The case of Miss Edmonds

I've been reading a book published in 2017 called Eusapia Paladino: Materialisations and Intellergetic Phenomena in Physical Mediumship, compiled and edited by Scott Dickerson. It's a collection of articles from the turn of the last century concerning the controversial Sicilian medium who, although she was known to cheat when she could, also almost certainly produced legitimate phenomena when she wanted to. You can read a review here. I haven't read far enough yet to find out what the title word "intellergetic" means, though I assume it has to do with phenomena that appear to be caused by an intelligent agency.

I find the book kind of boring so far; the opening essays focus too much (for my taste) on philosophical abstractions, without getting into specific cases. An exception to this is a lengthy passage from the lead essay "The Spiritistic and Spiritualistic Explanation of Mediumistic Phenomena," by Caesar de Vesme,  which originally appeared in the Annals of Psychical Science, July 1907. (The book gives the publication date as August 1907, but you can find the actual article online, in the July issue. Scroll down to the article directly below the Table of Contents; the embedded link in the Contents doesn't work.)

De Vesme recounts a case that was apparently quite familiar at the time, but which, like so many others from the period, has been largely forgotten today. It's worth resurrecting. In the excerpt that follows, I've broken up the second, very long paragraph into four shorter paragraphs for easier reading. Italics are in then original.

Everyone is, no doubt, acquainted with this case: Judge Edmonds had a daughter in whom mediumistic faculties were revealed by the spontaneous phenomena which occurred in her presence, which soon aroused her curiosity to such an extent that she began to frequent séances. When another personality manifested through her she sometimes spoke different languages of which she was ignorant.

One evening when a dozen persons were assembled in Mr. Edmonds' house, in New York, a Mr. Green, a New York artist, was present, accompanied by a man whom he introduced under the name of Mr. Evangelides, of Greece.

Soon a personality manifested through Miss Laura Edmonds, who spoke to him in English and communicated to him a large number of facts, tending to prove that the personality was that of a friend who had died in his home several years ago, a person of whose existence even no one present could ever have known. From time to time the young girl uttered words and entire phrases in Greek, which suggested to Mr. Evangelides to ask her if she could speak to him in Greek. He himself, as a matter of fact, spoke English with difficulty.

The conversation was carried on in Greek on the part of Evangelides, and alternately in Greek and in English on the part of Miss Laura. Now and then Evangelides seemed to be much affected.

The next day he resumed his conversation with Miss Laura after which he explained to those present that the invisible personality who seemed to be manifesting through the medium was one of his intimate friends, who had died in Greece, the brother of the Greek patriot, Mark Botzaris; this friend informed him of the death of one of his own sons, who had remained in Greece and was in excellent health at the time that his father left for America.

Evangelides returned several times to Mr. Edmonds' house, and, ten days after his first visit, he informed him that he had just received a letter announcing the death of his son; this letter must have been already posted when the first interview of Mr. Evangelides with Miss Laura took place.

"I should like," writes Judge Edmonds on this subject, "that some one should tell me how I should regard this fact. It is impossible to deny it, it is too obvious. I might as reasonably deny that the Sun shines on us … This happened in the presence of eight or ten persons, all educated, intelligent, reasonable, and all as capable as anyone of distinguishing between illusion and real fact."

Let us, however, make an effort in psychical acrobatism: Let us suppose that Evangelides had telepathically received tidings of the death of his son, and that this information had remained latent in his brain until the clairvoyance of Miss Laura Edmonds managed to evoke it, in connection with that which related to Mark Botzaris and all the rest. Still it would be illogical to attribute to the medium the gift of speaking the Greek language, and the knowledge of the death of the boy to two distinct causes. How came it that Miss Laura spoke Greek? The hypothesis that can explain this phenomenon has not yet been invented!

Mr. Edmonds informs us that his daughter had never heard a word of modern Greek up to that day. He adds that on other occasions she spoke as many as thirteen different languages, including Polish, Italian, Indian, whilst, in her normal state she only knew English and French – the other only so far as it can be learnt in school. And this J.W. Edmonds was not a nobody, far from it. He was President of the Supreme Court of Justice of New York, and President of the Senate of the United States. No one has ever thrown a doubt on the absolute integrity of his character; his writings prove his brilliant intelligence. There is, therefore, no more reason for refusing to give credence to his accounts, so well authenticated, than to those of the savants who experiment with Eusapia Paladino and others.

What's most interesting in this account is that Laura Edmonds was reportedly able to converse in Greek at least part of the time, even though she had no knowledge of the language. The additional claim that she conversed in other languages is also interesting, though not substantiated by any details.

The super-psi hypothesis seems strained to its limits, or more accurately beyond its limits, by this kind of phenomenon. Laboratory studies of ESP have not, as far as I know, produced any cases in which telepathy or clairvoyance resulted in the spontaneous acquisition of a new language.

Comments

[Paul]

Very interesting, thanks Michael.

[Art]

\\"produced legitimate phenomena when she wanted to." - MP//
----------------

Or "when it happened it happened." Perhaps it wasn't up to her? Maybe she wasn't the one making it happen? And sometimes (to her surprise) she produced legitimate phenomena, but it may not have been her making it happen? I'm not sure how much control we have over this kind of stuff when it happens? I believe it happens but the actual phenomena may originate someplace else?

Reminds me of something that happened to me. A while back I became fascinated by these large round brightly colored fish from Hawaii called Opah. Opah swim with tuna fish and are very brightly colored, sort of an iridescent salmon sort of color. Anyways I wanted to go to Hawaii and catch an Opah and eat it (because I am obsessed with food, especially meat and seafood) so I had posted pictures on Facebook of Opah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampris_guttatus

Well a couple of months after I posted those pictures a huge box of frozen Opah fillets appeared at our local United Grocery Outlet, which is a very cheap store, that was selling these 5 oz Opah fillets for 50¢/each? What are the chances of those specific kinds of fillets appearing at a cheap grocery store in Middle Tennessee? Why here? I had never seen that kind of fish sold anywhere before and believe me I check out the fish counters of stores pretty thoroughly! It was almost like I conjured them up?

Sometimes in life some really strange things happen? Like the time I dreamed that somebody gave me two huge bass and I saw them in my dream laying on the concrete floor of a barn.... and about two years later one of our neighbors called me up and told me he and his friends had gone fishing and caught a whole bunch of Striped Bass and did I want a couple? I went over there and there were two huge striped bass laying on the floor of his garage and it looked exactly like the dream I had?

Weird stuff like this happens to me quite frequently? But it's not like I can make it happen? When it happens it happens and I don't know if I had anything to do with making it happen or not? Almost like the Universe trying to show me something?

[Art]

Dr. David Bohm was a fairly famous (for several different reasons) that wrote a textbook about quantum physics. He also wrote another book called "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" having to to with the implicate and explicate universe. His idea was that there is another hidden universe that we aren't privy to from which our universe originates. In other words, a holographic universe. The implications of this implicate and explicate universe are is that everything that is here originates from there. It is Bohm's explanation for non locality.

What this has to do with Eusapia Paladino is that the things that she was able to conjure up may have been transported here from this other deeper hidden reality. My personal opinion is that Eusapia more than likely had very little to do with it and it was always part of the plan from the beginning.

"At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously."
http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html

[David Collins]

"From time to time, the young girl uttered words and entire phrases in Greek, which suggested to Mr. Evangelides to ask her if she could speak to him in Greek." Maybe she genuinely did speak words and phrases in Greek. Or maybe she was uttering gibberish which suggested to Mr. Evangelides that the manifested personality was speaking something like Greek.

It wouldn't bother me if it all happened as Mr. Evangelides and the other witnesses believe it did. We live in a weird universe where weird stuff happens. But, in this case, I will stick to the hypothesis that Mr. Evangelides interpreted the young lady's gibberish as Greek spoken by his deceased friend.

[Michael Prescott]

We would still be left with the puzzle of how Laura knew that Evangelides' son was dead, something Evangelides himself didn’t know. And how she knew anything about his deceased friend, the purported communicator. Perhaps cold reading (unconscious or otherwise) could account for the second issue, but not for the first.

Also, we’re told that after Evangelides took note of the scattered "Greek" words and phrases, he asked Laura if she could speak to him in Greek. The rest of the conversation, reportedly, was conducted with Evangelides speaking Greek exclusively and Laura speaking Greek about half the time. This indicates that Laura could understand Evangelides when he conversed in Greek, and that her own conversation consisted of more than just garbled words and phrases. After all, it would be hard to have a dialogue if you can’t understand the other person’s language and are speaking gibberish 50% of the time.

[Art]

Idiot savants are picking up information from somewhere. There is no way they are doing calculations and figuring out "the hard way" some of the things they automatically know.

We live in a conscious universe and that universal consciousness permeates the entire universe. We have to let go of the whole idea of separateness which when we talk makes it sound like the separateness that we experience in our daily lives is all there is. There is something amazing and mind boggling happening and we aren't normally privy to it but sometimes, every once in a while, people are able to tap into that reservoir of knowledge and "dial" into it and receive very specific information that they have no normal means of obtaining.

When we talk about God we make it sound like we are separate from God but I highly suspicion that we are always connected to it, and just like information in holographic film, it exists everywhere at once and nothing is separate from anything else, each piece contains the whole, and everything interpenetrates everything.

Like I keep saying the physics of the place we are going is very different from the physics we normally experience here, but when we get there it will seem completely normal and not strange and in fact it will feel like home.

Many near death experiencers say they had access to all information and simply by thinking about a subject they suddenly knew all about it. That information came as a bolus of information like it was downloaded into their consciousness "all at once" and they knew all about a subject simply by thinking about it.