Kamarling
Member
I was browsing the Captian Bob thread and noticed the name of Archie Roy which reminded me of his book, The Eager Dead which, in turn, reminded me of the Cross Correspondences. For anyone who has not heard of the latter, I'd urge you to look it up as it still stands today as some of the best ever evidence for survival. An article by Michael Tymn summarises, thus:
There is another summary here. Incidentally, Prof. Roy's obituary in the Daily Telegraph is headed with yet another example of media skeptical bias when he is described thus:
Professor Roy didn't "dabble", he was president of the Society for Psychical Research and founder of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. He spent years researching the Cross Correspondences.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make at the outset. We tend to concentrate on fairly recent evidence and ignore much of the valuable work that went on in the early years of the 20th century. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps we have been put off by images of table turning and dark, Victorian seances? Or perhaps we imagine that the older research would not stand the test of modern scientific analysis? But it seems to me that there is a similar imperative to dismiss old research as there is to dismiss new anecdotes - i.e. they must all be considered unreliable.
Roy spent 10 years studying them before writing the book. “Essentially, the cross-correspondences originated in a deceptively-simple idea,” he explained. “Someone who has died transmits to a number of mediums or automatists scattered round the world snippets of a theme dreamed up by him. The snippets received by any one automatist do not make any sense whatever to him or her. Only by bringing all the snippets together does the theme become clear. Moreover, that theme is characteristic of the intelligence and learning and personality of the sender who even, when he finds the group of investigators having serious difficulties in interpreting the collected snippets, speaks through the scripts directly to them, chiding and teasing them in the manner of a kindly teacher with an obtuse class. He then gives hints to them to aid them in their interpretation of the scripts.”
There is another summary here. Incidentally, Prof. Roy's obituary in the Daily Telegraph is headed with yet another example of media skeptical bias when he is described thus:
Professor Archie Roy, who has died aged 88, was a respected astronomer who also dabbled in the realms of the paranormal, becoming known as “the Glasgow Ghostbuster”.
Professor Roy didn't "dabble", he was president of the Society for Psychical Research and founder of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. He spent years researching the Cross Correspondences.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make at the outset. We tend to concentrate on fairly recent evidence and ignore much of the valuable work that went on in the early years of the 20th century. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps we have been put off by images of table turning and dark, Victorian seances? Or perhaps we imagine that the older research would not stand the test of modern scientific analysis? But it seems to me that there is a similar imperative to dismiss old research as there is to dismiss new anecdotes - i.e. they must all be considered unreliable.