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A Magician Among the Spirits

Chapter 4: PREFACE
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About This Book

The author recounts his long investigation into Spiritualism, reviewing its founders and celebrated mediums, documenting séances, spirit photography, slate-writing, ectoplasm, and other phenomena, and describing methods by which investigators and stage magicians uncovered deceptions. He profiles specific figures, analyzes common trickery used to obtain information, and recounts tests and experiments conducted in laboratories and seance rooms. He also addresses exchanges with prominent believers and explains why purported proofs failed to convince him, arguing that conjurers’ techniques and systematic scrutiny expose fraud. The work concludes with reflections on the emotional stakes for grieving people and on the ethical responsibility of exposing charlatanry.

Gladly would I embrace Spiritualism if it could prove its claims, but I am not willing to be deluded by the fraudulent impositions of so-called psychics, or accept as sacred reality any of the evidence that has been placed before me thus far.

The ancients’ childish belief in demonology and witchcraft; the superstitions of the civilized and uncivilized, and those marvellous mysteries of past ages are all laughed at by the full grown sense of the present generation; yet we are asked, in all seriousness, by a few scientists and scholars, to accept as absolute truth such testimony as is built up by their pet mediums, which, so far, has been proven to be nothing beyond a more or less elaborate construction of fiction resting on the slenderest of foundations, or rather, absolutely no foundation.

Not only educated men and women with emotional longings for some assurance of the continued existence of departed loved ones, but people of all phases and conditions of life, have completely surrendered themselves to belief in the most monstrous fiction, vouched for by only a single witness of the so-called phenomenon, and that too when the medium, through whom the phenomenon was supposed to have presented itself, had been caught cheating time and again.

I believe in a Hereafter and no greater blessing could be bestowed upon me than the opportunity, once again, to speak to my sainted Mother who awaits me with open arms to press me to her heart in welcome, just as she did when I entered this mundane sphere.

H.

Spring, 1924.