The turning of spirit into psychical matter was a favourite phenomenon of the Spiritualists, not least because it gave empirical weight to the claims of the continued existence of the departed spirits. From a séance cabinet, typically restrained, the spirit voices in a séance would solidify, either as a person, or through a sheet of material or paper cut-out.
Materialisation
20 November 2023
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The restraint of mediums to prevent any falsification, as well as strip or even cavity searches, often resulted in somewhat weaker apparitions. This usually meant the replacement of visible materialisations with an invisible force through a sheet. The Scrapbook has one such instance, in the Psychic World, December 28, 1950. In this photograph and report, the medium’s hands were padlocked and the legs ‘manacled’. Within these ‘fraud-proof’ conditions, a materialised face appeared, apparently a drawing in crumpled paper, resting on the medium’s left shoulder. These are typical for photographed materialisations which were proffered as ‘hard evidence’ for the truth of materialisations.
A different form of materialisation was ectoplasm, the appearance of solidified mist from the medium’s orifices as a sign of their communion with the other world. Conan Doyle expressed his scepticism of ectoplasm, but other experimenters, such as Schrenck-Notzing, took the idea seriously. Eve Carrière, one of his subjects, used her ectoplasm to prop up paper cut-outs, a cause for criticism when viewers expected a visible being rather than invisible one pushing through paper. Very often, the ectoplasms themselves were caught, and found to be a chewed vegetable matter propped up by stiff strands or by wire. Schrenck-Notzing persisted in his general theory, despite the debunking of individual cases. In the long run, this would seriously weaken his overall credibility.
The appeal of Materialisation can thus be seen as both an evidence and a wonder. It was on one hand a proof for the truth of spiritualism, and the object of marvel for the religious element. All faiths have their miracles, and Spiritualism could boast plenty, even as detractors chipped away at cases of fraud. The spectacle of manacling the medium and waiting for the materialisation to happen was a part of the theatricality of the movement, a fixed ritual which lent colour to the medium’s performances, as well as the verification of what they did.
Scrapbook of the Christchurch Psychical Research Society Inc., Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury Manuscript 165, 171-172
Heather Wolffram, The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870-1939 (San Francisco, Clio Medica, 2009), 130-134
