From Magic to Science? An Integrated Guide to Collections at Cambridge University

The history of Cambridge University fundamentally challenges modern assumptions that science has disenchanted the world. As can be expected, this is also reflected in its archival and library holdings. Some of the most curious items held at Cambridge University Library are found in the collection of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which includes old and rare books, periodicals and pamphlets, as well as the Society’s vast archives.

When the three years of my research post at Churchill College came to an end last year, I applied for a library fellowship at Cambridge with a proposal to compile an integrated bibliographical guide to these collections. I proposed it to consist of annotated entries on about 350 selected titles of books, pamphlets and periodicals from the roughly 3,000 volumes in the SPR library, and cross-links to manuscripts in the SPR archives, Wren Library, and other collections.

Building on my own research in these and related archives for the past 10 years, I wanted to roughly focus on holdings from the nineteenth century to around the death of the mathematician and Principal of Newnham College, Eleanor M. Sidgwick (1845-1936), who was one of the early members and leading representatives of the SPR. And while my previous research has been focused on the human sciences, I proposed to use the guide to build further bridges to various disciplines including medicine, anthropology, biology, and the physical sciences.

Medicine and the Mind Sciences

A convenient starting point regarding psychology and psychiatry is an annotated entry on one of the oldest books in the SPR library, F.W.H. Myers’ personal copy of Meric Casaubon’s 1659 account of John Dee’s supposed discourse with spirits through crystal vision.

Myers’ own spiritualist leanings notwithstanding, he promoted crystal-gazing not for necromantic purposes but as a means to induce visual hallucinations as vehicles for the recovery of buried memories and other subconscious material.

Others followed Myers by taking up ‘crystal-gazing’ as an instrument of psychological experimentation. Théodore Flournoy, professor of psychology at Geneva, applied it in Des Indes à la planète Mars, a classical psychological study of creative capacities of trance states.

The American neurologist Morton Prince published his results in ‘crystal-gazing’ as “An Experimental Study of Visions” in the neuroscience journal Brain in 1898, and the French psychologist Pierre Janet presented similar observations in his Névroses et idées fixes, a copy of which is in the SPR library along with Flournoy’s book.

When F.W.H. Myers suggested to his friend William James to encourage students to experimentally study crystal visions in his psychological laboratory at Harvard in January 1894 (letter in the Wren Library, Trinity College), the suggestion was therefore not as outrageous as it may appear today. (Most of James’ own empirical contributions to psychology were in fact independent replications of related experiments in hypnosis and automatic writing by Myers and colleagues. Other psychologists particularly in France, such as Janet and Alfred Binet, also experimentally induced and manipulated divided streams of consciousness.)

These previously rather understudied contexts will also throw fresh light on the massive collection in the SPR archive with original materials regarding the Boston trance medium Leonora Piper, who was William James’ prime experimental subject for the study of automatic writing and speaking.

Anthropology

Cross-links between anthropology and the occult I wanted to address in entries on The Making of Religion and other works by the folklorist and SPR president in 1911, Andrew Lang, whose correspondence with various colleagues is preserved in the SPR archive and Wren Library.

Crystal visions and other earmarks of Myers’ experimental psychology of the subconscious mind figured prominently in Lang’s critiques of Edward B. Tylor’s anthropological theories. Lang disagreed with Tylor’s views that explained belief in occult phenomena as normal in ‘primitive’ societies, but dismissed it as an inherently pathological relapse into ‘savage’ developmental stages when manifesting in ‘civilized’ cultures.

While Tylor himself expressed guarded sympathy for Henry Sidgwick’s work on telepathy in February 1898 (letter at Wren Library, Trinity), the ‘father’ of modern psychology in Germany, Wilhelm Wundt, appropriated Tylorean anthropology to repudiate the unorthodox work of the SPR in his pamphlet, Hypnotismus und Suggestion.

Appearing before the second session of the International Congress of Psychology at University College London in 1892, Wundt’s pamphlet was a protest against Henry Sidgwick’s serving as president of the London congress (and F.W.H. Myers serving as secretary). An entry for the congress proceedings, which like Wundt’s pamphlet are also in the SPR collection, would naturally link to Wundt’s polemic, as well as to various letters in the Myers and Sidgwick papers at Wren Library concerning the organization of the London Congress.

Biology

One among several possible items in the SPR collection that deserves to be placed in a wider context within the history of biology is On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism by the ‘other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace. An annotated entry on this manifesto of Wallace’s spiritualist convictions would outline the context for his fundamental differences regarding spiritualism with Charles Darwin, and include records in the SPR archive of séances held by Darwin’s son, George H. Darwin, with F.W.H. Myers, Francis Galton, secular humanists George H. Lewes and George Eliot, and Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas H. Huxley.

Moreover, this and related titles provide an occasion to address Wallace’s later disputes with Myers and the Sidgwicks, whom he accused of deliberately trying to undermine evidence for spiritualism by explaining mediumship and apparitions in terms of psychological automatisms, hallucinations, and telepathy from the living. (It is these understudied disputes which I think show that reasons for the ‘decline of magic’ within science were a little more complex than popular standard notions would have it.)

Physics and Chemistry

Two possible items concerning the history of the physical sciences are items in the SPR Library including William Crookes’ Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, and Jules Courtier’s “Rapport sur les séances d’Eusapia Palladino” (Bulletin de l’Institut Général Psychologique, 1908), the latter of which is a report of séances held by Marie and Pierre Curie.

With entries on other titles by elite physicists in the SPR library, they will connect to the important work by my colleague Richard Noakes, regarding the rather widespread interest of distinguished British physicists in alleged materializations and other physical marvels of spiritualism, particularly in the context of Crookes’ collaborations with the Curies in the study of radioactivity. It will also allow cross-references to related items in the Crookes papers and Lodge collection in the SPR archives, the latter containing, for example, a letter from German physicist, Max Planck (which I already translated here).

Sadly, my proposal was unsuccessful, which is a shame not only because this project is something I always wanted to do. I think an integrated guide along these lines, drawing together some of the seemingly disparate threads connecting modern sciences and its ‘occult’ shadows, would be of real help to users of these collections, and would open up new and surprising contexts and perspectives.

© Andreas Sommer

Help us Promote Historical Literacy!