Daniel Dunglas Home

The teaching

Taught from his Incidents in My Life and Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, with the reports of his sitters and of Crookes.

The manner of a sitting

Home's sittings were held in private houses among invited company, round a table, usually in a lit room, by gas, candle or firelight, though the light was often lowered. He used no cabinet and set no price, and he could not call the phenomena at will: some evenings nothing came, and for one long stretch, he says, his power left him altogether and came back on the day he had been told it would. He spoke of what happened as coming through him and not from him.

Sitters were invited to look under the table, to hold his hands and feet and to watch him closely, and he urged that every manifestation be seen in as much light as it would bear.

What the sittings presented

The record of his sittings presents raps, the table tilting and rising from the floor, heavy furniture moving untouched, an accordion playing tunes while he held it by one end under the table, hands that sitters said they saw and felt and that melted in their grasp, points of light, cold breezes and voices. He was reported to grow taller before witnesses, and to rise from the floor and float.

He was also reported to take a glowing coal from the fire, hold it in his hands and lay it on the heads and hands of others, who said they felt no burn. These are reports of what witnesses said they saw, and the house is plain about this one: fire and coals burn, and no one should handle them in imitation.

The tests

Home sat for William Crookes's instruments. In one test an accordion was set in a cage of wire and wooden laths under the table, Home holding it by the end away from the keys, and it played. In another one end of a board rested on a table and the other hung from a spring balance; when Home laid his fingers lightly on the end over the table, the balance showed the far end pressed down, more than his touch could account for. Crookes printed both as the work of a force he called psychic.

The rules he set for mediums

Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism turns on the tricks of others: the dark séance, the cabinet, the rope-tying and the spirit photograph, each described with its method. His rule is that true phenomena need no darkness and no cabinet, that every medium should welcome the closest examination, and that a cause served by fraud is betrayed by it. Spiritualism, in his teaching, must be rid of its cheats if it is to stand.

He had no patience with the doctrine of rebirth that Kardec's followers taught. He wrote that he had met at least a dozen Marie Antoinettes, several Mary Queens of Scots and some twenty Alexanders the Great among its believers, and never a plain John Smith.

What he stood for

For Home the phenomena were a proof of the soul's survival and a comfort to the bereaved. They were not a show, a trade or a road to power, which is why he took no money for them, and he held them to belong with Christian faith and not against it.