At the height of the spiritualism craze way back when, there was a man who levitated in front of people by walking out a window and around the house to enter into another window that had no ledges. This man’s name was Daniel Douglas Home. He supposedly held seances and the like. His story appears to be “true” but I have my doubts. Have the alleged powers of levitation and necromancy by Daniel Douglas Home ever been seriously debunked? (I hope).
Seriously?
A better question might be whether there’s any reason to assume the alleged powers have any basis in fact at all. I’ll bother debunking someone who claims to be able to violate the laws of physics as we know them after there’s the slightest shred of evidence to suggest he’s not a fraud.
I’ll debunk it for you. It never happened. He was a convicted fraud.
Don’t believe me?Harry Houdini took a swing at him here.
Of course they have. Home was a fraud and a liar who repeatedly conned widows out of their money by telling them the spirits wanted them to support Home financially. While some people were taken with him, it goes without saying that others saw through him. One of his victims came to her senses after giving him thousands of pounds and sued him successfully.
The levitation didn’t happen in front of anyone. Home was in one room and his friends were in another. During the seance, Home cried out to his friends that spirits were lifting him up and carrying him out the window. Then he “appeared” at the next window and entered the room. All he did was open the window, step onto the ledge, and then step onto the ledge of the next window. Here’s Joseph McCabe writing about Home:
Like I said just today in another thread, miraculous reports of this type always turn out this way: either nobody really saw the alleged event or there was some easy way that it could have been achieved without supernatural intervention.
Incidentally he went by Daniel Dunglas Home, not Douglas - not that it matters because he made up the “Dunglas” himself as a pretense to some Scottish nobility. Robert Browning called him “Dungball.”
Apparently was a master fraud and charlatan. Did he ever get arrested or pay restitution?
Perhaps the OP is confusing him with former British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, famed for his supernatural ability to lose both earldoms and general elections.
Most confusingly, he was also, once, Lord Dunglass.
NO I meant D.D. Home the supposed “spiritualist.”
Also the supposed D. D. Home. Anyway are you still worried this greedy fake might’ve been able to levitate?
Dude faked it and made a few bucks along the way.
More interesting, in my view, were those mediums - like Andrew Jackson Davis, Emma Hardinge Britten and others - who, inspired by what they truly believed to be authentic messages from the beyond, set out to work for progressive causes: Feminism, birth control, abolitionism, etc.
Oh, and to the best of my knowledge, Home never claimed to practice necromancy. Levitation, yes, but never necromancy.
Like I said, he lost at least one lawsuit. I’m not sure if he paid up. I wouldn’t be surprised if his rich friends/dupes paid the bill for him.
That’s one of the most interesting aspects of Spiritualism, I agree. Early on there was a utopian strain to it, and pretty much throughout its entire history it was strongly tied to feminism and progressive causes and it drew from liberal religious denominations. I can’t help thinking Spiritualism must’ve seemed very attractive to intelligent women who couldn’t get men to listen to them any other way.
He did say he communicated with the dead, yes. Mediumship was the way most of these people made money.
Absolutely. After all, mediumship seems to have been one of the very few positions of significant religious and moral authority available for Western woman during much of the 19th century.
A nice snippet from Allison Coudert’s Angel in the House or Idol of Perversity?: Women in Nineteenth-century Esotericism:
Naturally, many an outraged harumph followed, such as this gem:
Good crack, that.
Aw, shit, you’re quite right. I was under the impression that “necromancy” only meant raising the dead, as opposed to communicating with them, as the Spiritualists did. As it turns out, the word carries both meaning. Ignorance fought.
Too bad the Amazing Randi wasn’t around back then. Other than Houdini, do you know of any other famous debunkers back in the day a la The Amazing Randi?
Reading about that era you could get the impression that everybody fell for this stuff, but yes, there were skeptics and whole skeptical and rationalist associations. McCabe is the only one I’m really familiar with offhand, but I don’t think he was ever a medium or anything- just a rigorous skeptic. I did once read part of a book by a retired medium who exposed a lot of the tricks of the trade.
Beware of presentism. It wasn’t as clear-cut as a battle between “believers” and “debunkers”.
Instead, you had a whole bunch of people, scientists and psychologists and laymen and priests etc., all hard at work trying to figure out just what the hell was going on in the séance room.
The bigger picture: The kind of extreme materialism professed by men such as Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt (who famously believed that “thought stands in the same relation to the brain, as bile to the liver, or urine to the kidneys”) seemed to be on the retreat. For instance, psychologists were beginning to accept that not all diseases had strictly somatic roots - and phenomena such as hypnotism, with its roots in the earlier theories of animal magnetism etc., seemed to prove that the mind was capable of, well, all kinds of cool shit. On top of all that, you had scientists discovering invisible forces by the minute - Hertz, Röntgen, Curie, etc.
So, the big question for most of those involved, including scientists, wasn’t so much “how do we debunk these frauds?”, but rather “which new invisible force are we dealing with this time?”
So a whole bunch of different hypotheses popped up. Unsurprisingly, some Christian thinkers argued that the forces at play were demonic - the mediums were the Devil’s unwitting puppets. Then there were those who believed that the messages and communications were actually “unconcious reflections” of either the medium’s own ideas, or perhaps those of others present. And then there were the “classic” Spiritualists - i.e., those who came to believe that what you were dealing with was authentic communication with the spirits of the dead.
Of course, there were also debunkers. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any prominent American examples, but up here in Denmark you had, for example, a magician and a doctor teaming up to debunk false mediums as early as the 1880’s - all live on stage, with musical interludes and all the rest of it.
There’;'s a long history of debunking. Augustuis de Morgan’s A Budget of Paradoxes from the 19th century is worth reading. And, of course, there’s the Proto-Cecil, Bergen Evans, whose On the Spoor of Spooks and A Natural History of Nonsense should be required reading.
And there’s the second century Lucian of Samosota, whose satires are surprisingly modern, and who wrote a surprisingly Rabnndi-esque debunking of the DD Home of his day, Alexander of Abonoteichus. It’s on the internet, but I prefer the Penguin translation
http://www.epicurus.net/en/alexander.html
Spiritualism also came to the fore around the same time the public began to understand concepts like radiation and magnetism and as long-distance communication via telegraph was becoming possible.