Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979). Image credit: Hugh Lloyd-Jones/Verlag C.H. Beck.
If you enjoyed my video plug for the reading group and are keen on additional background readings about Oxford classicist Eric R. Dodds, I got you sorted: you can now download a free PDF of Dodds’s article “Why I do not believe in survival” (1934) from the website of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR, whose President Dodds was in the years 1960 to 1963).
As stated in the video, Dodds was a sceptic concerning life after death, which is also the topic of his 1934 article. However, it’s not widely known that Dodds held sittings with the trance medium Gladys Leonard, and that his unpublished notes of these seances can be inspected in the archives of the SPR at Cambridge University Library. The sittings were held at around the time Dodds published his article. Somewhat strangely, however, Dodds’s article doesn’t reveal his impressions of these seances.
A useful summary of studies and guide to investigations of Mrs. Leonard, this book includes references to original studies (buy on Abebooks /eBay / Amazon).
Two years later, Dodds suggested to a fellow SPR researcher, Charles Drayton Thomas, to organize another series of tests of Mrs. Leonard’s reported mediumistic powers. These were so-called “proxy sittings” – i.e. seances in which a person seeking evidence of spirit identity sends a proxy to rule out “cold readings” and other techniques employed by fraudulent psychics (who pick up subtle unconscious clues by sitters, which are then used to fool them into believing to have communicated with a deceased loved one). The results of these proxy sittings were published in a research paper by C. D. Thomas in 1939, who reported striking successes. But yet again, it’s unknown what Dodds made of them.
Anti-Spiritualist Occultism?
Dodds was certainly no fan of spiritualism. However, he was not your run-of-the-mill sceptic of the stereotypical “materialist” persuasion either. In fact, reading Dodds’s article you may be struck how he doubted spiritualist interpretations not by rejecting “occult” phenomena altogether, but by explaining successful mediumistic readings in terms of mysterious capacities of the living rather than inspirations from the dead.
This interpretation is quite at odds with popular notions, which tend to portray investigators of mediums in quite a polarized manner – either as prior believers in spirits who are only too willing to be fooled, or as determined debunkers of all things occult.
But Dodds was hardly the first to adopt a middle approach. The last comprehensive empirical essay published by the founder of modern American psychology, William James, in fact reveals James struggling with the same problem: like Dodds after him, James was convinced that fraud and “cold readings” could not explain how some trance mediums appeared to convey highly specific and often intimate bits of information, which were only known to the sitter and the supposedly communicating “spirit”.
While James was on the fence regarding spiritualism, like Dodds he believed that trance mediums indeed sometimes constructed convincing trance personalities of deceased loved ones – not by actually “channelling” the spirit in question, but by unconsciously tapping into some kind of cosmic nexus or world soul, which telepathically connected the unconscious minds of all beings (living or dead). Dodds may have known James’s article, but cited the classical study of mediumistic trance productions by James’s friend and fellow psychologist, Théodore Flournoy, instead.
The most recent and complete English edition of Flournoy’s classical 1900 study of mediumistic trance in relation to subconscious creativity and “multiple personalities”. Like his friend William James, Flournoy also took telepathic explanations of certain mediumistic readings seriously (buy on Amazon / Abebooks).
Again, the notion of a cosmic “world soul” was hardly new, but had already been proposed by another famed psychologist, Gustav Theodor Fechner in Germany, as well as by idealist philosophers such as Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. And centuries before James, Fechner and German idealism, these ideas were at the heart of Neoplatonism and related currents of ancient thought, which were revived during the Renaissance and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution.
Depiction of the cosmic interconnectedness of mind and matter by the physician and polymath Robert Fludd (1574-1637), a major proponent of “natural magic” in early modern England. Image credit: Wiki Commons.
And if you watched my video on the magical world of Francis Bacon (a key figure of the Scientific Revolution), you may recall that I briefly mentioned how Bacon also made a distinction between occult cognitions inspired by disembodied vs. embodied minds.
The word “telepathy”, however, was invented only in 1882, by William James’s friend and closest psychological ally in England, Frederic W.H. Myers in Cambridge. Myers was both a pioneering psychologist of the subconscious mind and a classicist, whose ideas on telepathy and altered states of consciousness were also steeped in Neoplatonic thought.
And it’s probably also no accident that Neoplatonism was among the research specialities of Dodds as a classicist.
Driving out Spirits through “Secular” Occultism
While Francis Bacon and Frederic Myers were still believers in spirits, Dodds’s non-spiritualist interpretation, which still preserved “occult” phenomena as fundamental scientific anomalies, was shared by other elite intellectuals in the twentieth century. We have seen this in another video, the concluding episode of our journey into the haunted past of science: Albert von Schrenck-Notzing in Germany (whom Dodds visited in 1928 to investigate the mediums Willi and Rudi Schneider) adopted a similar non-spiritualist approach, as did one of Schrenck’s supporters, famed Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (the inventor of the term “schizophrenia”).
However, in contrast to Bacon, Myers and James, these twentieth-century investigators shared Dodds’s agenda: to programmatically explain away belief in spirits by emphasizing ostensible occult capacities of the living. After all, when Dodds referred to spiritualism in his writings, he typically labelled it as modern “superstition”. Schrenck-Notzing, Bleuler and others on the continent deployed a similarly dismissive prose, which often stressed supposed social and cultural dangers of spiritualist beliefs.
Today, spiritualism and belief in telepathy are often lumped together. But if we as historians are to understand both the supposed “decline of magic” and continuities of occult beliefs in Western modernity, we also need to study the concrete means by which various forms of these beliefs have been battled and sustained.
And once we look at specific contexts and cases, it quickly turns out that critiques of spiritualism were not always motivated by commitments to “materialism”. Quite often, they expressed competing modes of reasoning which were themselves steeped in principles of magic – not magic as make-belief, but as a hidden function of nature, which may or may not have spiritual significance.
(NOTE: The purpose of this post was to share Dodds’s article as an interesting historical primary source, and to provide a broad historical context to illustrate important but often neglected nuances in modes of reasoning by investigators of modern “occult” phenomena. Comments are welcome as always, but please refrain from propagating or debating any specific interpretation of mediumship here – there are more than enough other platforms serving that purpose).
REFERENCES & RECOMMENDED READINGS
Dodds, E. R. “Why I do not believe in survival.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 42 (1934), 147-172 [free PDF download].
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press, 1951 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
James, William. “Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-control.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 23 (1909), 2-121 (included in James,Essays in Psychical Research, Harvard University Press, 1996 [Buy on eBay] [Buy on Abebooks] [Buy on Amazon]).
Flournoy, Théodore. From India to the Planet Mars. A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages (ed. S. Shamdasani). Princeton University Press, 1994 (first French ed. 1900) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Hamilton, Trevor. “Gladys Osborne Leonard.” In MacLuhan, R. (ed.), Psi Encyclopedia. London: The Society for Psychical Research, 2018. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/gladys-osborne-leonard
Smith, Susy. The Mediumship of Mrs. Leonard. New York: University Books, 1964 [Buy on Abebooks] [Buy on eBay] [Buy on Amazon].
Thomas, Charles Drayton. “A proxy experiment of significant success.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 45 (1939), 257-306.
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Excellent post, Andreas. Quite timely in my case, too, as I am reading Braude’s “Immortal Remains”.