ..."

Various automatists made allusions to Dante's Divine Comedy, involving the Seventh Circle of Purgatory and seven candlesticks whose flames painted colors of the rainbow in the sky. 

Mrs. Piper said in semi-trance, "We are Seven. I said Clock! Tick, tick, tick." (Note that "we are seven" is the exact phrase found in Piddington's letter.)

Through her Myers persona, Helen Verrall wrote of a seven-branched candlestick and the seven colors of the rainbow, and also wrote "we are seven."

In trance, Mrs. Piper said, "Seven of us, 7, seven."

Mrs. Frith wrote, "... till the mystic seven lights up the golden candlestick of dawn."

Mrs. Holland wrote, "There should be at least three in accord and if possible seven." She specified the six automatists involved in this cross-correspondence as six of the "seven," though Piddington himself was not mentioned.

Through her Myers persona, Mrs. Home wrote, "Seven times seven and seventy-seven send that burden of my words to others."

Salter continues: 

On the 19th November 1908 Alice Johnson told Piddington of a sevens cross-correspondence with Dante allusions to be found in the scripts.... On the 27th November 1908, after he and she had examined the case more thoroughly, he told her that the subject of his "posthumous" letter was variations on the theme of Seven. She then got out his sealed envelope from the locked drawer where she had kept it. They examined it, found to the seals intact and opened it. Until that day she had had no inkling what the contents might be.

On the 27th January 1909 Mrs. Verrall, who did not even know that such an envelope existed, wrote a script ending with the following passage: --

"And ask what has been the success of Piddington's last experiment? Has he found the bits of his famous sentence scattered among you all? And does he think that is accident, or started by one of you? But even if the source is human, who carries the thoughts to the receivers? Ask him that. F.W.H.M."

Nothing is airtight, but this strikes me as an exceptionally strong case, and one that deserves to be better known.

Listen up

All of Robert McLuhan's new book Randi's Prize is well worth reading, but I was particularly struck by his thoughts on pages 262 through 266, in which he talks about the importance of actually listening to the subjective impressions of near-death experiencers.

Here are some excerpts. 

[A] reluctance to listen continues to be characteristic of professional sceptics. Their defensive posture leads them to talk about claims as opposed to experiences, too preoccupied by the challenge to their imaginations to think at all closely about what is actually being said. From their perspective, people who report paranormal-seeming incidents are creating problems, if not actually setting out to cause mischief, and this point of view is bound to create a distortion in their readers' minds. Their insistence that these are mere anecdotes -- and for that reason unscientific, undeserving of serious attention -- means they lack exposure to first-hand testimony. Blackmore's Dying to Live, rather tellingly, is sparsely illustrated with direct speech: a comparatively bland extract from an individual's reported experience at the beginning is followed here and there by a few short quotes, none of which begin to convey the intensity of the experience as it appears elsewhere.

By contrast near-death experience researchers' studies are laced with copious quotations from individuals who are only too happy to describe something they may have kept locked up for years. This brings the phenomenon alive for the reader; it's more than just a concept, an idea. There's a palpable sense of awe in the first-hand accounts, of euphoria, exultation and mystery....

McLuhan then presents a few random excerpts from Kenneth Ring's book Heading Toward Omega.

... if you took the one thousand best things that ever happened to you in your life and multiplied by a million, maybe you could get close to this feeling...

... this wonderful, wonderful feeling of this light...

There was the warmest, most wonderful love. Love all around me... I felt light-good-happy-joy-at-ease.

I can't begin to describe in human terms the feeling I had at what I saw. It was a giant infinite world of calm, and love, and energy and beauty.

As I absorbed the energy, I sensed what I can only describe as bliss. That is such a little word, but the feeling was dynamic, rolling, magnificent, expanding, ecstatic -- Bliss.

McLuhan continues:

How many people can say that anything -- anything -- they have experienced in this world matches up to these descriptions? My point is that, without such live comments, readers may be left with the impression that what people experience can be described as 'euphoria' or 'a tremendous sense of well-being', a linguistic down-sizing which makes it comparable to the effects of a stiff whiskey or a good workout at the gym. It's then all the easier for a sceptic to argue that it's explicable in neuroscientific terms, a release of endorphins perhaps....

It's remarkable enough that a person's inner consciousness seems to persist when all life functions have apparently ceased, but there's more: the individual also experiences a mega-powerful attack of conscience [in the life review]....

Describing the stage when they are interacting with the 'light', they don't say they gained a sudden insight into how other people felt; they say they experienced the other person's feelings -- as if they were their own. A woman sees the younger sister she bullied when she was young, and for the first time feels what the little girl felt, understanding the full extent of her anguish. A hit-man becomes aware of families of the people he murdered and is swamped by their feelings of devastation. The feedback is physical as well: a truck driver who once beat up a pedestrian in a fit of road rage feels his own fist crashing into his own face.

[quoting the truck driver:] And I felt the indignation, the rage, the embarrassment, the frustration, the physical pain. I felt my teeth going through my lower lip -- in other words, I was in that man's eyes. I was in that man's body. I experienced everything of that into relationship between [myself] and that man that day.

These are powerful images, and they are too widely reported in the research material to be dismissed as spurious; they form a clear pattern. Here too, I found it hard to resist the idea that the process is in some way intended to impact on attitudes and behaviour: people who experience it are often profoundly changed and they go through personal and professional upheavals as a result. How do we account for such a thing? I'd love to hear a scientific theory that could explain how one shares other people's feelings, not in the conventional way of being able to sense them, or name or describe them, but to experience them exactly as if they were their own, and moreover at a time when all life functions appear to have ceased. I don't mean some formula couldn't be worked out, but it's yet one more feature to load onto a framework already tottering under the burden of sceptical speculation.

In reading this, I was reminded of Dr. Gerald Woerlee's recent review of Pim Van Lommel's book Consciousness Beyond Life. As a firm skeptic, Woerlee was unimpressed with Lommel's evidence for life after death. He was particularly unenthusiastic about Chapter 10, writing:

What a strange interlude is all that can be said about this chapter. Sandwiched, seemingly at random between other heavy and difficult "scientifically" oriented chapters, we have a chapter which is no more than the very personal and emotionally laden extensive account of the NDE undergone by Mrs Monique Hennequin. Pim van Lommel gives no analysis. The account is placed there as is - nothing else. It is an emotional interlude between difficult chapters which many of the less well educated readers might find boring or too difficult.

This arrangement puzzled me, until I related it to the format of the public lectures given by Pim van Lommel, as well as his television appearances. These public and television appearance nearly always include a person who tells of their NDE. Usually it is a well-spoken woman, who is able to express the content of her NDE in terms everyone can understand, as well as fully convey the emotional impact this NDE had on her life. This is something to which most of the audience can relate. Most people ignore much of the scientific talk, but the public testimony really is an effective instrument binding the audience to the speaker regardless of what is said. Jeffrey Long used the same technique during his television appearances to promote his book "Evidence for the Afterlife". Oprah Winfrey and "Dr. Phil" also use this same presentation technique to very good effect in their popular television shows.

He concludes: 

"Consciousness Beyond Life" is no more than a book written in the form of the popular "Oprah Winfrey style" television shows!

This is a pretty good illustration of the difference between the skeptical approach and the approach taken by more sympathetic researchers. To the latter, the profound emotional meaning of the NDE is key to understanding and appreciating the phenomenon. To the former, on the other hand, the patient's emotional response is merely an annoying, unscientific distraction. 

Angel band

The recent publication of Glimpses of Eternity by Raymond Moody and Paul Perry has raised awareness of what the authors call "shared death experiences." These are cases in which the visions of the dying person are shared by someone close by. As the authors point out, stories of this type have circulated for many years. Several of them are found in the 1918 book The Ministry of Angels: Here and Beyond, by Joy Snell. (Amazon sells a new edition.) 

Snell, who apparently manifested psychic powers from an early age, worked for a while at a hospital, where she was frequently in attendance on the dying. She records various instances of what we might now call SDEs. 

Here are some examples from the book. Though written in the florid style that was conventional at the time, they match up pretty well with the more modern accounts collected by Moody:

But whether the deaths I witnessed were peaceful or painful, preceded or not preceded by the recognition of some one from the other world, always, immediately after the physical life had ceased, I saw the spirit form take shape above the dead body, in appearance a glorified replica of it. However painful might have been the last hours, however protracted and wasting the illness, no trace of suffering or disease appeared upon the radiant spirit face. Striking, at times, was the contrast which it presented to the human features, pain-distorted and deep-furrowed by suffering.... [p. 40]

It was about six months after I began to work at a hospital that it was revealed to me that the dying often really do see those who have come from the realms of spirit life to welcome them on their entrance into another state of existence.

The first time that I received this ocular proof was at the death of L------, a sweet girl of seventeen, who was a personal friend of mine. She was a victim of consumption [tuberculosis]. She suffered no pain, but the weariness that comes from extreme weakness and debility was heavy upon her and she yearned for rest.

A short time before she expired I became aware that two spirit forms were standing by the bedside, one on either side of it. I did not see them enter the room; they were standing by the bedside when they first became visible to me, but I could see them as distinctly as I could any of the human occupants of the room. In my own thoughts I have always called these bright beings from another world, angels, and as such I shall hereafter speak of them. I recognized their faces as those of two girls who had been the closest friends of the girl who was dying. They had passed away a year before and were then about her own age.

Just before they appeared the dying girl exclaimed: "It has grown suddenly dark; I cannot see anything!" But she recognized them immediately. A smile, beautiful to see, lit up her face. She stretched forth her hands and in joyous tones exclaimed: "Oh, you have come to take me away! I am glad, for I am very tired."...

[The girl expired very shortly afterward, still smiling at the "angels."]

The two angels remained by the bedside during the brief space that elapsed before the spirit form took shape above the body in which the physical life had ceased. Then they rose and stood for a few moments one on each side of her, who was now like unto themselves. And three angels went from the room where, a short time before, there had been only two. [pp. 41-43]

[Later, Snell recounts the case of a dying father reunited with his previously deceased son.]

Then again I witnessed what had now become a familiar spectacle to me -- the formation of the spirit body above the discarded earthly body. When it was complete the angel child clasped the hand of the now angel father, each gazed into the eyes of the other with an expression of the tenderest affection, and with faces aglow with joy and happiness they vanished. [pp. 46-47]

For similar accounts from a little earlier in history, see my posts on Andrew Jackson Davis here and here.

Such narratives, in themselves, may not prove anything, but the fact that people have been reporting these phenomena pretty consistently for a hundred years or more ought to suggest that something is going on. After all, it's unlikely that most of Moody's informants had ever heard of Joy Snell or other early Spiritualist writers.

It might be argued that the imagery of a spirit form taking shape above a dying person while attended by angels is simply part of the Western mythos, and as such it finds expression in hallucinations. There are at least two responses to this argument: First, one would expect much greater variation in the reports than there seems to be (e.g., appearances by Jesus or the Virgin Mary, etc.); and second, how did this mythos develop in the first place, if not through SDEs, NDEs, and similar events? 

A quantum of solace

Interesting news from November 30 about a new experiment testing quantum entanglement (nonlocality). It's increasingly hard to deny that a particle can directly influence its entangled partner regardless of distance. 

Regular readers know that I think the Virtual Reality Interpretation of quantum mechanics looks promising as a way of making sense of all this.

Caveat: I'm not a physicist, so my opinion may be entirely worthless.