Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead? | Hacker News Reader

Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead?

newyorker.com

37 pointssamclemens15 comments

One interesting thing that happened in that era was the unlikely friendship that developed between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.[1][2]

Doyle was a true believer in spiritualism while Houdini was a debunker of it.

They became friends despite this conflict of views, but later had a falling out over it when Doyle arranged for a seance for Houdini where Houdini's dead mother allegedly appeared.

[1] - https://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2016/04/the-real-story-of-h...

[2] - https://medium.com/picture-palace/harry-houdinis-spiritual-f...

> Houdini was immediately suspicious. The message was written in English and his mother only spoke German. At the top of each page was a cross. His mother was the wife of a rabbi and devoutly Jewish. There is no way she would have drawn a cross. Finally, the day of the séance was her birthday. Why didn’t she mention this?

This would probably sound laughable for anybody who has basic idea of extrasensory practice. Even assuming ghosts exist, you really can't contact them directly as if they were on a telephone/fax. That only works this way in cartoons. The only slightly realistic scenario is them channeling pure meanings/thoughts into a medium's mind. The medium then interprets them and turns them into words/drawings in accordance with habits of his own mind.

For example some times I (not a medium, I mean in ordinary life) really know what do I want to say and that is a simple one-word concept but I have hard time recalling the word in ANY of the languages I speak, I only have a pure meaning experience without a verbal representation to express. If I somehow could pass this sense to someone else telepathically they would still probably misinterpret it, e.g. because they have a different context in their minds.

And I would hardly waste time/traffic mentioning my birthday if I were talking to my son through an unreliable inter-dimensional telepathical connection.

Have you considered how you would distinguish this from ghosts simply not existing?

It seems like what you're describing is merely a means by which a non-existent phenomenon may seem plausible.

It seems obvious they probably don't exist and it's hardly possible to prove they do. But if they did (proving they don't exist seems equally impossible to me), I could only imagine they would communicate the way I describe.

Nevertheless it indeed seems a curious exercise to invent a framework for meaningful communication to be logically possible over a channel of such a nature keeping its fuzziness in mind.

Yes, but the only reason you can imagine it this way is that the many other possible ways are ruled out by the fact we do not observe them.

There is no purely logical reason the universe couldn't be such that a person's soul is capable of moving the air, such that they can actually speak.

I instinctively try to make the least bald assumption possible. Of course, as we exercise unconstrained imagination, we could imagine a ghost being so mighty it would materialize beautiful LaTeX documents right on our hard drives manipulating magnetic particles on them. Nevertheless, if I forget about the doubt in ghosts existing at all for sake of fun or whatever, the next doubt I have is they can manipulate the matters of material world with ease and precision - even if they could manifest a blow of a wind it would probably be hard for them to manipulate it precisely enough to produce continuous ineligible speech.

Conan Doyle and the Wright family helped propagating the Cottingley Fairies. Sometimes I get impressed by how much the western developed world was still so mystical by the begining of the 20th century... then I see people mixing religion and politics and I see how we haven't advanced so much in this area.

The article has a few interesting non-fiction book recommendations (are Houdini's books in the public domain? They don't seem as easily found online as I'd expect), so I'll add a random fiction book to the list:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27272632-summerland

A sci-fi/fantasy/spy novel that builds from the assumption that the victorians discovered a real afterlife.

Fairly unique in setting, and I found it an enjoyable enough read that I'm looking into picking up the author's other books.

Wikisource has transcribed versions of some of Houdini's books, but not yet of "A Magician Among the Spirits" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Harry_Houdini

The Internet Archive has a scan of the book: https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpir...

Because they had new surveillance technology (the telephone) and they needed a plausible explanation for what the source of all their secret information was. You can turn a specially modified telephone into a listening device. All important people had phones in their offices sitting right on their desks.

But obviously, to the gullible public, they were getting it directly from “the dead”.

This was popular

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost

Because they had no tv?

The dead know all the secrets?

Presumably for the same reason people in every other era, including today, try to speak with the dead: they miss them.

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