Chapter III: An Experience in the Occult (2)

A pause. Then arises a varied activity among the light rings on the floor. They are shoved to and fro, tossed from place to place. One rises from the floor with its gleaming string hanging down. It is held up, carried through space, brought to the table, where it wants to be put down, and is, with a clumsiness which might lead one to think that its motive force was blind. But probably the thing is timid, afraid of being seen, afraid of venturing too far into the circle of lamplight on the table. The ring is moved to the nearest corner of the table, by a kind of stealthy shove that makes the felt scrape along the wood. It just balances. At the same time the thing, in its blind, clumsy trepidation, knocks so hard against the table that it shakes. Tut, tut, you hole-and-corner fish out of water, why, and with what monstrous knuckles, are you knocking like that on our good table, before our face and eyes? Just as I am thinking this, plop, a ring flies into my face. Something has flung it at me, it drops on my knee and thence at my feet. What a playful monster! We all laugh. But it is not amusement we feel, rather a sort of sinking sensation at the chilling arrogance of this something or other which is perhaps only a distressingly complicated kind of humbug. But, as I said, a civilized. It did not throw the music-box in my face, but tactfully chose one of the soft little rings. People have had their ears boxed, and other practical jokes have been played, such as unlacing boots. Somebody had his wristwatch taken off and carried about the room. But nobody, it is unanimously affirmed, has ever suffered any serious harm from these powers, and that is an indication of good sense and decent feeling. On the other hand, they do unmistakably tend to become demoralized, to play silly tricks and make unmotivated displays of strength. The need of constant oversight, guidance, and direction is plain--as, for instance, when the agency now set to work, with a good deal of persistence, to upset the music-box standing on the table. The Baron was alarmed for his instrument, and begged Minna to spare him the heart-breaking annoyance which any kind of repair work costs in these days. In vain. “It” obstinately persisted in overturning the box, on which lay the slate and slate-pencil, likewise in danger of breaking.

Something had to be done by way of distraction, and the Baron thought of the typewriting-machine, which stood on the floor in front of the curtain, with paper inserted ready for use. “Write, Minna,” he said. “Do something useful. We will listen to you, and then we shall have the writing, to prove that we are not hypnotized, as some of your enemies say.” The thing seems able to listen to reason, it desists from its efforts at the box. We wait. And, on my honour, the writing-machine begins to click, there on the floor. This is insane. Even after all we have already seen, it is in the highest degree startling, bewildering, ridiculous; the fantasticality of the thing is even fascinating. Who is it writing on the machine? Nobody. Nobody is lying there on the carpet in the dark and playing on the machine, but it is being played on. Willy’s arms and legs are held fast. Even if he could get an arm free, he could not reach the machine with it; and as for his feet, even if they could reach that far they could not touch single types on the machine, they would tread on several at once. No, it is not Willy. But there is nobody else. What else can we do but shake our heads and laugh? The writing is being done with the right touch, a hand is certainly touching the keys--but is it really only one hand? No, if you ask me, there are surely two hands; the sounds are too quick for one, they sound as though proceeding from the fingers of a practised typist; we come to the end of a line, the bell rings, we hear the carriage being drawn back, the new line begins--the sound breaks off and a pause ensues.

Then somewhat further back, in front of the dark background of the curtain, suddenly, swiftly, and fleetingly, the following little apparition. Something appears, a longish something, vague, and whitely shimmering; in size and general shape like a human forearm, with closed fist--but not certainly recognizable as such. It comes and goes, showing itself before our eyes, lighted by a sort of flash of white lightning that issues from its own right side and wholly obscures whatever shape it has--then it is gone.

“There, there is a materialization for you,” says our host, pointing to it. “I’m glad you have seen one. Wait, perhaps it will make an impression for us.” And he pleads with Minna to put her hand into the plate of flour on the table. But I did not for a minute believe that she would, and she did not, we waited in vain. It was quite light on the table, the phantom would have exposed itself all too defencelessly to our view, and to do that did not in the least correspond to the image I had made to myself of the shy, sly, stealthy, equivocal character of our elusive guest: a character too insignificant to have evil intent, on the contrary probably quite well-meaning, but weak-minded and embarrassed.--Nothing further happened. General fatigue, it seemed, had supervened. Willy whispered: “Merry Christmas!” The sitting was over.

It was odd to see in the bald white light the felt ring lying there at my feet where it had no business to be. Remarkable, too, to observe the typed writing on the machine, a perfectly nonsensical jumble of large and small letters; presumably it would have been different if Willy himself knew how to type. He still lay drunk with sleep, leaning sideways across the arm of one of the controls. I went up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him it had been a brilliant sitting. He looked dumbly up at me with his sleepy eyes, and a good-natured, rather sad little smile was on his face.

We moved back by groups into the library, in animated discussion over what we had seen. Tea was served, and did us all much good. The evening finished off with stage stories narrated by Reicher.

* * * * *

Well, now, what had I seen? Two-thirds of my readers will answer: swindle, sleight-of-hand, deception. Some day, when our knowledge of these matters has progressed, the field will be popularized, and they will deny that such was their judgment. Even now, and even if they take me for a credulous and suggestible fad-chaser, the testimony of trained experimenters like the French scholar Gustave Geley ought to make them less glib. Geley closes his report with the categorical statement: “I do not merely say that there was no deception present in these sittings; I say that the possibility of deception was ruled out.” That is absolutely my own position. I am in that intriguing and confounded state of mind in which reason commands us to recognize what reason on the other hand would reject as impossible. The nature of the phenomena I have described makes it inevitable that the idea of deception should afterwards haunt the minds even of those who saw with their own eyes; only to be laid, over and over, by the evidence of the senses, by the reflection that deception was definitely impossible.

But, it will be objected, three-quarters of all the mediums _are_ swindlers, and have been exposed as such.--That is a fact, a bewildering one; the more so that in many of these cases, I might even say in most of them, the _dolus_, the intent to deceive, is absent. I am convinced that even our good Willy, if he had had the chance, would have started hocus-pocussing and so have seriously compromised his position; for it is conceivable that in his dream he makes no distinction between what he does with his own hand and what in “other” ways; and being moved by the quite comprehensible desire to produce an effect, he might, if he had been “uncontrolled,” have set to, been discovered, and so discredited the experiments. And this would not have been any evidence whatever against the genuineness of the occult phenomena which were produced when he was in safe arrest.

The whole affair, however trifling it looks on the surface, is serious enough to warrant explanations in a serious and even a solemn key. Having seen what I saw, I consider it my duty to bear witness that in the experiments during which I was present, any mechanical deception or sleight-of-hand tricks were humanly impossible. Some may find such testimony reckless; and our reason even obliges and forces us to do so; for we do immediately twist and turn to find a middle way out, by which we may somehow, even verbally, avoid the alternative of deception or reality. “Delusion” is such a word; its very vagueness helps by preventing us from seeing to the bottom of it. The two conceptions of reality and of deception are mingled in it, and perhaps the mingling has more justification than we know, and is less strange in nature than it is to our downright processes of thought. I will say, then, that what I saw had to do with an occult delusion in the domain of organic life; with bewilderingly deep and sub-human complexes, at once primitive and involved. These, undignified by nature and trivial in their activity as they are, are well calculated to be offensive to our proud æsthetic sense, but to deny their abnormal reality would be nothing less than unreasonable obstinacy.

Furthermore, the scientific investigation of these phenomena is no longer precisely in its infancy. Science has at least got so far as to have invented a terminology, by means of which one can express oneself respectably on the subject. What I saw were “telekinetic” phenomena, phenomena of motion at a distance. This particular medium, young Willy S., is especially strong in the production of this kind of manifestations, which in their origins are closely related with the occult natural phenomenon of materialization--in other words, the temporary organization of energy outside the medial organism, its _exteriorization_, so to speak. Among reasonable people it is agreed that the agent which performs the tricks I have described, the swinging of the bell, the lifting of the handkerchief, the typing, is not a spiritistic “intelligence” by the name of Minna, neither is it Aristotle or Napoleon, but the partly exteriorized medium himself. But even that does not go far toward making our problem more accessible to the reason. On the contrary, the popular, spiritualistic hypothesis is much clearer and simpler than the scientific one; while as for the problem of exteriorization and materialization, the longer one looks at it, the more it reveals a complexity apparently calculated for the express purpose of making a mock of the human intellect. Which is not surprising--considering that after all it is bound up with the presumably not occult problem of life itself!

“That which governs life,” Claude Bernard wrote, “is neither chemistry nor physics, nor anything of the kind; but the ideal principle of the life-process.” A strangely indefinite saying for a great scientist, he being a Frenchman to boot; a saying that gropes vaguely after a mystery, and shows that it is precisely the great world of scholarship which never loses an inward feeling for the mystery; and that only the rank and file run the danger of scientific darkness, unmindful how very little complete, how much mingled with mystery--and riddles perhaps never-to-be-solved--is all their exact knowledge of nature and life and its functions. It is accepted as an established fact in the world of occultism today that the effective and formative principle at work in the psychological processes does in certain cases assume a “teleplastic” character: in other words, it passes beyond the limits of the organism and operates outside it, “ectoplastically.” That is, it calls into temporary existence, out of the exteriorized, organic basic substance (the appearance and form of which have already been observed with some degree of exactitude), shapes, limbs, bodily organs, particularly hands, which possess all the properties and functions of normal, physiological, biologically living organs. These teleplastic end-organs move apparently free in space, but so far as can be observed have a close physiological and psychological relation with the medium, in such a way that any impression received through the teleplasm has its effect upon the medial organism, and vice versa. Here we see supra-normal physiology vying with the normal to bear witness to the unity of the organic substance. A fluid, in varying degrees of density, leaves the body of the medium as an amorphous, unorganized mass; takes form in various teleplastic organs, hands, feet, heads, and so on; and after a brief existence in this form, during which, however, it displays all the attributes of living substance, dissolves and is reabsorbed into the medial organism. And this fluid, this substance, this substratum of the various organic formations, is uniform, undifferentiated; there is not such a thing as a bone-substance as different from a muscular or visceral or nervous one; there is only the one substance, the basis and substratum of organic life.

Probably all reasoned thinking and talking in this highly speculative field of facts is today premature and can only seem to clarify without doing so. But one thing is certain: we shall be thinking and talking most inadequately about the phenomena of materialization, as about the riddle of life in general, if we regard them from the physical and material side alone, and not from the psychical as well. It was Hegel who said that the idea, the spirit, is the ultimate source of all phenomena; and perhaps supra-normal physiology is more apt than normal to demonstrate his statement. Yes, it undertakes to place the philosophic demonstration of the primacy of the idea, of the ideal origin of all reality, alongside the biological demonstration of the unity of all organic life.

Quite uninstructed, and on my own responsibility, I explained the telekinetic phenomena as the medium’s magically objectivated dreams. And the literature of the subject confirms my explanation; with an awe-inspiring display of technical terms, it explains that the _idea_ of the phenomenon, present in the subconsciousness of the somnambulist, mingled moreover with that of the other persons present, is by the aid of psychophysical energy “ectoplastically” moved, by a biopsychical projection, to a certain distance, and imprinted--that is to say, “objectivated.” In other words, we call to aid an uninvestigated _ideoplastic_ faculty possessed by the medial constitution. Ideoplastic--a word, and a conception, of Platonic power and charm, not without flattering unction to the artist’s ear, who will be ready from now on to characterize, not only his own work, but universal reality as ideoplastic phenomena. Yet a word, and a conception, of quite as turbid depths as the word “delusion” itself, and, by virtue of its maddening mixture of elements of the real and the dream, leading straight to the morbid and the preposterous.

Let me give in closing one single but striking example. We are repeatedly assured that the ideoplastic formations, for the time during which they are present, possess all the characteristics of actual life. When they have been in a good mood they have not only let themselves be seen and touched, and their objective reality established by photography and apparatus which registered their telekinetic activities; but plaster casts have been made, hands of transcendental origin having been persuaded to dip themselves into basins of warm water with melted wax floating on top. In this way a mould has been formed about the spirit member, and hardened by exposure to air. Out of such a mould no human hand could get free without breaking the mould. But the teleplastic organ frees itself by dematerialization, and the experimenters pour plaster of Paris into the wax glove and thus obtain a cast of the materialized organ, which should correspond to it in all particulars. It is to be noted that the casts thus obtained show no resemblance in shape or lines to the hands of the medium, or to those of anyone else present. Now at one of Willy’s sittings the following perfectly lunatic thing occurred (and not the only one of its kind). The medium being under the most careful control, a shape like a hand appeared, coming from above and behind, and showed itself above a piece of grey clay on the little table. It had a forearm, and was lighted by a rosy light, and it hovered about over the surface of the clay; on which, after the sitting, six flat impressions were found, on the previously smooth surface. But at the base of Willy’s little finger on his left hand, and on the back of the fourth finger of the same hand, _there were traces of clay_.

Now I ask of nature and spirit, I inquire of reason and of logic on her throne: How, when, and from where came the clay on Willy’s fingers?

No, I will not go to Herr von Schrenck-Notzing’s again. It leads to nothing, or at least to nothing good. I love that which I called the moral upper world, I love the human fable, and clear and humane thought. I abhor luxations of the brain, I abhor morasses of the spirit. Up to now, indeed, I have seen but a few stray sparks from the infernal fires--but that must suffice me. I should like of course to hold, as others have held, a hand like that, a metaphysical delusion made of flesh and blood, in mine. And perhaps there might appear to me, as it has to others, Minna’s head, above the shoulder of the sleeping Willy: the head of a charming girl, Slavic in type, with lively black eyes. That, however uncanny, must be a wonderful experience.... After all, I will have another try or so with Herr von Schrenck-Notzing; two or three times, not more. That much could do me no harm; and I know myself, I am a man of ephemeral passions; I shall take care that it leads to nothing, and put the whole thing out of my mind for ever after. No, I will not go two or three times, I will only go once, just once more and then not again. I only want to see the handkerchief rise up into the red light before my eyes. For the sight has got into my blood somehow, I cannot forget it. I should like once more to crane my neck, and with the nerves of my digestive apparatus all on edge with the fantasticality of it, once more, just once, see the impossible come to pass.

1923

Thomas Mann is one of the really great contemporary
men of letters. He, himself, however roundly
resents being labeled a “writer,” and insists
upon considering himself not as an “artist”
at all but only “a good bourgeois drifted by
chance into literature.” To Mann this is no mere
equivocation in terms; rather it represents the
very keynote of his philosophy as revealed in his
works, springing from a deeply held conviction
that the intellectual type is not the ideal
toward which evolution moves, but, instead, the
man-of-action. All of Mann’s writing indeed, from
the epoch-making “Buddenbrooks” of his youth to
“The Magic Mountain,” the masterpiece of his
maturity, constitutes the most elaborate rejection
in literature of the “intellectual” as an unhealthy
growth upon the main body of humanity; but while
this theme dominates Mann’s works, it is only the
scarlet thread in his design, the whole of which
comprises nothing less than the most profound
criticism of the modern world yet vouchsafed by any
novelist.

_This book was set on the linotype in Bodoni,
electrotyped, printed and bound by The Plimpton
Press, Norwood, Mass. The paper was made by S. D.
Warren Co., Boston_