Recently I came across some comments on a skeptics' message board impugning the mediumship of Leonora Piper. Some of these comments, I felt, showed a lack of familiarity with the details of the case. One point in particular stuck in my craw.
A skeptic pointed out that an investigator had asked Mrs. Piper, while she was in trance, what the word Lethe suggested to her. She replied with a string of words that did not directly define or describe the river Lethe - which, in Greek mythology, is the river from which spirits drink in order to erase their earthly memories before being reincarnated. Since Piper's reply did not directly answer the question, the skeptic concluded that she had said nothing of interest and that the Lethe case could be dismissed.
But this is far from being true. The Lethe case is extremely interesting and valuable, so much so that Chris Carter devotes an entire chapter to it – titled "The Lethe Experiment" – in his outstanding book Science and the Afterlife Experience.
I won't attempt to summarize Carter's entire treatment of the case here. After all, he spends more than 25 pages on it. But I do want to address the question of whether Mrs. Piper's response contains any interesting information.
The question asked by the researcher, G.B. Dorr, was "What does the word Lethe suggest to you?"
The first reply - produced in writing - was: "Lethe. Do you refer to one of my poems, Lethe?"
The purported communicator was F.W.H. Myers, who was a poet of some repute and an expert in the classics. Dorr, however, did not believe that Myers had written any poems on the subject of the river Lethe, so he found the answer meaningless.
As Chris Carter tells it,
Dorr answered in the negative, and pressed the communicator for an answer, getting in response some disjointed words, including "Winds," "Greece," and then:
... It is all clear. Do you remember Cave?
Dorr: I think you are confused about this. It was a water, not a wind, and it was in Hades, where the Styx was and the Elysian fields. Do you recall it now?
Myers: Lethe. Shore - of course I do. Lethe Hades beautiful river - Lethe. Underground.
Thinking the medium was growing tired, Dorr shortly afterward closed the sitting. As Mrs. Piper came out of her trance (a period called the "waking stage"), she said the following:
Sybil - Olympus - water - Lethe - delighted - sad - lovely - mate. -
Put them all together …
Entwined love – beautiful shores …
Warm – sunlit – love.
Lime leaf – heart – sword – arrow
I shot an arrow through the air
And it fell I know not where
Mrs. Piper then described a vision of a woman in the air with a bow and two arrows.
(For a fuller excerpt of the material produced at this sitting, see this Google Books entry.)
It is true that on the surface this appears to be so much gobbledygook. But it's worth remembering that at this stage of the investigation of Piper's mediumship, the cross correspondences were already underway. In these elaborate experiments, complicated messages were conveyed piecemeal through a variety of mediums. Accordingly, the investigators were on the lookout for similar puzzles that might crop up in the communications.
The next day, Dorr again met with Mrs. Piper. This time the ostensible communicators were Richard Hodgson and F.W.H. Myers. Here is part of the transcript, quoted by Carter:
Hodgson: Now Myers feels a little distressed because he thinks you did not quite understand his replies to your last question ... he did give you one or two replies which he and I both fear you did not understand.
Dorr: No, it wasn't clear. I worked over the sittings yesterday till nearly midnight, trying to straighten things out.
Hodgson: Let Myers explain what he thinks you did not grasp.
Myers: I wrote in reply to your last inquiry Cave – Lethe.
Dorr: I asked him whether the word Lethe recalled anything to him.
Hodgson: He [Myers] replied Cave – Banks – Shore … He drew the form – a picture of Iris with an arrow.
Dorr: But he spoke of winds.
Myers: Yes, clouds – arrow – Iris – Cave – Mor MOR Latin for sleep Morpheus – Cave. Sticks in my mind can't you help me?
Dorr: Good. I understand what you're after now. But can't you make it clearer about what there was peculiar about the waters of Lethe?
Myers: Yes, I suppose you think that I am affected in the same way but I am not. [emphasis in original]
The two sittings, taken together, make it clear that Myers is attempting to create another puzzle to be solved by the researchers. Instead of simply defining Lethe as the river of forgetfulness, Myers' answers range over a variety of other topics. Yet we know he could have defined it, because his last answer ("I suppose you think that I am affected in the same way") shows that he understands the central issue of forgetfulness.
What was the point of such a puzzle? SPR researchers at the time were divided over whether Piper's communications came from deceased persons or from her own subconscious mind by way of telepathy. Had Myers simply defined Lethe, giving the standard definition found in any textbook, the answer would have been of little interest. It could always be argued that Piper, even though she had almost no knowledge of the classics, might have come across the term at some point and remembered it subconsciously; or that she had obtained the information from Dorr's mind or from the mind of some other living person. A standard, boilerplate definition of Lethe could be picked up almost anywhere.
Instead, the "Myers" communicator answered in a complex way that required analysis and research to decode. But once the message was deciphered, the particulars that he listed were shown to relate to the living Myers' interests and classical training in a distinctive way.
The researcher who unraveled the case was J.G. Piddington. Piddington knew that, in life, Myers had been a great admirer of the Roman poet Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses. In reading the Metamorphoses, Piddington found the story of Ceyx and his wife Alcyone in Book 11. This immediately piqued his interest, because in the waking stage of the second sitting with Dorr, Mrs. Piper had reported seeing Myers "writing on the wall … C [a pause] Y X." And at the next sitting, the entranced medium wrote the letters CYNX. Naturally, then, the name Ceyx in Ovid caught Piddington's attention.
The story, in condensed form, is as follows:
King Ceyx died at sea. Iris, goddess of the rainbow, was dispatched from Olympus to visit Somnus, god of sleep, and to instruct him to send a dream messenger to Ceyx's wife Alcyone, daughter of the god of Winds. Iris traveled over a rainbow to reach Somnus' cloud-shrouded Cave of Sleep, from which issued the river Lethe. Having received Iris' message, Somnus chose his son Morpheus to deliver the news to Alcyone. The distraught widow ran to the seashore and tried to drown herself, but was transformed into a kingfisher and reunited with her husband. (Adapted from Carter, following Gauld and Piddington)
Remember that Dorr's question was "What does the word Lethe suggest to you?" This is a more open-ended question than simply asking for a definition. What the word apparently suggested to Myers was the story of Ceyx and his widow, a story that includes the following elements, all mentioned in Mrs. Piper's sittings:
Ceyxwinds
Greece
Olympus
cave
Lethe
shore
entwined love
Iris
bow
clouds
Morpheus
sleep
sad
mate
Chris Carter sums up:
As an expert in the classics who had studied Ovid in detail, Myers would have been familiar with Ovid's description of the cave as the source of the river in Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone, in which the rainbow goddess Iris visits the god of sleep.
Was the story sufficiently well known that Piper or Dorr might have been familiar with it? If so, it could have been pulled from Mrs. Piper's subconscious or from Dorr's memory (via telepathy). Neither Piper nor Dorr had read Ovid. Piddington found only two books besides Metamorphoses that included all the necessary details. Piper had never read either of those books (her bookshelves were searched and her daughters questioned in order to confirm it). Dorr had read one of the books, Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, in childhood, but remembered almost nothing about it.
Still, perhaps Dorr subconsciously retained the memory, and Mrs. Piper accessed it? The sticking point for this hypothesis is that several additional communications from Myers during the same period touched on stories told in Books 10 and 11 of Metamorphoses - stories that are not connected with each other in Bulfinch, or indeed in any source that Piddington could find, other than Ovid.
There's another wrinkle. Chris Carter tells us:
Three out of the four stories told in Metamorphoses X and XI to which "Myers" alluded are also alluded to in three consecutive stanzas of one of Frederic Myer's poems; and Piddington found that the order in which the allusions emerge in the trance and in the poem are the same.
The allusions in question were to Iris, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pygmalion. They emerged spontaneously in that order in the trances: Iris on March 23 and 24, Orpheus and Eurydice on March 30, and Pygmalion on April 6.
So we can see that, if any known mind were ever likely to think of these specific stories, in this particular sequence, it would not be the mind of G.B. Dorr, much less that of Mrs. Piper. It would be the mind of F.W.H. Myers.
Other elements of the communications were decoded, as well. For instance, in the waking stage of her first trance, Mrs. Piper mentioned Sybil. The classical scholar Myers would have known that the Sybil (a prophetess) was Aeneas' guide during his visit to the underworld, which included a stop at the river Lethe.
The Lethe episode is actually more complex even than this, involving further experiments conducted by Oliver Lodge in England, working with the medium Mrs. Willett. The messages that came through Mrs. Willett were at least as interesting and evidential as the product of Mrs. Piper's sessions. Unfortunately, I can't present the full case in a relatively brief post.
Even so, I hope I've shown that Mrs. Piper's answers were not meaningless or random, and that they did bear directly on the question of what the word Lethe would have suggested to Myers.
Oh, one more thing. Recall that Myers' initial response to Dorr was "Do you refer to one of my poems …?" Dorr found this answer meaningless because Myers had not written any verses about Lethe.
Except, as it turned out, he had. In a long poem called "The Passing of Youth," Myers wrote:
... God to the innumerous souls in great array
To Lethe summons by a wondrous way
Till these therein their ancient pain forgive
Forget their life, and will again to live.
Here's a synchronicity for you: I was just last week attempting to defend Piper's Wikipedia page from the skeptics patrol, which had the following argument:
1) Piper is a Spiritualist.
2) Spiritualism cannot be real because it conflicts with Science.
3) Wikipedia cannot conflict with Science, the ultimate arbitrator of reliable knowledge.
4) Therefore, any positive-sounding material on Piper's page violates Wikipedia's commitment to reliable knowledge.
5) Therefore, Piper should be described as a con artist, against EVERY biography about her ever written.
I disagreed, so I was branded a Spiritualist and harassed, even though I don't believe in communication from spirits.
Posted by: Shii | August 30, 2013 at 01:29 AM
Dear Michael,
Instead of reading pseudoskeptics blitherings. I have several dozen folds of used toilet paper you can have. FOB.
The Od ;)
Posted by: The Od | August 30, 2013 at 10:32 AM
Shil, I've been told essentially the same thing, though I've never tried to edit a Wiki article. Skeptics say that Wiki's official policy is to present mainstream information, not "fringe" theories. Since they define parapsychology as "fringe," they say that pro-parapsychology edits violate the policy.
On one hand, I can see a certain logic to this. WIki doesn't want to become a clearinghouse for every crackpot theory.
On the other hand, it's not clear that parapsychology really is a "fringe" science anymore. The ganzfeld tests have been written up in mainstream journals, as have Daryl Bem's precognition tests, etc. The CIA and other government agencies have funded research into psi. The Parapsychological Association has been affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest scientific society, since 1969.
However, it is true that research into life after death remains even more controversial than ESP research, so perhaps afterlife studies can still properly be considered "fringe" by Wiki's criteria.
Ultimately, I don't think it matters. If Wiki's articles on psi - and particularly on life after death - are too one-sided, people who are genuinely interested in getting the whole story will look elsewhere, and Wiki will lose credibility in this area. (I think this is already happening.)
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 30, 2013 at 01:07 PM
I think that has already *happened*, Michael.
Great post!
Posted by: Matt Rouge | August 30, 2013 at 11:36 PM
Research into ESP is not more plausible than survival theories at all. That is what ghosts are - dead people.
Do you really believe that there are scientists that are so skeptical they publically claim that ESP exists but survival doesn't? HAHAHA, that is quite hilarious.
I would like to see these people that claim that ESP does actually exist first, before the concept of survival and ghosts is breached, just to remind them how wrong they are.
Posted by: David R | September 02, 2013 at 01:09 PM
Charles Tart and Rupert Sheldrake are just two examples of contemporary scientists who are convinced that ESP is real, but remain unsure about survival. This position has been pretty common throughout the history of parapsychology; it's the basis of the super-psi argument. Frank Podmore, C.D. Broad, J.B. Rhine, and Eric Dingwall are some well-known names from the past who doubted survival but endorsed ESP.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | September 02, 2013 at 01:53 PM
Sheldrake is a Christian. He also believes stars are alive. Not sure where you heard he doubts survival.
Posted by: The Gipper | September 03, 2013 at 02:21 PM
This blog post gives what I think is an accurate assessment of Rupert Sheldrake's position on life after death:
http://lifeafterdeathevidence.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-eternal-question-is-there-life.html
I've read most of Sheldrake's books, and I don't recall that he has ever come out in favor of the view that there is an afterlife. The most he will say is that it's a possibility that has not yet been proved or disproved.
I don't know what Sheldrake thinks about stars, but Beyond Human Personality, by Geraldine Cummins, channels F.W.H. Myers as saying (essentially) that stars are alive. The idea does not seem plausible to me, though it is presented very poetically in Cummins' book.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | September 03, 2013 at 05:10 PM
"I don't recall that he has ever come out in favor of the view that there is an afterlife."
If you look at this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeQgbw61Sm4
(which gets interesting around the 18 minute mark) - he accepts that the dream (or astral) body survives death.
Posted by: The Gipper | September 06, 2013 at 05:37 PM
If somebody wants to get a comprehensive understanding of Piper, then they should read the *primary* literature - i.e. the papers/reports published by the original investigators. They should also read critical reviews of those papers, as well as rejoinders by the original investigators, *and* contemporary assessments of the literature. It shouldn't have to be pointed out that it's ridiculous and unethical for Wiki editors to *prevent* references to/from the Hodgson reports given that such reports are part of the *primary* first-hand literature and therefore highly relevant to assessing the question of anomalous information acquisition in the Piper sittings.
Posted by: N/A | September 11, 2013 at 04:52 PM