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Reviews
THE ICELANDIC PHYSICAL MEDIUM INDRIDI INDRIDASON. E
Loftur R. Gissurarson and Erlendur Haraldsson. Proceedings of the St
ciety for Psychical Research, Volume 57,
Part 214, January
198‘
54-148.
In 1905, a 22-year-old Icelandic farmhand came to Reykjavik to lea:
typography. Through the people with whom he was staying he chanced
visit a, newly formed circle that was trying to produce table tilting.
(It w;
said to be the first circle of its kind in Iceland.) When the newcomer w.
invited to participate, the table immediately began to react violently. T1
young man, Indridi Indridason, who is said to have known nothing of sui
things (despite having had some “remarkable visions”), became frigf
ened and wanted to run out of the house. Fatefully, however, he staye
Thus began a series of remarkable physical phenomena that lasted for c
most 5 years among a group of participant-witnesses who observed and,
an increasingly sophisticated extent, controlled them. The group ceas>
meeting when Indridason became ill with typhoid complicated by tuberc
Iosis, from which he died 2 years
later. The report by Gissurarson
a:
Haraldsson, based on contemporary sources,
is a judicious account of t
seances in which Indridason participated. Haraldsson, a professor of ps
chology at the University of Iceland and well known to the readers of tl
Journal for his contributions to parapsychology, had suggested the toj
for Gissurarson’s B. A. thesis.
Indridason was the
first— and reputedly only— physical medii
known in Iceland. The Experimental Society that was formed to inves
gate him held seances once or twice weekly, from September to June,
:
nearly 5 years. (The total number of seances
is not stated.) At first
t
sittings were held at members’ houses, but soon after major manifestatic
began, a special house was built in which to hold the seances. Apparen
some phenomena, such as levitations, began to manifest themselves sp<
taneously,
as did Indridason’s trance
states
in which most of the
pi
nomena took place. Other phenomena, such as apports and materiali:
tions, began only
after some experimentation and “training” had be
carried out. What this training consisted of is unclear; the authors of
report came across no accounts of it, and
it seems possible that a good p
of it was autogenic. The authors think
it likely, in any case, “that dur
his very short career as a medium Indridason may have produced most
the phenomena of physical mediumship that are known to have been
ported elsewhere”
(p.
132).
The catalogue of Indridason’s manifestations was reported to be as
tensive, with considerable overlapping, as that of the better known
r
dium D. D. Home. However, Indridason’s manifestations included p
nomena that had never been reported of Home, such as ostensible dei
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terialization of a limb (although similar phenomena had been reported of
other mediums). In a final appendix, Gissurarson and Haraldsson compare
the seance manifestations of the two mediums. Of 107
items under 26
headings (levitations, materializations, apports, direct voice, etc.), 19 re-
portedly manifested by Home were not shown by Indridason (e.g., lumin-
osity of self and objects, “earthquake effect,” ringing of bells, chirping of
birds), whereas 28
listed under Indridason were not produced by Home
(e.g., transportation of the medium through matter, heavy objects airborne
many
feet without support, two voices singing
at the same
time). Ex-
cluding items such as the numbers of persons allowed at the seances (on
occasion as many as 70 were present at Indridason
s), 60 types of phe-
nomena (e.g., loud knocks, strong gusts of wind, persons other than the
mediums levitating during seances, completely materialized human forms)
are listed under both.
At the beginning, the controls on the alleged phenomena, judging from
what accounts remain (the Minute Books of the Society were
lost
in
1942), were insufficient to warrant firm conclusions, which the authors
acknowledge (and as might not be too unexpected in a pickup circle of
witnesses, none of whom had had experience with things that go bump in
the darkness, which is where most of the reported occurrences took place).
However, at the height of the manifestations, in the winter of 1908- 1909,
especially under the supervision of physician Gudmundur Hannesson, an
arch unbeliever (later founder of the Icelandic Scientific Society) who at
that time asked the Society’s permission to join the investigation, the de-
scribed controls left little to be desired. Apparently not all controls were in
use at any one time, but they included not only the standard stripping and
reclothing of the medium (who was then sewed
into his garment) and
minute examinations of the seance rooms, but, in addition to the holding
of the arms and legs of the entranced Indridason,
the holding of the
holders’ limbs as well. The depth of Indridason’s trances was tested by his
pupillary responses to light and the reactions of different parts of his face
and eyelids to needle pricks. An important control measure was the fas-
tening or painting onto all potentially moveable persons and objects in the
seance room (the number of persons present was reduced early to about
five) of fluorescent material purchased from abroad, presumably to make
it difficult to introduce substitutions. In addition, at Hannesson’s urging, a
dense mesh netting was introduced and carefully nailed down, floor to
ceiling and wall to wall, under strips of lathe. This rendered the part of the
room in which the entranced medium and his “watchers” were stationed a
separate, sealed-off compartment. At irregular times, and with the seem-
ingly always granted permission of the “spirit’
controls that soon devel-
oped, matches were
lit or red darkroom lights were turned on for a few
seconds to see, among other things, that no one was where one or another
— and sometimes several— direct voices seemed to come from. (One
control entity was about as feisty a character as has ever been reported in
the mediumistic literature.) At different times, seances were held in Han-
nesson’s home, with the room used chosen by him
at the
last minute.
Seances were also held at the home of the Bishop of Iceland.
As to the possibility of conjuring,
it is said that Iceland could boast of
no practitioners of this art at the time, although, somewhat confusingly,
it
is also stated that Hannesson “was acquainted with various tricks used by
conjurors for imitating the phenomena” (p.
120).
It is neither desirable nor practicable for me to try to cover all the mate-
rial presented in Gissurarson and Haraldsson’s excellent report. The reader
is urged to consult the monograph itself and also two of the sources for it
that were published in an issue of the Journal of the American Society for
Psychical Research (Hannesson, 1924; Nielsson, 1924). One is an article
by Haraldur Neilsson, a professor of theology at the University of Iceland,
and the second
is by Hannesson. The latter
is a delightfully written ac-
count not only of the precautions taken against fraud but of the states of
mind of an entrenched unbeliever as he is confronted by the almost liter-
ally maddening alternatives he is driven to entertain by way of trying to
account for phenomena he knows to be impossible— such as that his close
friend Neilsson, the principal “watcher” inside the net,
is not only lying
but even, episodically, insane. Hannesson seems to have been bothered
especially by a heavy zither, treated with phosphorescent paint, that darted
about the room
like an agitated
fly, with tunes coming from
it
all the
while, and by the babble of male and female voices
several of them
readily
identifiable as particular deceased persons known to Hannesson
and/or others—emanating from different parts of the room, sometimes
with two of them singing a duet. Not surprisingly, this arch unbeliever
explores at some length the possibilities of ventriloquism by way of trying
to account for the voice phenomena. But, disconcerted though he is when
he
is able, on different grounds,
to rule them out one by one, he nevei
tumbles
to the
fact that the “projection” of the human voice— except
perhaps for the creation of distance effects by having the voice grow fain
is quite impossible in the dark, where the usual behavior of the ventnlo
quist and his dummy in creating the illusion of projection would be quite
useless. At
all events, despite his being forced to accept the fact of thi
seemingly disembodied voices not being the medium’s, Hannesson com
pletely sidesteps the question of the nature of the personalities behind th<
various self-professing communicators.
Hannesson’s testimony provides an
intriguing glimpse
into the psy
chology of belief— and
disbelief.
Despite everything he witnessed, h
never relinquished his skepticism. Unlike Everard Feilding, who,
facet
with unassailable facts (Feilding, Baggally & Carrington, 1909), wrest et
his disbelief of Eusapia Palladino’s carefully controlled phenomena to th
mat and emerged with an inescapable, however uncomfortable, convictio.
about the human (or whatever) powers that pass
all understanding, Han
nesson, true to the end to his unshakeable convictions about reality,
re
mained a staunch disbeliever. “After prolonged observation,” he states
l
his article (cited on page 121 of Gissurarson and Haraldsson’s report).
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I saw no way round the inference that the things move often,
if not always,
in an altogether unaccountable manner, without anybody’s either directly or
indirectly causing their movements by ordinary means. But although
I
cannot get away from this conclusion,
I am utterly unable to bring myself to
believe in
it altogether.
It
is not easy for unbelieving people to accept the
theory that inanimate things move about without any natural causes.
He remained, thus, an irremediably split mind, a counterpart, perhaps, of
Neils Bohr, who was forced to postulate an irreducible duality and com-
plementarity in the nature of light and other radiation.
It must be said to
Hannesson’s credit, however, that he never repudiated what he claims to
have observed; to the end—he later became President of the University of
Iceland—he maintained (like Sir William Crookes upon his accession to
the chair of the British Society) that he had nothing to retract.
References
Feilding, E., Baggally, W. W., & Carrtngton, H. (1909). Report on
a series of sittings with Eusapia Palladino. Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research, 23, 306-569.
Hannesson, G. (1924). Remarkable phenomena in Iceland. Journal of
the American Society for Psychical Research,
18, 239-272.
Niffsson, H. (1924). Remarkable phenomena in Iceland. Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research,
18, 233-238.
Jule Eisenbud
4634 East 6th Street
Denver, Colorado 80220
THE GHOSTS OF THE TRIANON: THE COMPLETE AN ADVEN-
TURE BY C. A. E. MOBERLY AND E. f\jOURDA1N. Edited by
Michael
H.
Coleman.
Wellingborough,
Normamptopxhire,
England:
Aquarian Press, 1988. Pp.
160. £7.99, paper. PSBNL6-85030-774-0.
It is always a benefit to psychical research when mstoric cases are sub-
jected to fresh analysis,
if only to see whether thdy\tand up as well to
scrutiny as some of their defenders would have us believe. This
is espe-
cially so in a case as complex and baffling as Mpberly and Jourdain’s An
Adventure. Since its original publication the better part of a century ago,
the case has generated a vast amount of commentary, ranging from un-
qualified endorsement to equally unqualified rejection. Most of us who
have bothered to thread our way through this considerable secondary liter-
ature, some of it quite recondite, don’t know quite what to conclude, ex-
cept that perhaps the final word on the matter has yet to be said. Maybe
the last word has
still not been said, but Michael Coleman’s book. The
Ghosts of the Trianon, comes about as close as we are likely to get, given
the present state of knowledge about the affair. Without new discoveries
to breathe fresh life into the case, the ghosts of the Trianon have finally
been laid to rest.
Though offering
little that was not already known about Moberly and
Jourdain and their An Adventure, Coleman has ably summarized and di-
gested a vast amount of information about the case and the opinions sur-
rounding it. Included are chapters on the authors, the writing, researching,
and publishing of their book, initial reactions to the work in the psychical
research and spiritualistic copmunities, subsequent responses by other re-
searchers, and later, more detailed investigations of the book and its au-
thors. Similar cases of so-called walk-in retrocognition are reviewed, fol-
lowed by a final summary/and appraisal of the evidence in the case. Con-
cluding the work
is
a bibliography of some
105
items, followed by
a
helpful appendix listing the various editions and contents of An Adventure.
All in all, the book is a yell-organized and concise summary of all that is
known about Moberly pnd Jourdain’s Adventure and the reactions
it has
elicited since'-its initial publication in 1911.
Much of theVnaterial/ reviewed by Coleman consists of a mass of details
that do not lencK.themselves well to summary, as anyone will realize who
has read some ofythe pore elaborate commentaries on the case. Briefly,
though, ColemanVcpunts the story as told by Moberly and Jourdain
who, during a visiWfo the Palace of Versailles in 1901, reported under-
going a strange expedience. While touring the Petit Trianon, the house and
gardens that Louis Xv\had given to Marie Antoinette in 1774, both ladies
reported seeing and/hearing things that seemed oddly “out of place”— the
sounds of music w/lh no musicians in evidence, people dressed in antique
costumes, and mop of all ,\ feeling of “dreary unnatural depression” thal
lasted
the whole jour. They. however, thought
little of the experience
until, in the coupe of conversion, they noticed a curious discrepancy ir
their recollections: Miss Mobenv remembered a woman sitting below the
terrace of the Petit Trianon, whereas Miss Jourdain insisted that she hac
seen no one
in /hat location;
in fact, she was quite certain that no such
person had beep there at the time. Thinking that the experience may weL
have been
stranger than
either had
initially supposed, they resolved
tc
write independent accounts of what each could remember, without furthei
consultation, jhey also agreed to investigate the history of the place and tc
revisit
it again
at the
earliest opportunity. Much to their surprise,
the)
discovered thkt the scene was now significantly different from what the)
remembered—buildings and topography had changed, and the people
they now saw appeared normal in dress and behavior. Further research
ir.
historical records, however, revealed that the Petit Trianon and its grounds
had indeed once looked much as they remembered
it— in the late
18th
century, during the lifetime of Queen Marie Antoinette.
.
This story has given
rise
to a considerable secondary literature,
o)
which Coleman’s book
is the best and perhaps
final addition.
In
it he
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