Manly Palmer Hall - Albert Einstein - Bill Cooper - Richard Dawkins - Vladimir Nabokov - John Nicholl - Jordan Maxwell - Max Heindel - Codes and Conspiracies TV - Thomas Szasz - Chris Everard - Lucy Worsley TV -
The majority of modern mediumistic apparitions are but the elemental creatures (the word for demons) masquerading through bodies composed of thought substance supplied by the very persons desiring to behold that wraiths of decarnate beings. Manly Palmer Hall, Ceremonial Magick and Sorcery
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning. Albert Einstein, letter February 1921
Channelling is one of the strange activities occurring inside the New Age religion. I have witnessed this. I can say most channellers are just fraudulent con artists. Bill Cooper, Hour of Our Time
There’s a network of over five hundred Spiritualist churches across Britain. Here, Tuesday night is séance night. Richard Dawkins, Enemies of Reason: Slaves to Superstition, Channel 4 2007
The dead start talking inside the medium’s head. ibid.
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville NY, and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr Duncan, a lady medium’s dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the sceptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery’s ‘control’ not to get lost in the bathrobe’s lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh – upon the warm skin of which he felt a ‘teleplastic’ mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. Vladimir Nabokov, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s Until Now
The history of spiritualism has really been a history of fraud and deception. Joe Nicholl, paranormal investigator
I feel that perhaps it would be best said that I am a spiritualist. Jordan Maxwell
There are various grades of spiritual sight. One grade enables a man to see the ordinarily invisible ether with the myriads of beings that invest that realm. Other and higher variants give him the faculty to see the desire world and even the world of thought while remaining in the physical body. Max Heindel
The Silver Legion: its bigoted members the Silver Shirts combined spiritualism with para-militarism, and targeted communists and Jews. Codes and Conspiracies: American Nazis, Apple TV 2014
If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a Spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic. Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1973
In 1905 Charles Richet was conducting experiments into the mysterious substance known as ectoplasm. Witnesses at séances often saw ectoplasm float in space taking the form of hands. Chris Everard, Spirit World I
Arthur has enlisted the help of a medium. Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle III: Shadows & Sleuths
Arthur Conan Doyle, scientifically trained doctor, creator of the super-rational Sherlock Holmes, had become a person who believed in the paranormal. ibid.