Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Hermione on Psychical Research
HERMIONE ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
SPIRITUALISM is becoming quite the thing, isn't it?
Dear Sir Oliver Lodge has been proving some more things quite recently, you know. How anyone could doubt a man with such a lovely head and face I can't imagine!
Spiritualism and Spiritism are quite different, you know. It has been a long time, really, since Spiritualism was taken seriously.
Except by superstitious people, of course.
But Spiritism has come to stay. It has nothing to do with superstition at all. It's part of Advanced Thought—quite scientific, you know, while Spiritualism was just a fad.
And Spiritualism is somehow more—well, er—vulgar, if you get what I mean. The sort of people one cares to know well have dropped Spiritualism for Spiritism.
Though, of course, a ghost is a ghost, whether it is materialized by Spiritualism or Spiritism.
I have been often told that I am naturally very clairvoyant—if I were developed I would make a splendid medium. Mediums have seen shapes hovering around my head, and once when I was at school I did some automatic writing.
It was the strangest, easiest thing! I had a pencil in my hand and without thinking of anything in particular at all I just scribbled away, and what I wrote was, "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary; When in the course of human events it becomes necessary," over and over again.
I was quite startled, for the last thing I had been thinking of was an algebra examination, and not history at all. We had had our history examination days before.
I felt as if an unseen hand had reached out of the Silences and grasped mine!
Wasn't it weird?
And I know who it was, too. A distant relative of Mamma's on her father's side, by marriage, was one of the men who signed the Constitution of the United States in Faneuil Hall, in Philadelphia, in 1776, and it was his spirit that was trying to deliver his message through me!
And only last year I came across a very similar case. Only this was stranger than mine, if anything. For it happened on a typewriter—which proves that the veil between the two worlds must be very thin, doesn't it, if the spirits are taking up modern inventions?
It happened to one of Papa's stenographers. I had her up to the house to take notes for a report I was making to one of the sociological committees I was on then.
And she took the notes and put them into shape for me, but when she sent the report to me the back of one of the sheets was just full of one sentence written over and over again. She didn't know she'd included that sheet, of course.
It was so curious I asked her about it.
She looked a little queer and said that when she wasn't thinking of anything in particular, but just sitting before her typewriter and not working, she always wrote that sentence.
"It just comes into my head," she said, "and I write it."
"An occult force guides your fingers?" I asked.
"Yes, ma am, that's it," she said.
Over and over and over again she had written, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party."
And here is the eerie part of it—it almost frightened me when I got it out of her!—her father had been some sort of a politician; a district leader, or something like that. And he was dead, and she had had to go to work.
But he was trying to deliver a message through her!
Isn't Psychical Research simply wonderful!
Not that I'd care to go in for any vulgar thing such as tin trumpets, you know, but——
Well, there's the Astral Body. That hasn't been vulgarized at all, if you get what I mean. Really, the Best People have them.