If there was one thing the Victorians were crazy for, it was a good seance.


Victorians occupied an unusual moment in history, where the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries had become professionalised and atheism, while still unusual and often distrusted, was gaining popularity. Life was hard yet - for many- more genteel than ever before, and death was romanticised while still haunting the majority of families as a danger that could strike at any moment.  The rise of the middle classes and self-made men meant that what was fashionable spread like competitive wildfire and defined how many people saw themselves in society that was increasingly critical of itself. In an uncertain world, hung between science and religion, nature and the power of man, spiritualism offered some form of compromise between the old ways and the new. The alter of spiritualism was the seance performed in a fashionable gentleman's parlour, and the grand vicar of spiritualism was the medium.

In The First Psychic Peter Lamont tells us the story of the Victorian era's most notorious medium, Daniel Dunglas Home and, through this narrative, examines all the complexities of how our ancestors (and we) witness and interpret the world around us.

Who was Daniel Home?

Daniel Home

Daniel Home was the Scottish-American son of a mother who was reported to have 'the gift' of clairvoyance and spiritual contacts. He was Christian, often sickly and effeminate in appearance, with blonde-red hair, but commanded an impressive presence when he set out on his mission to convince the world that spiritualism was truth. He conducted his 'mission' by holding regular seances for the famous and well-born of America and Victorian London. He never charged a cent and instead relied on the hospitality of his clients to keep from homelessness and quickly built up a reputation as a frighteningly talented medium. It was said that Daniel communed directly with the spirits and through them he caused tables to float and flip, instruments to play without being touched and for spirit hands to appear and interact with the audience members. But, most impressively, he was known to levitate high off the ground,even flying in and out of windows.

Naturally, plenty of people doubted Daniel and the others who followed his profession, but while his contemporaries were discovered one by one Daniel continued to perform and astound his audiences without his methods ever being found out. He made powerful enemies in Robert Browning and Charles Dickens, while utterly convincing Mrs Browning and many eminent scientists. In the meantime his wide net of acquaintances took him through the turbulent seas of poverty and wealth, even drawing him to marry a relative of the Russian tsar! Daniel polarised public opinion about one of the most controversial topics of the Victorian era.


'The First Psychic', really?

Daniel set up in one of Crook's experiments

The title of the book might be a surprise, given that soothsayers and clairvoyants are seemingly as old as time, but it perfectly encapsulates the position of this little snapshot of history. The treatment of Daniel's 'powers' by skeptics was typical of the new professionalism of the scientific method, and Daniel was famously tested by William Crookes, the scientist who famously discovered thallium. Crookes devised a series of experiments to test (and restrict) Daniel's 'powers' to determine their integrity and in doing so found that he could not disprove any of Daniel's powers. Even when in the presence of precise measuring equipment and restricted conditions the tables still moved and the accordions still played as if by ghostly hands. Having no other alternative he was forced to concede that Daniel really did have access to 'another force', a mysterious power of movement. He officially dubbed this 'psychic force' - the first use of the term - and Daniel Home became the official world's first 'psychic', sanctioned by the scientific method.
Naturally, Victorian society did not take this sitting down.


So is it worth a read?

A 1930s seance

Peter Lamont does a great job of writing in an engaging fashion in this little biopic. It took me less than 10 days to read which, for non-fiction books I typically only read in snippets at my breakfast or commute, is pretty darn good. What might have been a dry , though admittedly curious, life story in someone else's' hands actually turned out to be a well balanced well thought out piece on science, spiritualism, conjuring and the always difficult reliability of testimony. lamont reminds us that the stakes are always high, as friendships, relationships and professional reputations are built and destroyed as they orbited the controversy of spiritualism. Though showing us the remarkable life of one extraordinary man Lamont manages to tell a detailed history of the tensions victorians felt between the scientific and the spiritual, and how the various facets of private victorian societies interacted and rubbed against one another. Most importantly, lamont offers a very balanced view, not letting his own beliefs about whether Daniel's actions as a medium were real or trickery. He examines the evidence carefully as well as the counter evidence and in doing so remains remarkably without bias - a feat that previous historical writers of Daniel's life have often failed to maintain.

If you're interested in stories about remarkable people, the weird and wonderful, or the culture of fashionable Victorians, this is a book for you.


Other posts on the weird and wonderful:

- The science behind 'Bloody Mary'
- Mary Toft's Rabbit Births
- Why do so many aliens in real-life abduction stories look the same?
-Review: on Monsters and Marvels
-Running around like headless chickens



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Mary Tudor

Bloody Mary has been an urban legend for as long as teens enjoy terrifying one another. 

The story goes that if you go in a dark room, look at yourself in the mirror, and chant he name a set number of times, the murderous ghost will be summoned in the mirror and - in some cases - will even mark you for death.
It's uncertain where the name comes from - does it reference the Tudor Mary I, or another murderous woman? - but in the end that matters far less than the power of the legend itself as, when kids look at the mirror,often they will see a strange apparition...

So what or who is Bloody Mary?

Thankfully for all traumatised teens, Bloody Mary can be explained by science and it reveals a fascinating insight to how our brain functions and how we, as humans, try to organise our sense of self. In the end, its nothing more than our brains mistranslating the information of our eyes.

How to 'summon' Bloody Mary

Either do this yourself or, if you're feeling rather wicked, ask your friend to stand around half a metre in front of a mirror. Makes sure that a dim light  (eg a candle) is directly behind them and turn off all other lights.

The key to the bloody Mary illusion is focus, which is often why 'Bloody Mary' is said to work when her name is chanted repeatedly. Get your friend to stare at their own reflection in the darkness and, given enough time, they will start to experience the spooky illusion. According to Giovanni Caputo in his article 'Strange-face-in-the-mirror-illusion' for Perception magazine, around 70% of people will see their face as becoming horribly distorted, to the point where they may look older or even that it is the face of another person with dark holes for eyes and mouths. It's no wonder that the urban legend of the ghost or demon of Bloody Mary was created to explain this creepy phenomenon!

Bloody Mary by theDURRRRIAN

Giovanni described the reason behind this as being due to how your brain pieces your face together. Our sight is not a continuum of one stable 'photo', but instead they move around constantly, picking up pieces of information which our mind then pieces together and stabilises. If we saw the world as we truly perceive it, then we would be beset by horrible motion sickness and an overload of sensory information, so the mind instead creates a relatively stable patchwork quilt of images that we perceive as fluid reality. However sometimes this process can be disrupted or distorted when something causes our mind to function a little less efficiently. In this case, the dimness of the light (or the flickering of a candle), combined with the focus and sense of creeping dread that staring at our own reflection produces, disrupts our own perception of ourselves, what we look like, and how our face is patched together into one image. And so 'Bloody Mary' is born in the surreal image that our confused brain creates.

Things can get even creepier when  this is combined with neurological conditions such as 'mirror misidentification'. It is unlikely that you have this condition, of course, but occasionally it can appear in lesser forms. TH - a 77 year old Australian man - suffered from the neurological condition quite acutely, despite otherwise being healthy. Whenever he would look in a mirror he described the man looking back at him as a 'dead ringer' for himself, but not himself. Unsettled, TH explained this by assuming that the man was a neighbour in his apartment complex, when in fact his brain was simply missing a process in connecting his sense of self with the image in front of him, despite his reflection being exactly the same as it should have been. Similar psychological processes can be seen to explain phenomenon such as out of body experiences, for example. Perfectly healthy people can often experience a form of dissociative identity disorder, often in periods of high stress.

If you're feeling in a spooky mood and like me, despite all scientific know-how, you're STILL too chicken to try this yourself, then why not check out the Supernatural episode of 'Bloody Mary' instead? It's a good 'un and entirely fictional. Woohoo!

Sources
-'The Ritual', Paranormality: Why we believe the impossible, Richard Wiseman,(2011)
-The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, Bruce Hood
-Bloody Mary art by theDURRRRIAN on Deviantart

Things are very rarely what they seem.
 
Whatever your opinions on the paranormal - be it ghosts, portents or spoon-bending - it's clear that there is a lot more at work than the simple telling of fantastical stories. Even if you believe in the supernatural, it's unlikely that you are liable to designate every medium as the genuine article, or every ghost as a genuine echo of a life long passed. The internet and TV are brimming with shows on things that go bump in the night or individuals who are more than happy to take your money to show off their gifts. If not all of them are the Real Thing (or, indeed, any of them) then why do we buy so enthusiastically into their tricks? What supports their industry and why, given the right circumstances, do we even believe in the paranormal ourselves, unprompted?

Richard Wiseman approaches these questions with a brilliant mix of personal experience, academic knowledge, and an approachable laugh-out-loud snark that doesn't turn into full-out sneering. While it would be too easy to hold up the banner of "SCIENCE!" and use it to insult those who subscribe to the paranormal without further explanation, Wiseman instead takes the approach of focusing on what the psychology of paranormality is and how, through people's natural draw and experimentations in the supernatural, it actually taught science some amazing facts about our minds that we might never otherwise have known. He is critical of those who use their knowledge to deliberately fool other people, but always has a respect for the skill and knowledge involved to do so. While some more innocent believers may be a little irrational or annoying (see the 'reincarnation of Catherine Howard' who followed them around on one of their experiments), he nevertheless gives them some respect.

Whatever your beliefs in the supernatural, this book is well worth a read. For those who don't believe, the book is a fantastic insight into the psychology of our minds that allows us to perceive such spooky goings on as we do. For those who do believe, this insight shows how you can separate out the fakes from the potentially genuine.

Prof. Richard Wiseman

The book is very approachable in its style and for a non-fiction book has a nice narrative quality that leads you through all the short sections that make up each chapter. There are little exercises you can do at home to try out your own weird-and-wibbly skills. The gimmick that really made me smile was the Q.R Readers scattered throughout. These symbols can be scanned with your smart phone and will instantly take you to a video of a study that is mentioned in the book. If you don't have a smart phone don't worry - he also has included the website addresses themselves.

Some of the topics on offer are:

• Testing a 'psychic' dog
• Fortune Telling
• Out of body experiences and how to have your own
• The psychology of spoon bending and other magic tricks
• How two young girls and an apple on a piece of string created a whole new religion
• The power of cults
• How to contact the dead
• The tale of the talking mongoose in the Isle of Wight
• Ghost-hunting and how a group of psychologists almost shook a house to pieces
• Hypnotism, brainwashing and the psychology of persuasion
• Did Abraham Lincoln foresee his own murder? 
• The remarkable world of sleep science
• The instant superhero kit

And many more.

It's well worth a look for anyone interested in psychology or the supernatural, why not give it a go?