Ectoplasm

Abstract

In the first third of the twentieth century various Spiritualist mediums, who went by names such as  ‘Eva C.’, and ‘Margery’,  gained considerable public notoriety by producing ectoplasm from their nostrils, mouths and vaginas. In Europe, the UK and the US, avid psychic researchers — who included eminent physicists, doctors and engineers — observed, touched and flash-photographed this placenta-like ectoplasm during a series of scientific test-séances, some of which were sponsored by the Scientific American. The séances were extraordinary theatres of desire, seduction, obsession and belief, which were played out over between the psychic researcher, the medium, the medium’s personal mentor, and the medium’s ‘spirit guide’, who directed proceedings through the medium’s ventriloquised voice.  The ectoplasm itself was either chewed paper-pulp, cotton flocking, and tightly rolled photographs ingested before the séances; or lengths of chiffon and animal lung-tissue compressed and inserted into the vagina before the séances. In the overheated darkness of the séance the mysterious eruption of ectoplasm from the sprawled body of medium, as she groaned and heaved while entranced in her cabinet, totally reconfigured conventional gender politics. Her body became immensely powerful in its supposed docility and receptivity. Some psychic researchers reported that they saw the ectoplasm form itself into rudimentary ‘pseudopods’, the embryonic limbs of spiritual beings protruding from the ‘Other Side’. Others saw it receive photographic impressions, which were ‘ideoplasmically’ projected into it from the ‘Beyond’. In developing their elaborate theories for what they had seen, the psychic researchers drew on contemporaneous advances in science. They radically rethought the body, away from being a self-contained discreet entity embodying a single personality, towards being a kind of techno/bio diaphragm, part of an extended ‘mucoidplasmic’ continuum which linked the body directly to modern physics, technology and communication. Lately the intensely imaginative world the Spiritualists created for themselves, and the body of imagery they left behind, have come under renewed interest from artists, writers and theoreticians. It is still compelling. The photographs the researchers took where published in vast psuedo-scientific tomes and journals of psychic research. They can also be found in the collections of psychic institutes such as the Society for Psychical Research, London, and the American Society for Psychical Research, New York.  The paper draws extensively on these resources.

Ectoplasm

Introduction

Spiritualism was the belief that the human personality survived death. It was a broad, highly organised social and religious movement for almost a century, from the 1850s to the 1940s. It involved large numbers of converts who, believing that the dead were actively seeking to communicate with the living, formed themselves into séance ‘circles’. The circles often formed around charismatic mediums who, in the emotionally charged darkness of the séance room, manifested various signs from the other side: rappings, levitations, materializations, disembodied voices and glowing lights.

The Spiritualists imagined their mediums to be just that — a human medium for spirit communication — people pre-endowed with special powers to be able to passively receive and transmit messages from one side of the divide of death to the other. Mediums were often women, often working class, often middle aged, and often corpulent. To their devotees they appeared to be guileless — the innocent subjects of forces much larger than themselves. To sceptics , however, they were disingenuous thaumaturges skilfully deploying an arsenal of special effects derived from longer traditions of magic and illusion. In either case, their power was based on their physical presence, their supposed ‘feminine intuition’, and their corporeal affinity with the natural processes of life and death.

In the early twentieth century some mediums began to add another special effect to their psychic repertoire — ectoplasm. Ectoplasm quickly became the central image in the Spiritualist imagination, and became the obsessive passion of a number of self-styled psychic investigators for the next twenty years.

Eva C and Albert Schrenck-Notzing

The first ectoplasmic medium operated under the name Eva C. She was closely managed by a woman called Juliette Bisson. In the period just before the First World War, the two submitted themselves to hundreds of experimental séances conducted by Baron Schrenck-Notzing, a medical doctor who had become interested in hypnotism and psychic phenomena. Together the three slowly developed a new form of Spiritualist materialization: the slow, painful extrusion of wet organic matter from the body of the medium, which gradually formed itself into an entity. Ectoplasm, it was deduced, must be produced from within the body of the medium herself by the direct physicalization of psychic forces. These materializations were also called psychoplasms, or teleplasms, and were seen to be akin to telekinesis and telepathy in that they were unknown forces extruding themselves into our world.

Schrenck-Notzing’s preliminary medical examination had found Eva C physiologically normal, but psychologically weak and hysterical. In order to conduct his experiments under what were called ‘test conditions’, he examined her orally and vaginally, before some early séances, put her into tights and sewed her at the waist, back, neck and sleeves into an apron dress. At some séances she was fed bilberries to colour anything she regurgitated. After other séances she was given emetics to establish whether or not she had swallowed anything. But as they progressed these precautions were relaxed, the issue of fraud having been settled to Schrenck-Notzing’s satisfaction.

Eva C was hypnotized before the séances and fell into a trance, apparently controlled by a spirit calling herself Berthe. She whimpered, groaned and gasped behind the cabinet curtains as she produced the ectoplasm. Materializations were supposedly sensitive to light and touch, but it was found that Eva C could manage to withstand the painful shock of a brief flare of magnesium flash if the séance room was lit with dim red light, and she was allowed to ripen the materializations behind closed curtains and, under the control of a spirit, open the curtains herself when she was ready. Schrenck-Notzing documented the phenomena with 225 photographs taken by a battery of five ordinary and stereoscopic cameras. Enthusiasts could purchase copies of the photographs for eight Deutsch-marks each.

As the séances proceeded, the complexity of the materializations gradually developed, starting from amorphous clumps of flocculent or diaphanous material. At an early séance on 21 August 1911 Eva C gave Schrenck-Notzing his long desired for result when she delivered a strip of moist, cool and viscous material into his hand from her mouth, which although it was fibrous, was to him comparable to abdominal connective tissue.[1] By November, faces and heads were being photographed. Mask-like, flat looking, crumpled, veiled with cloth, and often with real hair attached, they were taken to be entities only partially completed by the teleplasmic forces.[2]

In January 1913 Eva operated naked for her close mentor, Madame Bisson, alone. Bisson photographed a web of a substance akin to intestinal connective tissue stretched between her nipples and navel. She also photographed partially formed hands and fingers, and reported seeing a full-sized human head come out of Eva’s vagina, which looked at her before disappearing again.

Towards the end of his 300-page account of the Eva C séances Schrenck-Notzing reflected on the inevitable accusations of fraud they would receive. He was the first to concede to his critics that the manifestations certainly bore all the signs of being cloth, pictures, or drawings, tightly folded and smuggled into the cabinet to be produced for the camera behind the curtain, under the cover of Eva C’s labouring moans and groans. And, from time to time, he himself had even found pins and threads in the cabinet after the séance. But to him this evidence that he was the victim of a magician’s sleight-of-hand remained purely circumstantial, while the possibility that he had discovered a previously unknown scientific phenomenon continued to beckon ever more strongly to him. So he fell back for assurance onto the ‘scientific’ manner in which he had conducted his experiments. He had searched every one of Eva’s orifices except her anus, he had purchased a square yard of the finest muslin and found he could only compress it down to the size of a small apple, he had ensured that the medium’s hands were held by himself or Bisson during the séance, and he had meticulously recorded the lightning-like speed with which the materializations seemed to appear and disappear, without the medium’s body appearing to move. So, he allowed himself to conclude, however suspiciously like regurgitated photographs Eva C’s flat, inert-looking ectoplasmic entities might seem to the untrained eye, to the trained eye of serious investigators such as himself, her phenomena revealed themselves to be following a new natural law:

If the play of a natural law, unknown to us, consisted in presenting to us optical images which are sometimes plastic, sometimes coarse, and sometimes equipped with the finest detail; having all the appearance of life on one occasion, and none of these on another occasion, we should have to accommodate ourselves to the fact, however strange it might appear […].[3]

Indeed, he argued there were many reasons why the unknown force would manifest in this peculiar, two-dimensional way — it might be using a picture language already known to us in order to make itself intelligible, or in order to economize on the use of the medium’s teleplasmic matter.

Eva C. and Gustave Geley

In early 1918 another researcher, Dr Gustave Geley who, like Schrenck-Notzing, was also a medical practitioner turned psychic researcher, began to examine Eva C at bi-weekly séances in his laboratory at the Paris Institute Metapsychique International (International Institute of Metaphysics) which had been set up to scientifically examine psychic phenomena. Eva C, always accompanied by her close protector Bisson, manifested moving fingers and hands in the midst of ectoplasmic masses. In the ruby gloom of the séance cabinet, Geley saw apparent ectoplasmic masses extend from her mouth, nose, eyes and fingertips, and, suspended from umbilical cords, form themselves before his eyes into beautiful doll-like heads. Geley was often so moved and surprised that he forgot to press the button for the flash that operated his stereoscopic cameras.[4]

Schrenck-Notzing had contented himself with detailing his observations, whereas Geley attempted to synthesize a theory of ‘metaphysical embryology’.[5] The ectoplasm emerged from the midst of the medium’s birth pangs as a polymorphous protoplasm which, although not yet organised, was nonetheless independently mobile and sensitive to the touch. Over time this protoplasm organised itself into either complete body organs — fingers, faces or heads of various sizes — or representations looking like drawings or photographs.

I have, for instance, seen the substance issue from the hands of the medium and link them together; then, the medium separating her hands, the substance has lengthened, forming thick cords, has spread, and formed […] epiploic [caul-like] fringes. Lastly, in the midst of these fringes, there has appeared by progressive representation, perfectly organised fingers, a hand, or a face.[6]

At this stage of biological research, well before the discovery of DNA, it was only through some unexplainable ‘life force’ that, for instance, an inchoate egg yolk was understood to organise itself into the different constituent parts of a chicken. Perhaps, psychic investigator’s reasoned, a psychic force could analogously form ectoplasm into spirit beings. But sometimes, even to Geley, Eva C’s ectoplasmic entities appeared to be clearly simulacra, as if cut from paper. But these, he reasoned, must be products of a weakened psychic force: ‘Like normal physiology, the so-called supernormal has its complete and aborted forms, its monstrosities, and its dermoid cysts. The parallelism is complete.’[7]

Like Schrenck-Notzing, Geley was convinced that he had eliminated all possibility of trickery. He put on record his gratitude to the young medium for supplying him with the phenomena he was seeking: ‘[t]he intelligent and self-sacrificing resignation with which she submitted to all control and the truly painful tests of her mediumship, deserve the real and sincere gratitude of all men of science worthy of the name.’[8]

.Eva C in London

In 1920 Eva C and Juliette Bisson were invited to London where they held forty séances for a committee from the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR hired the photographic firm of Elliot and Fry to document the séances with electric flash. Eva was stripped naked and given an oral, but not a vaginal, examination by the lady members of the committee, and sewn into a pair of tights to prevent previously hidden ectoplasm being surreptitiously produced. During the séances Eva cried out to Bisson, in French, ‘Call, Juliette, Call’, and Bisson asked the investigating committee to encourage the phenomena by replying, in a chorus of French, ‘Come! Come!’.

While Bisson held her hands and encouraged her to give herself up to the forces possessing her, Eva would breathe stertorously, eventually managed to produce small white objects, flat photo-like faces with trailing tendrils of black fibrous hair, and proto-hands, one of which seemed to gesture to the Society’s research officer, Eric Dingwall.[9]

.The Goligher Circle

From 1916 to 1920, another self-appointed psychic investigator, W. J. Crawford, conducted an extended series of experiments with the young Belfast medium Kate Goligher. Goligher was an eighteen-year-old blouse-cutter. Her family, led by her father, a collar cutter, were known throughout British Spiritualism as the Goligher Circle. The men who had investigated Eva C — Schrenck-Notzing and Geley — were medical doctors, and for their investigations Eva C seemingly produced various quasi-organic phenomena around which they developed elaborate physiological metaphors. Crawford, however, was not a medical doctor, but a mechanical engineer lecturing at the Belfast polytechnic. Correspondingly, the ectoplasmic phenomena Goligher created for him to observe appeared to him to follow mechanical, rather than physiological, principals.

In 1916 Crawford began to investigate the Circle’s ability to levitate tables and produce spirit rappings. The medium’s feet were tied together, and then to the back legs of her chair, and all the hands of the sitters were supposedly held in a circle. The séances were conducted in darkness. However, if the invisible operator who controlled the medium was given warning, a dim ruby-lamp could be lit, a piece of card painted with phosphorescent paint unveiled, or a flashlight photograph taken.

One such photograph showed what appeared to be a vertical column of light in the middle of the image. To our eyes the effect could be interpreted as the result of a light leak or a dribble of chemical fixer on the photographic plate, but Crawford saw it as a ‘psychic structure’ with curved legs as a base and cantilevered arms. Remembering how the medium had convulsed and shuddered for ten minutes after the photograph was taken he reasoned that it must be an ectoplasmic structure briefly made visible for his camera in order to give him an indication of the invisible psychic mechanics which had been employed to lever the table up. For the next four years Crawford explored the mechanical properties of these invisible psychic structures, asking his readers to remember that, ‘I had to feel my way bit by bit with nothing to guide me. There was not a single signpost on the road.’[10]

The invisible operators demonstrated their presence by lifting a table using psychic rods that apparently emanated from the body of the medium. Working in the near darkness of Goligher’s séance room, Crawford deduced that the rods varied in diameter from about half an inch to three or four inches, and the free end of each rod seemed able to assume various shapes and different degrees of hardness. The ends could also expand to act like suckers to adhere to the underside of table. As the table tossed in the air in front of the entranced medium, Crawford thought he could hear the suckers slipping over the wood in the dark. In a 1917 séance one of these rods was laid in Crawford’s upturned palm, and he felt its flattened end. The rods had a feel of their own which was nearly impossible for Crawford to describe in words: soft, dense, plasmic, half solid, half liquid. If the rods were in a less tensile gaseous state Crawford reported that he could even feel his hand passing through them, feeling a cold breeze of a disagreeable, spore-like matter.[11]

Crawford put trays of wet clay under the table for the rods to leave an impression of themselves. He found the texture of Goligher’s stocking fabric in the clay. But this, he reasoned, wasn’t the result of the medium’s foot being loose from its bonds. Rather, as the glutinous fibrous ectoplasm had oozed out of her body, it must have been pulled through the weave of her stocking before being wrapped around the inner core-force of the rods by the invisible operators, so it had retained the texture of her stocking. Sometimes he had heard peculiar fussling noises from the neighborhood of her bound feet and ankles just prior to the phenomena. These noises occurred in spasms and were, he reasoned, probably not due to her feet getting out of their bonds, but due to psychic stuff fluxing through the material of the stocking. Likewise, when he found clay on her shoe, that also was consistent with the rod being retracted from the tray of clay, up her leg, and back into her body.[12] In some séances Crawford thought he could just make out the ectoplasm wriggle back up her leg like a snake.[13]

Crawford needed to track the rods to their source in the medium’s body. Under his wife’s supervision Goligher put on white calico knickers into which he had sprinkled powdered carmine. In other tests he put carmine in her shoes. The theory was that the plasma would pull a trail of carmine behind it. After extensive experiments he proved to his own satisfaction that the plasma came out of Goligher’s trunk, from a location he described politely as between her legs, traveled down her legs to her shoes, and stiffened out to form rods, then returned by the same route.

Crawford also felt Goligher’s body undergo great stress as she produced the phenomena. A doctor who attended one séance measured her pulse rising from 72 to 126. As with the other psychic investigators and their ectoplasmic mediums, for Crawford, Goligher’s psychic convulsions inevitably became metaphorically linked with the feminine mysteries of birth. At another séance Crawford put his hand on her thigh and felt the flesh seemingly become soft and cave in, then fill out again as the psychic stuff apparently returned to her. He felt her breasts become very hard and full during the occurrence of another psychic action.[14]

.Margery

In December 1922 the popular science magazine Scientific American offered $2500 to the first person who could produce a psychic photograph, or other psychic phenomena, to the satisfaction of a committee that included conventional scientists.[15] The committee examined a Boston medium known as ‘Margery’. She was controlled by the impish spirit of her deceased brother, Walter, and conducted her séances in close collaboration with her husband, the wealthy Boston surgeon L. R. G. Crandon. The Scientific American committee purpose-built an extraordinary range of mechanical equipment to test the extraordinary range of phenomena she produced: telekinetically moving furniture across the carpet, apporting pigeons and roses into the séance, generating psychic lights that floated around the room, speaking in the direct voice of various spirits from different parts of the darkened room.[16]

As the interest of the popular press increased, more investigators were drawn to Margery. As the various investigators, which now included Eric Dingwall who was sent over from London by the SPR, gathered around Margery and her husband, acrimoniously jostling with each other to produce definitive evidence either exposing her as a fraud or confirming her as genuine, Margery responded by delivering new and more elaborate manifestations, finally moving into the photography of ectoplasmic extrusions.

Dingwall was eager to see more ectoplasm. In early 1925 Margery and her husband agreed to grant him a series of private séances, at which she wore only an open dressing gown and stockings. At an early séance in the series an excited Dingwall felt his hand touched by a tongue-like substance. By the light of a piece of cardboard painted with luminous paint he saw a mitten-like hand slide across the table with a stealthy gliding motion. Later, hearing a rustling sound coming from her lap, he ran his hand up Margery’s stocking until he felt a cold mass like uncooked liver on her thigh. This was flicked onto a luminous plaque on the table and, in silhouette, was seen to grow out finger-like tuberosities while still connected umbilically to Margery’s abdomen.

Later Dingwall received permission from Margery’s spirit control Walter to photograph this ectoplasmic extrusion by magnesium flash in the dark, before it was reabsorbed back into the medium’s body, but only at the precise moment Walter gave him permission. Dingwall showed the flashlight photographs of the ectoplasmic hand to William McDougall, chair of the Scientific American committee and professor of psychology at Harvard. Under his magnifying glass it looked to him more like an animal’s trachea and lung cut crudely into the shape of a wrist, palm and fingers, than ‘genuine’ ectoplasm. Dingwall next showed the photographs to a gynaecologist who confirmed that the substance, whatever it was, could be packed into a vagina and expelled. Shortly after this, Margery suffered a uterine haemorrhage and the weeks of séances came to an end.[17]

.The theory of ectoplasm

The leading psychic investigators associated with the Society for Psychical Research and the Institute Metapsychique International (International Institute of Metaphysics), were not only at the outer limits of ‘scientific’ psychical research, they were also personally at the forefront of many of the extraordinary developments in conventional physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and psychology that were happening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new high-end concepts that were being contemporaneously developed and proven in those disciplines included: the expansion of the electromagnetic spectrum towards previously unknown x-rays and radio waves, research into the processes of growth and replication in plants and animals at a cellular level, and the discovery of an unconscious mind which stored mental images which manifested themselves in conscious behaviour.

As well, this was a period when images were being technologically delaminated, replicated and disseminated through popular technologies such as half-tone off-set printing, wireless news-picture transmission, and film and lantern slide projection. Psychic investigators incorporated aspects of all of these into the theories they were developing to understand the strange new phenomena the mediums presented to them.

Ectoplasm was conceived of as being primarily placental, but it was a new kind of placenta, one not supporting the birth of new beings by genetic reproduction, but one directly producing spirit simulacra by organo/mechanical replication. These simulacra could be three-dimensional entities animated from within by a psychic force; or they could be inert casts or moulds impressed into the soft mucoid matter by spirit controls on the other side; or they could be two-dimensional photographic images psychically printed onto cauls of the stuff by the spirit controls.

.Automatic writing

This reconceptualization of the female body as an image-duplicating machine, rather than a reproductive organism, was developed by the investigators directly out of a history of spirit communication that had already been well established in the previous century. The Spiritualists were modernists. They saw their beliefs and their pseudo-scientific investigations as being integral to the march of scientific progress. It was only a matter of time, they believed, before scientific evidence objectively established the truths of their beliefs.

The Spiritualists were technologists. They believed in their séances as a kind of new technology for extended communication. In the nineteenth century the reigning metaphor for spirit communication had also been the signal technology of that century’s communications — the telegraph. The telegraph, which was invented a few years before the first mediums began to practice in the 1840s, proved that messages could be sent in a disembodied non-physical form over vast distances. Analogously, one of the favourite means of Spiritualist communication with the other side was automatic writing. This entailed the reconceptualization of the body as a kind of telegraph, a passive machine taken over by another operator. The daughter of the medium William Howitt vividly described the effect of seeing an invisible spirit operator take over her father’s body prior to spirit transmission:

My father had not sat many minutes passive, holding a pencil in his hand upon a sheet of paper, ere something resembling an electric shock ran through his arm and hand; whereupon the pencil began to move in circles. The influence becoming stronger and ever stronger, moved not alone the hand, but the whole arm in a rotatory motion, until the arm was at length raised, and rapidly—as if it had been the spoke of a wheel propelled by machinery—whirled irresistibly in a wide sweep, and with great speed, for some ten minutes through the air. The effect of this rapid rotation was felt by him in the muscles of the arm for some time afterwards. Then the arm being again at rest the pencil, in the passive fingers, began gently, but clearly and decidedly, to move.[18]

.Hamilton, Mercedes and Dawn

In the late 1920s and early 1930s a Canadian psychic researcher called T. G. Hamilton was investigating several mediums who combined automatic writing with ectoplasmic replication. One of the leading lights of Spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had ‘crossed over’ to the other side in 1931. He immediately began to return as a spirit at many different séances around the world. Using automatic writing one of the Canadian mediums, called Mercedes, recorded this message from him for Hamilton’s circle:

I am watching your progress. Your methods are different from mine, but perhaps they are better. I will put my picture through if your [spirit] control will consent. Splendid work! Splendid! Good mediums! My life’s work! Carry on! Keep the banner waving. Good night. A.C.D.[19]

Eventually, true to his word, the medium’s spirit control managed to transmit an image of Doyle ‘in his younger days’, into some ectoplasm which was produced from the nose and mouth of another medium, Dawn. Later they transmitted another image of Doyle along with some allegorical fragments. In these experiments the medium became like a Gestetner machine.

.Conclusion

As should by now be clear, the ardent psychic investigators who obsessively experimented with celebrity mediums had very active imaginations. The overheated, charged atmospheres of the séances became experimental spaces that combined the modern scientific laboratory, with a religious chapel, with a ritualistic performance space.

Whilst masquerading as passive conduits for larger psychic forces, the mediums and their associates were, in fact, the ones responsible for producing these scenarios for interpretation. They responded to the desires of their investigators and created a performative feedback loop that led the ardent investigator on. In this heightened space of bodily enactment the investigators reconceived the female body in a very radical way. By conceptually mapping already proven new scientific principles, as well as new technologies of remote communication, over the strange evidence the mediums produced for their observation, they imagined they were witnessing a modern experience of bodily reproduction.

For them the medium’s body was able to temporarily give up its day-to-day status as an autonomous entity, and become self-attenuated into nothing but a mucoid membrane, a labile medium between two worlds. When they touched, felt, smelt and photographed ectoplasm they thought they had witnessed positive evidence of this.

‘Our Quest in the Psychic Field’, Scientific American, May (1923), p300

J. M. Bird, ‘Our Psychic Investigation: Its Scope, Conditions and Procedure, as Far as They Can Be Laid Down’, January (1923), 6

R. Brandon, The Spiritualists : The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (London: Weidenfeld And Nicolson, 1983)

W. J. Crawford, The Psychic Structures of the Goligher Circle, (London: John M. Watkins, 1921)

E. E. F. d’Albe, The Goligher Circle: May to August 1921, (London: John M. Watkins, 1922)

E. Dingwall, ‘Report on a series of sittings with Eva C.’ Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research, 32, (1922), 44

E. Dingwall, ‘Report on a Series  of Sittings  with the Medium Margery’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research, 36, (1926-28), 48

N. Fodor, Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, (London: Arthurs Press Limited, 1933)

G. Geley, From the Unconscious to the Conscious, (London: William Collins Sons, 1920)

G. Geley, Clairvoyance and Materialisation: a Record of Experiments, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1927)

F. Gettings, Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography, (New York: Harmony Books, 1978)

T. G. Hamilton, Intention and Survival, (Toronto: MacMillan, 1942)

W. McDougall, ‘ The “Margery Mediumship”‘, Scientific American, May (1925),

B. A. Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the investigation of mediumistic teleplastics, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920)