Continued from Articles page 8. I personally do not agree with some of what is said.

Glimpses into Automatic Literature.

The claims of discarnate authorship present a delicate problem. Brofferio, knew a writing medium "to whom Boccaccio, Bruno and Galileo dictated replies that for the elevation of thought were assuredly more worthy of the greatness of that trio than on the level of the medium; I could cite competent testimony to the fact." According to Lombroso "' Dante, or one who stood for him, dictated to Scaramuzza three Cantos in terza rima. I read only a few strophes of this but so far as I could judge they were very beautiful." Many famous writers wrote in a semi-trance, having but an imperfect recollection of the work afterwards. Mrs. H. B. Stowe, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"said"that she did not write it: it was given to her it passed before her." In the preface of his famous poem Jerusalem, Blake says that it was dictated to him. "The grandest poem that this world contains; I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be other than the Secretary; the authors are in eternity." Again: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will." Parts of the Old Testament were received through automatic writing. "And there came a writing to him from Elijah the prophet saying . ." (2 Chronicles XXI. 12). In 1833 the book of the German Augustinian nun, Anna Catherine Emmerich, The Lowly Life and Bitter Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother, was accepted by Catholics as divinely inspired. The remarkable contents of the book came to her in visions and were noted and edited by the poet Clement Brentano.

In America one of the earliest automatically-written books was the Rev. C. Hammond's The Pilgrimage of Thomas Payne and Others to the Seventh Circle, New York, 1852. The book contains 250 octavo pages. It was begun at the end of December 1851 and completed February 1st next year. The following year Judge Edmond's and Dexter's Spiritualism was published, which also contains many spirit messages. The same year saw the appearance of John Murray Spear's Messages from the Spirit Life, which was followed in 1857 by a big connected work, the Educator. A year after, Charles Linton, a book-keeper of limited education produced a remarkable book of 100,000 words, The Healing of the Nation, which was printed with Governor Talmadge's preface. Next year Twelve Messages from John Quincey Adams through Joseph D. Stiles was published. But all these books pale into insignificance by Hudson Tuttle's Arcana of Nature, a profound scientific book with which, in sweep and scope, only the trance writings of Andrew Jackson Davis compare. Two astonishing cases of automatic writing should yet be mentioned. The first dates from 1874. It is The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens, when he died, left this novel unfinished. T. P. James, an American mechanic of very slight education, completed it automatically. According to many critics the script is characteristic of Dickens in style and is worthy of his talent. The second is Oahspe, 1882, a new cosmic Bible which Dr. John Ballou Newbrough received in automatic type-writing.

In France, Hermance Dufeaux, a girl of 14, produced in the early days of French spiritualism, two surprising books: a Life of Jeanne d'Arc, dictated by the Maid, and Confessions of Louis XL Allen Kardec vouched for the honesty of the girl. On the other hand, the Divine Revelations of Geneva in 1854, obtained by a little group of ministers and professors by means of the table from Christ and his angels, is-according to Prof. Flournoy-insipid and foolish enough to give one nausea.

In England Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson published in 1857 an octavo volume of impressional poetry. The first continued series of automatically received messages deserving serious attention was produced by William Stainton Moses between 1870 and 1880. His scripts contained many evidential messages but their main purpose was the delivery of high religious teaching. Nothing, except the writings of the Rev. George Vale Owen and the present-day communications of Miss Geraldine Cummins has equalled these scripts in interest. The Scripts of Cleophas, Paul in Athens, and The Chronicle of Ephesus produced by Miss Cummins under the alleged influence of Philip, the Evangelist and Cleophas, bear signs of close acquaintanceship with the Apostolic Circle. It is very curious that Cleophas describes the Pentecost meeting and declares that the Apostles sat round in a circle with hands clasped, as the Master had taught them. As to the inspiration of The Road to Immortality, Miss Cummins' fourth book, by F. W. H. Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge claims to have received independent evidence.

W. T. Stead's Letters from Julia is widely known, and Mrs. Hester Travers, Smith's Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde offers great intellectual thrill. The Glastonbury Scripts have an importance of their own. The quantity of automatically-written books is such that it is difficult to mention more than a few as, for instance, Elsa Barker's Letters from a Living Dead Man, War Letters from a Living Dead Man, Last Letters from a Living Dead Man (the probable communicator being David P. Hutch, a magistrate of Los Angeles), the remarkable books of Patience Worth produced through Mrs. John H. Curran of St. Louis, The Book of Truth, claimed to have been written under the divine guidance of Osiris, Submerged Atlantis Restored: or Links and Cycles, Rochester, N.Y., 1911, inspired by "atlantean spirits" through Mrs. C. C. Van-Duzee, Meslom's Messages from the Life Beyond and To Woman: from Meslom, by Mary McEvilly, New York, 1920, The Seven Purposes, by Margaret Cameron, New York, 1918, J. S. Ward's Gone West and A Subaltern in the Spirit Lands, the anonymous Private Dowding (by W. Tudor Pole), the Revelations of Louise, Claude's Book, 1918, Claude's Second Book, 1919, and Claude's Third Book, 1920 by Mrs. Kelway Bamber, The Twentieth Plane, by Albert Durrant Watson, Philadelphia, 1919, Oscar Wilde in Purgatory and the curious and highly intellectual automatic scripts of Mme. Juliette Hervey of France which Dr. Eugen Osty studied.

Communications obtained through the planchette, ouija board or table tipping are modifications of automatic writing and may be obtained by an interchange of methods. The Oscar Wilde scripts came partly through the planchette, partly through automatic writing.

AUTOMATIC DRAWING AND PAINTING, attempts at artistic expression without control of the conscious self. The phenomenon belongs to the same category as automatic writing but neither necessarily involves the other. Mrs. William Wilkinson, the wife of one of the pioneer English spiritualists, could draw, paint and play music automatically, but she could not produce automatic writing. Her husband developed both gifts. An interpretation of the flowers of joy, love, humility, faith and the architectural designs emanating from under his wife's hand, was forthcoming in his automatic scripts. The power of automatic drawing burst, after many weeks of vain trial., on William Wilkinson in the following way: "After waiting less than five minutes it began to move, at first slowly, but presently with increased speed, till in less than a quarter-of-an-hour it moved with such velocity as I had never seen in a hand and arm before, or since. It literally ran away in spiral forms; and I can compare it to nothing else than the fly-wheel of an engine when it was "run away." This lasted until a gentleman present touched my arm, when suddenly it fell like an infant's as it goes to sleep, and the pencil dropped out of my hand. I had, however, acquired the power. The consequences of the violent motion of the muscles of the arm were so apparent that I could not for several days lift it without pain."

In most cases visions are being presented to the automatist and the idea to sketch then comes to him naturally. Miss Houghton in Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance writes of a Mrs. Puget who saw upon a blank paper "a lovely little face, just like a photograph, which gradually disappeared; then another became visible on another part of the sheet, and they arrested her attention so much that she thought she would like to catch the fleeting image, which she did with a piece of burnt cork, thinking that a piece of pencil would be too trying for her sight." William Blake sketched his spiritual visitants as if they were posing. He drew them with the utmost alacrity and composure looking up from time to time as though he had a real sitter before him. If the vision disappeared he stopped working until it returned. "I am really intoxicated with vision every time I hold a pencil or pen in my hand "-he wrote.

Helen Smith painted in trance a series of tableaus on Biblical subjects in colors. Her fingers moved incoherently over the canvas, executing different details, in different parts which later merged into harmonious whole. She was very slow. The execution of a big picture took more than a year. The vision always returned.

Mme. d'Esperance saw a luminous cloud concentrate itself in the darkest corner of the room, become substantial and form itself into the figure of a child. Nobody else saw the figure but she could sketch it in the dark, being unconscious of the extraordinary circumstances that she could see the paper and pencil perfectly well. Spirit sketching became a regular phase of her mediumship for a considerable time but the power waned, the luminosity of the apparitions decreased as soon as she began to study sketching and became more self conscious of her work.

Dr. John Ballou Newbrough, the automatist of Oahspe could paint with both hands at once in total darkness. Susannah Harris, being blindfolded on the platform, executed in two hours an oil painting upside down.

There are various degrees of such automatic activity from inspiration to obsession. The fantastic designs of Victorien Sardou: scenes on the planet Jupiter, The House of Mozart, The House of Zoroaster were inspired, as he felt it, by Bernard Palissy. In the celebrated Thompson-Gifford case the impulse amounted to obsession. Heinrich Nusslein, a contemporary German automatist developed his curious powers of painting under the effect of the suggestion of a friend. In approximately two years he had painted 2,000 pictures. He paints small pictures in three or four minutes. No work takes more than thirty or forty minutes. Many of them are painted from visions and in complete darkness. He makes portraits of distant sitters by psychometric rapport or by concentrating on a name. His paintings have considerable artistic merits. Augustine Lesage, the French miner painter produced his first work in 1918, at the age of 35, after attending some seances. In ten years he produced 57 canvases the conceptions of which are harmonious and suggest an innate genius for color. He always begins at the top of the canvas and works, as it were, story by story. He believes himself to be the reincarnation of an old Egyptian painter. In 1926 the Society of French artists exhibited some of his works. He feels an inner prompting before he begins to paint.

Marjan Gruzewski, the Polish painting medium has a peculiar history. His subconscious life was in preponderance from early childhood. When he went to school his hand would write something else than what was dictated to him. If he tried to write what he was told to do the pen dropped out of his hand. When he first came into contact with spiritualism he was discovered to be a medium for telekinesis, ectoplasmic phenomena and trance mediumship in general. His gifts of automatic painting were discovered at the age of 18-19 after the end of the war. In a state of trance and in full daylight he could produce pictorial representations of anything suggested: scenes from the spirit world, historical events, strangely interwoven with phantasies, striking portraits of dead people whom he did not know in life; and the composition was often set with grinning demons and weird faces. In Paris, at the Institut Metapsychique he drew designs and painted portraits in complete darkness. But these pictures were inferior to those produced in light. The quality improved with red light, even if it never reached the table where he was working. He could also paint a portrait under psychometric influence. Before his automatic activity developed he knew nothing of designing or painting.

If talented painters, like Ferdinand Desmoulin and Hugo d'Alesi produce automatic pictures, subconscious activity may well explain the case. But that the explanation is not always satisfactory is well proved by the case of Mme. Marguerite Burnat-Provins, a very able author and painter. At the time of the outbreak of the war, when the church-bells tolled out the mobilization order, she was seized by a great emotion and sudden voices impelled her to write. At a later stage the hearing of the voice was accompanied by a vision which she drew with lightning-like quickness. The visions represented symbolical character pictures, they were sometimes felt subjectively, but were often seen objectively in natural colors in space, developing on some occasions from a cloud-like formation and leaving an indelible impression on her brain. They assumed a great variety in shapes and contents, over a thousand pictures having been produced by the Summer of 1930, when Dr. Osty published in the Revue Metapsychique the result of his study. Mme. Burnat-Provins feels anguished if she tries to resist the temptation to draw the visions as soon as they present themselves and an exhaustion follows or sometimes precedes the phenomenon. The style and character of the pictures is entirely different from Mme. Burnat-Provins' ordinary work, most of them resemble caricatures, and she attributes the results to an extraneous influence.

Another curious case is presented by the automatic sketches of Capt. Bartlett, of Glastonbury Abbey, as it was in ancient days. He began at the left hand top corner and worked downwards, bringing out archeologically verified details with an amazing precision.

The tremendous speed with which the automatic execution takes place is one of the most puzzling features of this psychic activity. The Seeress of Prevorst drew complicated geometrical designs. "She threw off the whole drawing" -writes Dr. Kerner - in an incredibly short time, and employed, in marking the more than a hundred points into which this circle was divided, no compasses or instruments whatever. She made the whole with her hand alone, and failed not in a single point. She seemed to work as a spider works its geometric diagrams, without a visible instrument. I recommended her to use a pair of compasses to strike the circles; she tried, and made immediate blunders." William Howitt, who had the gift of automatic drawing for five years, writes on this point: "Having myself, who never received a single lesson in drawing, and never could draw in a normal condition, had a great number of circles struck through my hand under spirit-influence, and these filled up with tracing of ever-new invention, without a thought of my own, I at once recognized the truth of Kerner's statement."

Myers observed that independent drawings often exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography, that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind. He often showed to experts strange hieroglyphics obtained automatically, but he found that at the best they appeared to resemble scrawls seen on Chinese plates.

The curious water-color pictures of Catherine Berry, exhibited in Brighton in 1874 disclosed such vagaries of mind to which Myers alludes. In Catherine Berry's own words: "by any ordinary observer they would be pronounced as chaotic, but a more minute survey of them reveals a wonderful design in construction and purpose whatever it may be." She was told by her guide that they were illustrative of the origin of species. Baroness Guldenstubbe attributed them to the inspiration of a planetary spirit.

Insane patients often exhibit an impulse to decorative and symbolical drawings. Some of their products, like those of Vaslav Nijinsky, are of decided art merit. The automatist, however, is as a rule of sound mind. Learning and erudition has nothing to do with the gift. Fabre, a French blacksmith, produced an almost faultless copy of Raphael's Bataille de Constantin, the original of which is now in the Vatican. The symbolic ideas often disclose a high moral purpose. "Never has anything proceeded from these drawings "-writes William Wilkinson in Spirit Drawings, A personal Narrative- "nor from their descriptions, but what has been to us an incentive to a better and holier life." It is, indeed, in the Bible that we find the first record of the phenomenon in the following: "Then David gave to Solomon his son the pattern of the porch, and of the houses thereof, and of the treasuries thereof, and of the upper chambers thereof, and of the inner parlors thereof, and of the place of the mercy seat and the pattern of all that he had by the Spirit, of the courts of the house of the Lord, and of all the chambers round about it, of the treasuries of the house of God, and of the treasuries of the dedicated things... All this, said David, the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even all the works of this pattern." (Chronicles, ch. XXVIII).

AUTOMATIC SPEAKING--excitation of the vocal chords without the volition of the conscious self. The speech bursts forth impulsively whether the medium is in trance or in the waking state. In the latter case, and in partial trance, the medium may understand the contents of the communication even if it comes in a language unknown to him. But the retention of consciousness during automatic speaking is exceptional. It is known to be so in the case of the medium Horace Leaf; it was so with Florence Morse, and it was also observed by Dr. Eugen Osty with Mme. Fraya and M. de Fleuriere. The curious case which Professor William James has recorded in Proceedings S.P.R. Vol. XII, pp. 277-98 of Mr. Le Baron's (pseudonym) experiences in 1894 in an American Spiritualist camp meeting, is specially instructive on this score. Le Baron, who was a journalist, at one of these meetings 'felt his head drawn back until he was forced flat on the ground.' Then "the force produced a motor disturbance of my head and jaws. My mouth made automatic movements, till in a few seconds I was distinctly conscious of another's voice-unearthly, awful, loud, weird-bursting through the woodland from my own lips, with the despairing words 'Oh, my people.' Mutterings of semi-purposive prophecy followed."

Professor James also speaks, as a curious thing, of the generic similarity of trance utterances in different individuals. "It seems exactly" -he said- "as if one author composed more than half of the trance messages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all subconscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspirations from it, I know not."

The remark does not apply to the higher grade trance utterances and inspirational oratory of which there is abundant proof. Nature's Divine Revelations was dictated by the Poughkeepsie Seer in trance. Thomas Lake Harris produced two big poems in a similar manner. An Epic of the Starry Heavens, a poem containing nearly 4,000 lines, and A Lyric of the Morning Land, another impressive poetic composition of over 5,000 words, were dictated in a remarkably short time. David Duguid's curious historic romance Hafed, Prince of Persia and its sequel Hermes, a Disciple of Jesus, were also taken down from trance dictations. The revelations of Catherine Emmerich, the Seeress of Westphalia about the house where Mary, the mother of Jesus died, as taken down and published by Clement Brentano in a work of several volumes have been confirmed by discoveries made near Ephesus towards the end of the last century. The seeress who lived at the beginning of the XIX century told the story of the life of Jesus day by day as if she had been an eye witness of it all. Telka, Patience Worth's poem of 60-70,000 words in Anglo-Saxon language, was dictated through Mrs. Curran as rapidly as it could be written down by a secretary, and the medium was so independent of that which came through her that she was free to smoke a cigarette, to interrupt herself by taking part in the conversation of those present, or go into the next room to answer the telephone. The whole poem, a masterpiece, took a total of 35 hours. The case of Miss Florence Morse is extremely interesting. She was not only conscious of her inspirational delivery but one of her controls who had a fund of dry humour frequently kept her amused by his droll remarks on some feature of the proceedings, especially when it was a case of answering questions. Trance-singing is a kindred manifestation to automatic speaking. Jesse Shepard was the most notable example. In the case of Mrs. A. M. Gage, a New York soprano singer, who lost her voice through an attack of haemorrhage of the lungs, it was accompanied by a complete alteration of personality.

BOOK TESTS, experiments to exclude the working of telepathy in mediumistic communications. In answer to questions or for reasons of personal relevance the communicator indicates a certain book upon a certain shelf in the home of the sitter and gives the text on a certain page. In such experiments far more successes were registered than chance would justify. The books selected are usually those of which the communicator was fond in his lifetime, thus offering another suggestion of personal identity. Many excellent cases of book tests are recorded in Lady Glenconner's The Earthen Vessel and in Some New Evidence for Human Survival, 1922, by the Rev. Drayton Thomas. Sir William Barrett, in his preface to this book, quotes the following communication which purported to come from Myers to him: "There were some books on the right-hand side of a room upstairs in your house in Devonshire Place. On the second shelf, four feet from the ground, in the fourth book counting from the left, at the top of page 78, are some words which you should take as direct answer from him (Myers) to so much of the work you have been doing since he passed over." Asked if the name of the book could be given, the reply was - "No," but that whilst feeling on the cover of the book he got a sense of "progression." Two or three books from this test book are one or two books on matters in which Sir William used to be very interested, but not of late years. It is connected with studies of his youth."

Professor Barrett remarks that Mrs. Leonard, the medium of the communication, never visited his house. He had no idea what books were referred to, but on returning home found that in the exact position indicated, the test book was George Eliot's Middlemarch. On the first line at the top of page 78 were the words .. "Ay, ay. I remember-you'll see I've remembered 'em all" which quotation was singularly appropriate, as much of his work since Mr. Myers passed over has been concerned with the question of survival after death and whether the memories of friends on earth continued with the discarnate. But the most remarkable part of the test was yet to be discovered. In dusting the bookshelves the maidservant, unknown to the Professor, had replaced two of George Eliot's novels by two volumes of Dr. Tyndall's books, viz., his Heat and Sound, which were found exactly in the position indicated. In his youth Prof. Barrett was, for some years, assistant to Prof. Tyndall, and these books were written whilst he was with him.

By what process is the discarnate intelligence able to find a relevant passage in closed books? One of the preliminary statements which the Rev. Drayton Thomas received from his father was that he "sensed the appropriate spirit of the passage rather than the letters composing it." After eighteen months he appeared to acquire a power of occasionally seeing the words by some sort of clairvoyance. The giving of the page is one of the greatest difficulties. The impression left on the Rev. Drayton Thomas'mind was that when a page had been fixed upon as containing a thought suitable for the test, the operator counted the pages between that and the commencement. He usually starts where the flow of thought commences and when it ceases and recommences higher up he concludes that he passed from the bottom of one page to the top of another. In this way, they say, it is found practicable to compute the number of pages between the commencement and the passage fixed upon for the test. When verifying, one usually counts from the commencement of the printed matter, disregarding fly-leaves and the printer's numbering.

The experiments were just as successful when a sealed book, deposited by a friend in the Rev. Drayton Thomas' house, was used; with an unseen bookshelf; with a parcel in which an antiquarian at random packed in some books and which was unopened; and with books placed in the dark in an iron deed-box. If these results are to be explained by the medium's supernormal powers, she has to be endowed, as the Rev. Drayton Thomas points out, with such a degree of clairvoyance as would permit the making of minute observations in distant places and retaining a memory of things there seen, with ability to extract the general meaning from printed pages in distant houses, despite the fact that the books concerned are not open at the time, with ability to obtain knowledge of happenings in the sitter's home and private life relating both to the present and to the distant past and with an intelligence which knows how to select from among our host of memories the suitable items for association with the book-passage, or conversely, of finding a suitable passage for the particular memory fished from the depths of our mind. His own conclusion was that the book tests were obtained by a spirit who gleaned impressions psychometrically and obtained an exact glimpse now and again by clairvoyance.

The underlying idea of book tests goes back to the experiments of Sir William Crookes. A lady was writing automatically with the planchette and he tried to devise a means for the exclusion of "unconscious cerebration." He asked the invisible intelligence if he could see the contents of the room, and on receiving an affirmative answer he put his finger on a copy of The Times which was on a table behind him, without looking at it, and asked that the communicator should write down the word which was covered by his finger. The planchette wrote the word "However." He turned round and saw that this was the word covered by the tip of his finger. This experiment was first published in January, 1874, in the Quarterly Yournal of Science.

The first plain book tests were recorded by Stainton Moses. He wrote automatically, under the dictation of Rector: "Go to the book case and take the last book but one on the second shelf, look at the last paragraph on page 94, and you will find this sentence. . . ." The sentence was found as indicated. The experiment was repeated a number of times.

Of other mediums William Eglinton was particularly successful in direct-writing book-tests. Many cases are described in John S. Farmer's Twixt Two Worlds. The page and line were selected by tossing coins and reading the last numbers of the dates. In some cases they were still further complicated by prescribing the use of colored chalk in a set order of the words. Book tests combined with xenoglossis are described in judge Ludwig Dahl's We Are Here, published in 1931. The Norwegian judge writes of the mediumship of his daughter, Ingeborg, and describes how her two (deceased) brothers "were represented as going into another room and reading aloud passages from a book still on the shelves, the number of which was selected by one of the sitters-the medium successfully repeating or transmitting what they read in a foreign language and far beyond her comprehension."

Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, in her study of the problem of book tests in Proceedings S.P.R., April, 1921, arrives at the conclusion: "On the whole, I think, the evidence before us does constitute a reasonable prima facie case for belief in the perception of external things not known to any one present, but known to someone somewhere."

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