Adolphe Didier Medium  France.

 

  Alexis Didier Medium  France.

1826 - 1886

In 1847 the Didier Brothers were tested twice by the Marquise de Mirville, by asking Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin the infamous 19th century French conjurer and illusionist along to the seance {not to be confused by the American American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) ]. Houdini produced a book that he had brought along with him and asked Alexis to read out from the book eight pages back from the one open starting from a specific mark which Houdini had previously marked by a pin being stuck into the page. Alexis correctly read out the passages so Houdini at the time signed the following statement; " I affirm that the above facts are scrupulously accurate."

In the Didier seances in attendance was a Mesmerist by the name of Marcillet. Even though the brothers were held up by the spiritualist following as being good Mediums, the brothers never claimed to be Spiritualist nor did they ever claim to be helped by the Spirit World.

In 1849 in the towns of Brighton and Hastings a Dr Edwin Lee recorded many tests he did with the Didier brothers. [see the book Animal Magnetism 1866]. They were also tested many times by H G Atkinson by giving them similar ones as those done by Houdini.

In his book E W Cox wrote;  "A party of experts was planned to test M Alexis. We prepared a packet containing a single word of twelve letters and enclosed it in six envelopes of thick brown paper, each of which we carefully sealed. Handing him this packet he placed it, not before his eyes which were bound with handkerchiefs and wool, but upon his forehead, and in three minutes and a half he wrote the contents correctly, imitating the very handwriting. The word was by arrangement placed in the first envelope by a friend in a distant town, who was not informed of the object and who did not inform us what the word was; and none of us knew until the envelopes were opened and the word found to be that which the Somnambulist had written."

 A Mr Frank Podmore writes about Alexis's gifts in The Newer Spiritualism 1910: "Many of these feats are so precisely recorded and so well authenticated that it is difficult to doubt their genuineness. They stand on the same evidential level as many of the similar incidents recorded in the Proceedings of the S.P.R."  Podmore noted that Alexis, as he said at the time, was in an abnormal state of consciousness during his performances, in other words a state of trance, this he noted because most times he would prefer to write down the answers to questions rather than speak them. Podmore also noted that Alexis was doing Automatic Writing in this trance state, classing him as an Automatic Writer and that his feats of clairvoyance were genuine and that they involved no conscious deception on his part. [so in my opinion he must have been linking with the Spirit World even though they did not know it].

Sources:

Cox, E. W. What Am I? A Popular Introduction to Mental Physiology and Psychology. 1874.

In a Report of the Experiments on Animal Magnetism, by a Committee of the Medical Section of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, 1831: "We have seen two somnambulists who distinguished, with their eyes closed, the objects which were placed before them; they mentioned the colour and the value of cards, without touching them; they read words traced with the hand, as also some lines of books opened at random. This phenomenon took place even when the eyelids were kept exactly closed with the fingers."

 

Quite a few of Alexis Didier's views are in

Le Sommeil Magnétique explique par le somnambule Alexis en etat de lucidite (1856).

Adolphe Didier wrote Animal Magnetism and Somnambulism (1856);

Mesmerism and Its Healing Power (1875),

Clairvoyance (1876).