Arthur Conan Doyle

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The New Revelation (1918) and The Coming of the Fairies (1922).

The bell and the message

Doyle teaches that the physical phenomena of the séance room, the raps, the moving tables and the voices, matter only as a signal. A telephone bell, he says, is a childish thing in itself, but it may announce a vital message; the phenomena are bells that have rung to make the human race rouse itself and attend, and what counts is the message that follows them. He calls that message a new revelation, still in its John the Baptist stage, and it comes chiefly through automatic writing, through words spoken in trance and through voices heard at sittings. The doctrine and practice of the movement he served are taught in full in the branch Mediums and Spiritualism of The spirit realm; what follows is the revelation as he read it.

Evidence, not faith

Faith, in his teaching, is beautiful in one person and dangerous in a crowd, because one faith cannot prove itself against another and the stronger has always been tempted to persecute the weaker. It is no virtue to claim what cannot be proved. His movement, as he sees it, sets religion on facts: messages that tell true things about this world, which can be tested, deserve to be trusted about the next, which cannot, and many independent accounts that agree in details nobody expected have a claim to be believed.

The passing

The dead, by the messages he gathered, agree that dying is usually easy and painless, and is followed by a great peace. A person finds themselves in a spirit body that is the exact counterpart of the old one, without its disease, weakness or deformity, standing or floating beside the body and aware of the people in the room. At that moment the spirit is nearer to matter than it will ever be again, which is why so many apparitions are seen at the hour of death. Then familiar faces appear, the loved and lost take the newcomer's hand, and with a more radiant being as guide the spirit passes through solid walls and out into its new life. It is simply the person, with all their strength and weakness, wisdom and folly.

Before the new life begins there is a sleep, sometimes hardly any, sometimes of weeks or months; Raymond, the son of Oliver Lodge, reported six days. Doyle guesses that its length answers to the troubles brought from this life, and that a little child needs none. The spirit wakes weak, as a baby is weak after birth, and soon grows strong.

No hell, but a hospital

Hell drops out altogether: as a permanent place it does not exist, and the idea of it is an insult to the Creator. Punishment is real, since without it there would be no justice, but it purifies and it ends, nearer to purgatory than to hell. The grosser souls find themselves in lower states, knowing that their own deeds placed them there, with the hope that their expiation and the help of higher spirits will raise them. Those states are better thought of as a hospital for weak souls than as a prison, and helping them is part of the work of those above.

Like goes to like

Beyond, the reports agree, life is pleasant and full of interest and occupation, and no one wishes to return. Like goes to like, and all who love one another or share an interest are together. The spirits have bodies as solid to them as ours are to us, but beautified; there is no age, no pain, no rich and poor; they wear clothes and take nourishment. Married couples are not necessarily reunited, but love continues, freed of what spoils it here. After a time, usually shorter than a lifetime on earth, a spirit passes on to a further state, which is why most messages come from those who have died recently, and why they fade.

The home of the dead is very near, so near that we visit them in our sleep. We remember nothing of it, but the comfort carries over, which explains the quiet resignation of many who have lost those they loved; and when the forgetting slips for a moment, the dreamer wakes trailing clouds of glory, and from such moments come prophetic dreams. He gives one of his own: in 1917 he woke with the name Piave, a river in Italy, in his head, had a note of it signed and witnessed, and months later the Italian line fell back to that river and held there.

Christianity must change

Christianity, he writes, must change or perish. People have left the churches because their reason and their sense of justice cannot accept a vicarious sacrifice, or a God appeased by one; and since the long ascent of life shows no fall, the doctrines of the fall, the atonement and original sin have lost their ground. Too much has been made of Christ's death and too little of his life, tolerant, charitable, brave and open to new ideas, which is the true centre of the faith.

The guides, as he reports them, speak of many higher spirits, whom we may call angels, and above them the Christ Spirit, nearer to God but not God, whose special care is the earth and who came down to give the lesson of an ideal life. Paul's list of the gifts of the spirit, prophecy, healing, miracles and the rest, he reads as the gifts of a powerful medium, and the early Church as full of the same powers.

Fairies and vibrations

The Coming of the Fairies carries the same reasoning to nature spirits. There may be, he argues, a population on this planet as numerous as our own, living its own life and separated from us only by a difference of vibrations. We see only the colours within our spectrum, with endless vibrations unused on either side of it; beings made of a material that gave out shorter or longer vibrations would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up to them, and that power of tuning is what makes a clairvoyant. The pictures that began the book were, by the later word of the cousins who took them, paper figures.