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Houdini and Conan Doyle


JeanLucPicard

Paranormal Maven
Im really sorry guys if this is not the place to post it, but i thought it would be great to share.
Its by no means any kind of spam, if this is deleted please let me know.
Is a really nice article from skeptoid about the relationship between Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
It reminded me about the ufo/paranormal comunity a lot :)
I hope theres more ppl like Houdini and less like Doyle (in the way they believe things)
I think is really interesting for people like me, who didnt now about it.
Cya!

LINK

IM JEAN LUC PICARD GENE, SAY MY NAME ON THE SHOW AND I PROMISE YOU A FREE TELEPORTATION TO THE ENTERPRISE AND TWO HOURS IN THE HOLODECK.
 
I cannot engage (???) in such conversation.

Congratulations Gene, you glitched Diana's brain.
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NOW WE'RE GONNA GO BACK IN TIME TO REBOOT THE PARACAST TOO, A NEW ONE WITH TEENAGE MODELS, FULL OF EXPLOSIONS FOR NO REASON, SUN GLARES AND SHITTY STORYLINE ORIENTED TO KIDS AND MECHANDISING.
 
¿¿?? LOL Gene relax, Im not intended to fall into the abyss ;)
Just wanted something to say to add that bizarre Picard image.
Ok, im going back to my books.
star-trek-tng-las-vacaciones-del-capitan-picard-de-relax.jpg
 
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I hope theres more ppl like Houdini and less like Doyle (in the way they believe things)

Thanks for the disclaimer. Personalitywise Houdini seems to have been the less enjoyable one.

How Doyle could believe that Houdini might have real "psychic powers" is beyond me, too. It seems at least as baffling as his credulity with the Cottingley Fairies.

And all of that from the man who invented Sherlock Holmes with this imperative of logic, scientific, objective observance and "consider the improbable only after eliminating the impossible".

If you've read "The Parasite" by Conan Doyle, it becomes very obvious that he was very aware of fraud and trickery in the "psychic field" and was at least not a born esotericist. He also said that until some personal experiences he was an agnostic.


Well, I guess, to turn him from agnostic to believer, it must have taken some personally convincing experience (which I can relate to very much). But his story shows how carefully one has to tread in this area.
 
In the case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his extraordinary gullibility came to him late in life, after he suffered from terrible depression due to the deaths of several close relatives, including one of his sons, either in World War One or the worldwide flu pandemic immediately afterwards (which actually killed more people than WWI, and is the reason doctors still get paranoid a century later whenever a new strain of flu pops up somewhere). Like so many others in those terrible times, he was willing to clutch at any straw if it gave him hope that his loved ones, though gone forever, could somehow reassure him that they still existed in some way and were happy in the afterlife. So he wasn't a stupid man, just a very human one. Though I'm afraid Sherlock Holmes certainly wouldn't have approved.

Harry Houdini's motives for being aggressively skeptical were surprisingly similar. He was very close to his mother, so her death affected him greatly, and he went along to a séance because, like Conan Doyle, he desperately wanted to be convinced that his mother in some sense still existed and was happy. Sadly, that's not what he got. Because he didn't look particularly Jewish or make a big thing of it, very few people other than his personal friends knew he was a Hungarian Jew called Erik Weisz who moved to the USA with his family at the age of 4, but grew up in a household where in private the family spoke an amazing mélange of languages including German, Hungarian and Yiddish that no outsider would understand (and which no medium could possibly fake). His mother never did get around to learning English, and although Houdini wasn't particularly religious, she presumably was, what with being married to a rabbi and all.

So you can imagine Houdini's reaction when the medium put on her best old lady voice and had the late Mrs. Weisz tell her son in perfect English that she was blissfully happy to be with Jesus at last just like she'd always hoped she finally would be! This really hurt and offended him in the worst possible way, and he never, ever forgave Spiritualism for taking financial advantage of his and many, many other peoples' grief in this appallingly cynical fashion. Hence not only his private debunking of fraudulent mediums (Houdini was always a far better escapologist than magician, but he was easily good enough to spot their painfully crude tricks), but also the section of his show in which he replicated the marvels of the séance-room live on stage, only better, then announced at the end that it was all trickery, and the so-called "real" mediums were doing it in just the same way.

Conan Doyle, on the other hand, had fallen for the con in the first place because when the medium assumed that his son was an English-speaking Christian, she got it right, and the usual platitudes sufficed. He continued to communicate with his deceased son and many other people for the rest of his life as a coping mechanism to deal with the desperate, crushing grief that otherwise might have killed him, and I'm sure nobody with a heart would think any less of him for that. Though when it got to the stage where his favorite medium, who channelled a spirit called Pheneas, insisted on not only going on holiday with the Doyles so that Pheneas could continue to advise him on any little matters that might crop up, but living with him and his wife, and furthermore, claimed that the completely incorporeal Pheneas needed his own room, and it had to be painted purple, clearly things had gone a bit far! And as for those fairies...

The reasons he accused Houdini to his face of actually having psychic powers but lying about it aren't quite as insane as you'd think. Although Houdini desperately wanted to expose the methods of fraudulent mediums as convincingly as he possibly could, there was one step he wasn't willing to take, and that was to do their tricks himself, and then explain to the audience how he'd done it. At the time (and this was still true until very recently), if you wanted to have a career as a stage magician in Britain or the USA, you absolutely had to belong to the Magic Circle, and they had very strict rules indeed. Any breach led to permanent expulsion, meaning that your career was dead. The big no-no was revealing anything whatsoever about how magicians did their tricks to a non-member.

This meant that he couldn't risk explaining his methods even to a friend like Conan Doyle. Usually he didn't have to explain himself anyway, since if he, a professional illusionist and conjurer, faked séance phenomena onstage and then announced at the end that it was all a trick, the audience members usually took his word for it without needing to know the exact details. There was, however, a rival act called the Davenport Brothers (Houdini didn't like them too well) who did the same thing even better. But unlike Houdini, their entire schtick was to leave it ambiguous as to whether they were just clever tricksters or really were summing spirits from the Great Beyond - that way they got the biggest possible audience. And of course, unlike Houdini, they hadn't been personally hurt by mediums, and therefore didn't give a fig how fake they were.

So Conan Doyle could sort-of-logically persuade himself that, since at least one other high-profile act existed which might be using psychic powers on stage, and that part of Houdini's act was pretty much identical to what they were doing, maybe he was using supernatural abilities to fake being a fake, but lying about it for some reason (you know, there's a graphic novel in there somewhere...). Still not very logical, but it was that or watch his belief-system crash down in ruins and be left with no defense against the soul-destroying depression it kept at bay. You can't really blame him. But you can't blame Houdini either for being offended when his friend accused him to his face of secretly being the thing he hated most and living a lie.
 
So you can imagine Houdini's reaction when the medium put on her best old lady voice and had the late Mrs. Weisz tell her son in perfect English that she was blissfully happy to be with Jesus at last just like she'd always hoped she finally would be! This really hurt and offended him in the worst possible way, and he never, ever forgave Spiritualism for taking financial advantage of his and many, many other peoples' grief in this appallingly cynical fashion. Hence not only his private debunking of fraudulent mediums (Houdini was always a far better escapologist than magician, but he was easily good enough to spot their painfully crude tricks), but also the section of his show in which he replicated the marvels of the séance-room live on stage, only better, then announced at the end that it was all trickery, and the so-called "real" mediums were doing it in just the same way.

Wisty, I always enjoy the detail and thinking I read in your posts, but I have a footnote I'd like to offer re this paragraph. Xenoglossy [defined with a handful of cases at this wiki link: Xenoglossy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ] has been demonstrated by some mediums, but far from all mediums are capable of it. Mediumship involves the articulation -- to the extent possible by the medium -- of information expressed by the discarnate. In some cases, mediums called 'voice mediums' are also capable of reproducing the sound of the voice of a discarnate as experienced by his/her family and friends during the individual's life. The wiki article I linked provides only a few of the striking cases of xenoglossia (several arising not in mediumship but in hypnotic past-life regression and in cases of secondary personality development). We need to add cases in which individuals awaken from amnesia speaking a language different from the language they spoke previously (one of these was reported only a few years ago). Similar anomalous abilities also occur in individuals following amnesia or coma as a result of serious accidents, including musical knowledge and abilities to perform music and significant mathematical knowledge not learned before the trauma. In one such case I read about, the individual's mathematical capabilities were as remarkable as those of 'prodigies' (and in those cases, again, what we're dealing with is anomalous knowledge exhibited early in childhood and developing to extraordinary levels that cannot be explained). All of these phenomena indicate a web of knowledge and expression existing in the world to which some people experience access. Though such cases are rare, they are daunting and require an attempt at investigation of how they occur. It would not be surprising if Houdini happened upon a medium who was incapable of expressing what his mother's surviving consciousness conveyed in his/her own native language rather than in the language she spoke at home.

Re Houdini's mother's expressed feeling about 'Jesus', that's more difficult to accept given her own religious background. But it's not clear from this bit of information that the medium was a fraud. I'd like to find some adequate sources of information about Houdini's sitting, perhaps a transcript of the sitting in the SPR's archives, and will report back what I discover. I'm guessing that the sitting took place at the SPR since Conan Doyle was affiliated with that organization for some time (though I think he left because the researchers there, mostly Cambridge scholars, were too sceptical for him).
 
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How Doyle could believe that Houdini might have real "psychic powers" is beyond me, too. It seems at least as baffling as his credulity with the Cottingley Fairies.

The thing to remember about Doyle is that his own ather was institutionalized, as his own version of reality was rather subjective, and while also an intelligent man there were still these other distractions. And you know how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree etc. This article contains some of his father's wonderful drawings, which is available as a published diary. Very insightful material.
The Father and Son Who Believed in Faeries by A.N. Devers - Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly
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Constance, regarding the points you made, Houdini's disillusion with Spiritualism was entirely independent of Conan Doyle's belief that it was real. The séance that caused all the trouble isn't recorded in detail. Houdini was probably too upset to make notes, but in any case, he was never an investigator in any true sense, or affiliated with any of the few paranormal investigation organizations that existed at the time - he was a purely aggressive debunker.

"Xenoglossia" is beside the point here - if your own mother has entirely forgotten the multiple languages she spoke in life, learned one she never spoke at all, and has suddenly and retroactively switched religions, you are entitled to doubt whether she's your mother! As I understand it, a medium who can while in a trance speak languages they don't normally know is exhibiting xenoglossia. Complete inability to speak any of the languages the allegedly channeled spirit was known to have spoken during his or her lifetime, yet ability to speak those with which the medium happens to be familiar, isn't "xenoglossia" - the technical term for that is "lying".

Both men started out desperately wanting to be deceived to ease the pain inside themselves. Conan Doyle was fooled because he was an easier mark, and spent the rest of his life plugging an increasingly bonkers belief-system and everything that pertained unto it. Houdini was a much harder mark because the fake medium got it disastrously wrong in the first place, therefore he took the exact opposite path. I'm afraid it's as simple as that.
 
No question I'd be wasting my time trying to change your mind even a little bit, so I won't try. Be well.



Incidentally, beginning a search for more information on Houdini's medium, I found an indifferent website on Conan Doyle that offered this slightly differing anecdotal description of the event:

". . . Houdini became interested in Spiritualism after the death of his beloved mother. He had hopes of contacting her. However after consulting mediums and attending séances he became convinced that mediums were charlatans. Thereafter he made it a personal mission to expose false mediums.

Conan Doyle first met Houdini in 1920. Oddly enough the two men became friends. Conan Doyle wanted to make Houdini a believer in the movement. He even suspected that Houdini possessed some psychic gifts.

Houdini must have been flattered by the attention of the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes. Also Houdini really did want to believe in the movement. If he could find a genuine medium then he could perhaps contact his mother.

In 1922 Conan Doyle and his family were in America for a lecture tour on Spiritualism. They arranged to meet Houdini and his wife, Bess, in Atlantic City. While the couples were visiting Lady Conan Doyle suggested that they hold a séance. Jean Conan Doyle was an inspired or automatic writer and she felt that she could help Houdini attain what he'd long sought, contact with his mother.

The session went well and Lady Conan Doyle produced fifteen pages of writings supposedly from Houdini's mother. While Houdini didn't doubt that the Conan Doyles sincerely wanted to help him, he did doubt that the message was from his mother. He didn't say anything at the time, but the communication was in English, a language that his mother didn't speak. Also the writings made no mention of the fact that the séance happened on his mother's birthday."

The Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Spiritualism

Nothing there about Jesus this time, if that's any consolation.
 
". . . Houdini became interested in Spiritualism after the death of his beloved mother. He had hopes of contacting her. However after consulting mediums and attending séances he became convinced that mediums were charlatans. Thereafter he made it a personal mission to expose false mediums.".

IMO he was biased towards fraud and charlatanery to begin with. He had commited those himself by the time (performed as a fake clairvoyant) and probably seen more fraudsters and Barnums than anyone would care to.
 
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