Slate writing
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
Slate writing, put simply, is a method of allegedly communicating with spirits using writing, or psychography. A medium would typically take a standard piece of slate in a wooden frame, place a piece of slate pencil on it, and hold it under the table, thumbs on top. After an interval, scratching would be heard, and the slate would have writing on it. Sometimes book slates, two slates in a frame connected with hinges, would be used, the pencil held between them. An in-depth history of the curiosity from the heyday of mediumship has yet to be written, but in the meantime Ron Nagy has produced this superficial treatment.
The book is divided into clear sections, but these are so short that they are simplistic. After a two-page explanation of what slate writing is which helpfully tells us that "bound-together slates were inscribed in many ways under various conditions", "John Gray", the spirit control of slate-writing practitioner Fred Evans, gives the viewpoint from the Other Side. A chapter on "the most documented slate-writing mediums" gives a few pages each on Henry Slade, Francis Ward Monck, Fred Evans, Pierre Keeler, Charles E Watkins, and just two paragraphs on William Eglinton (of whom much more below).
A brief reference to the Seybert Commission Report and the riposte by Almon Benson Richmond is followed by three pages on Johann Zöllner and Transcendental Physics. The book then moves on to what could have been its most valuable aspect, a collection of articles containing contemporary accounts of slate writing. A number are taken from the Spiritualist paper the Banner of Light, and these are unfortunately rendered largely useless to researchers by nearly all having their dates omitted. A chapter is devoted to extracts from the Psychic Observer on Pierre Keeler which are dated, and there is a brief conclusion and short list of sources, but no index.
Nagy is a Spiritualist and clearly believes that the bulk of spirit writing was genuine. Unfortunately he is too willing to put his faith in the séance reports that have come down to us, hence his extreme statement:
"At least a hundred levitations by DD Home are recorded and witnessed by creditable (sic) persons. They constitute overwhelming evidence that the incredibly impossible can be possible. To reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all human testimony whatever."
This might have led perhaps into philosophical considerations of epistemology, but he really just means that if I choose to reject a report from the 1860s of Home levitating, I must also reject someone telling me that it's raining outside, unless I verify it personally. Having trawled through the newspaper clippings recounting stories of slate writing, Nagy is confident that he has found only one instance of fraud. This means, for example, that he believes Henry Slade's version that when, at a séance in 1876, Edwin Ray Lankester snatched a slate before the ‘spirits' could have begun writing and found a message already on it, the spirits had been a bit quicker.
Nagy quotes from the Seybert Report:
"It would be a mere matter of opinion that all Independent Slate Writing is fraudulent; what is not a matter of opinion is the conviction, which we have unanimously reached as a Commission, of its non-spiritual character in every instance that has come before us."
Nagy feels that the key words are "opinion" and "conviction", the Commission had made its minds up beforehand and created a hostile environment that prevented an adequate performance by mediums. He does not however quote the next few sentences in their Report:
"An eminent professional juggler performed, in the presence of three of our Commission, some Independent Slate Writing far more remarkable than any which we have witnessed with Mediums. In broad daylight, a slate perfectly clean on both sides was, with a small fragment of slate pencil, held under a leaf of a small ordinary table around which we were seated; the fingers of the juggler's right hand pressed the slate tight against the underside of the leaf, while the thumb completed the pressure, and remained in full view while clasping the leaf of the table. Our eyes never for a fraction of a second lost sight of that thumb; it never moved; and yet in a few minutes the slate was produced, covered on both sides with writing. Messages were there, and still are there, for we preserved the slate, written in French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Gujerati, and ending with 'Ich bin ein Geist, und liebe mein Lagerbier.' We were utterly baffled. For one of our number the juggler subsequently repeated the trick and revealed its every detail."
Reading a number of these reports one does wonder why, if the mediums and their spirit collaborators were concerned to demonstrate the reality of the spirit world, they chose a method that looked so much like prestidigitation, rather than in some less ambiguous manner.
Despite devoting such a small amount of space to him, Nagy manages to claim that Eglinton sat from 1884 for three years with no results. This is quite a remarkable statement, and it is clear that Nagy has relied on a narrow range of American periodicals and not examined the enormous coverage given to slate writing in the publications of the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR carried out extensive work with Eglinton during 1884 and 1885 and the June 1886 issue of its Journal contains a long section on Eglinton, with reports by a number of members of sittings with him.
An accumulation of these can be misleading, because if a technique for fraudulently producing an effect is finely honed and not spotted by any participant, a large quantity of testimonies gives an unjustified confidence in the possible paranormality of the phenomenon. Concerns that these reports sent in to the SPR might have been underdescribed are reinforced by a concluding assessment to the entire set, provided by Eleanor Sidgwick, which forensically dismantles Eglinton's phenomena:
"Certainly some of the phenomena as described seem to be inexplicable by the known laws of nature; but this proves nothing by itself, since the question still remains, Are they correctly described? The juggler's art consists largely in making things appear as they are not."
Thus linking Eglinton's performances to conjuring, she asks if things which did not happen were imagined to have happened by sitters, and conversely things that did happen were overlooked. She stresses the necessity for continuous observation, but the difficulty in exercising it, and the unreliability of memory. Distractions can affect attention, and then memory lapses cause the observer to forget that the distraction ever occurred. And the conjuror is not bound to produce phenomena if the situation seems dangerous – it is acceptable for nothing to happen in a séance, and Mrs Sidgwick notes the frequency of this ‘privilege of failure' in Eglinton's sessions.
Sidgwick also conducted her own experiments on perception of the process of writing. Among other findings she discovered that writing can be done inaudibly, and if audible is not easy to localise. Also, it is difficult to discriminate between the sound of writing on a slate, and other methods of producing a similar effect, such as rubbing two slate-pencils together or scratching on the slate's frame, or the table. Although she does not use the word specifically, she is clearly alluding to the part that expectation plays in perception. Further, writing on a slate does not actually produce any detectable vibration, so that if sitters felt that this was occurring, it was caused by something else (the implication being that it was misdirection). Given the difficulties in observation, the table obscuring a clear view of the slate, talking and other distractions, Sidgwick concludes that she would only be convinced of the genuineness of Eglinton's writing by more stringent evidence, such as its production under circumstances which rendered constant observation unnecessary.
These comments naturally provoked dissension from Eglinton's supporters, and the Sidgwick summary was subject to criticism at a general meeting held on 5 July 1886, reported in the following issue of the SPR's Journal. For example, William Stainton Moses (who coined the term psychography), wondered whether there was any point Spiritualists remaining within the SPR if the Sidgwick article was representative of the SPR's "opinion". He hoped that the Society would disown the article and said that he had been pleased to hear since arriving at the meeting that it was to be considered a personal opinion only, as if this had been made a concession to those who like himself did not share it. An editorial disclaimer emphasised that as the SPR had no collective opinions it was not possible to ‘disavow' any views expressed by individuals, something it is curious Moses did not appreciate.
Naturally Moses and others present at the meeting were able to recount instances of psychic phenomena involving slates which they claimed could not have been produced by fraud, while Frank Podmore provided an example of a conjuror producing writing on a locked blank slate resting on top of the table in plain view. Frederic Myers took the opportunity to suggest, perhaps somewhat sarcastically, that the type of material described by Moses would form a valuable contribution to the proof of Spiritualism: "It is earnestly to be hoped that the notes which Mr Moses tells us were so carefully kept may be given to the world with the completeness and detail which their importance imperatively demands."
Noting the generally positive tenor of the contributions to the SPR's Journal, Richard Hodgson and a colleague attended a séance with Eglinton, and their observations are instructive as they suggest that the typical account on which Nagy places so much trust is not quite as comprehensive it seems. To begin with, there was conversation during his séances, which a sitter might easily think was his or her initiative and would make the medium's job more difficult. Hodgson on the contrary felt that conversation was designed to distract the sitters' attention and prevent them from observing Eglinton's movements satisfactorily. Despite this, Hodgson could see that both slate and hand were at times out of sight under the table. Secondly, Eglinton's left leg was almost entirely out of sight and it would have been possible to balance the slate on his knee. And thirdly, Eglinton made ‘occasional convulsive movements' (reports of other séances also spoke of ‘convulsions' and ‘writhing') and would change hands sometimes because of fatigue caused by holding the slate against the table, which would have allowed him to move the position of the slate. Similarly, Nandor Fodor noted that Charles E Watkins always writhed as if in torture every time the writing took place (something not mentioned by Nagy, who prefers to leave it at "a rarely gifted medium"). Such manoeuvres could allow the medium to carry out fraud undetected.
Hodgson concludes that these factors would allow "a skilled operator by ordinary methods to produce writing on the slate" with the conversation obscuring the sound of writing. That would mean that when a sitter thought that the writing was being done (announced by scratching sounds), it was already present on the slate. That leaves open the question of the sound of writing just before the slate was opened, and Hodgson explains this, backed up by experiments, by arguing that the sound of a pencil writing on slate can be imitated by a finger nail on the underside of the slate, and this can be accomplished without the slate or that part of the hand in sight appearing to move. The three taps signalling the production of a message also sounded like a finger nail rather than a pencil.
Later in 1886, Hodgson weighed in with a massive multi-part article with the prosaic title On the Reports, Printed in the Journal for June, of Sittings with Mr. Eglinton. Turning from his own experience to the reports of others, he contends that they were not reliable and were in line (as Mrs Sidgwick also concluded) with what might be expected if the phenomena they were describing were the result of conjuring. In addition, delays between sitting and writing the report could lead to gaps in the account which were often either smoothed over or associated with spurious recollections.
In order to indicate how reports might be deficient, Hodgson examined those describing séances at which there had been more than one sitter. Given that two or more individuals had attended the same event, discrepancies were valuable in teasing out instances of observer error. A good example of this was the incident in which numbers in different colours were written on a slate, and Hodgson shows how carefully these accounts need to be read. For example, one sitter stated that three coloured pieces of crayon were placed upon a slate and the three sitters each nominated a number to be written in a given colour, after which the slate was placed beneath the table. Yet according to another, the slate was placed beneath the table before numbers and colours were chosen, a different test entirely. Estimates of the length of time something took could vary wildly. There were enough discrepancies in both the slate writing and in other tests which Eglinton undertook to make the reader wonder what items the solo sitters had left out, and how reliable they were. For Hodgson, the lesson was that if these descriptions of the same event from two witnesses could be so at variance and "marred by the gravest omissions and other misdescriptions", what trust could be placed in any similar description of this type of sitting?
One of the news clippings from the Banner of Light reproduced by Nagy refers to "baseless charges" (ie "For myself, I have now no hesitation in attributing the performance to clever conjuring") laid by Mrs Sidgwick against Eglinton, but no context for this is given. Eglinton disdainfully bolstered his claim to genuineness by asserting that he had refused offers of large salaries from theatre manages, which if he were a conjuror, he would have accepted. Of course Eglinton's technique was not one that would have lent itself to a stage in front of a large audience, so these offers were easy to decline. He sniffily dismisses Mrs Sidgwick's "libellous charge" and the Banner continues by asserting that the SPR had disassociated itself from Mrs Sidgwick's claims and disclaimed responsibility, a complete distortion of the truth. The Banner article gives a number of testimonials but these are from Spiritualists who were not likely to be critical, and were open to the sorts of errors Hodgson had found. When Eglinton says that there were no distractions, not even conversation, during his séances, he is being disingenuous, as there was considerable movement and noise during what could sometimes be lengthy sittings.
Nagy considers that the newspaper descriptions he supplies were "in explicit detail", but how can he know? In fact, there is good evidence to the contrary if only he had looked. The debates within the pages of the SPR's publications make an interesting case study in the limits of eyewitness testimony and the will to believe. Yet over 120 years after Richard Hodgson and Eleanor Sidgwick made such trenchant criticisms, Nagy has taken the accounts in Spiritualist publications at face value, and while the descriptions he has reproduced have an historical curiosity, they are of little value shorn of any critical understanding on the part of credulous witnesses of what might have been happening under the table. They are certainly not the proofs of survival that Nagy might wish them to be.
