If you react to bee stings or seafood then you ought to know a bit about Charles Robert Richet. In 1913 he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the occasionally lethal set of allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis. But Richet, a French physiologist, had a number of other scientific interests, namely ghosts.
As a young man, a friend introduced Richet to Eusapia Palladino, an Italian spiritualist who was capable of levitation as well as “elongating” herself. Palladino could make spirit hands and faces appear in wet clay and play musical instruments without touching them. She had a great impact on Richet, who remained interested in the paranormal, even as he pursued a career as a physiologist, researching topics like hay fever, asthma and allergic reactions to foreign substances.
Richet’s circle included some of the most renowned occultists of the early 20th century. There was the great German psychic researcher Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, the British poet and founder of the Society for Psychical Research, Frederic William Henry Myers, and Gabriel Delanne, a French electrical engineer and author of the book, Le Phenomene Spirite (The Spiritist Phenomenon). Richet believed there was a physical explanation for paranormal phenomena. “The simplest and most rational explanation is to suppose the existence of a faculty of supernormal cognition,” he wrote, “setting in motion the human intelligence by certain vibrations that do not move the normal senses.”
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Basically, Richet believed in a sixth sense. Later he was to write an entire book on the topic, Our Sixth Sense, published in 1928. But Richet was man of science. If there was a spiritual world invisible for most of us here in this world, and if entities were passing back and forth between the two worlds, then there would have to be some physical evidence of that connection. There would have to be some object that enabled the people of this world to connect with the people of that other world. And Richet came up with a name for that object: ectoplasm.
Richet describes ectoplasm as the spiritual energy that allows mediums to connect with the spirit world. “This material is excreted as a gauze-like substance from orifices on the medium’s body,” reads Wikipedia’s ‘Ectoplasm’ entry. “Spiritual entities are said to drape this substance over their nonphysical body, enabling them to interact in the physical and real universe.”
Other scientists weighed in on the issue, too, often favorably. The renowned Scottish physician, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, described ectoplasm as, “a viscous, gelatinous substance which appeared to differ from every known form of matter in that it could solidify and be used for material purposes”. Dr. Gustav Geley, a French physician, actually tried to define ectoplasm even further. According to Geley, ectoplasm was “very variable in appearance…sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a fine fabric-like tissue.”
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Some researchers adopted ectoplasm into the larger idea of an ectenic force, the idea that there was some sort of psychic or supernatural force connecting the living world to the otherworld. Count Agenor de Gasparin, a French statesman, along with a professor of natural history at the Academy of Geneva named M. Thury conducted a number of experiments on ectenic force. They claimed to have found examples proving it existed, though their work was never independently verified.
The psychical investigator W. J. Crawford observed an Irish medium named Kathleen Goligher perform a number of séances and claimed to have obtained photographs of ectoplasm. He described the substance as “plasma” that was invisible to the naked eye, though it could be felt by the body. But other psychical investigators investigated Crawford and pointed out that the material in his photos was merely muslin. In other cases, material said to be ectoplasm was shown to have been formed by mediums regurgitating textile products smoothed with potato starch. Helen Duncan, the famous Scottish medium who in 1944 was one of the last people in Britain convicted of being a witch, was found to use an ectoplasm made of regurgitated cheesecloth and dolls heads.
These stories of fraudulent ectoplasm seem to weaken support for Richet’s theory that there is a physical substance that connects this world to the next, but even today modern science leaves us with some puzzling gaps. For one, NASA estimates that 70 percent of the universe is composed of dark matter, and yet we can’t see this matter and can’t really say much at all about where or how it exists. Hmm.
A few months back I spoke with the near death experience expert, Kevin Williams, about whether or not science would someday be able to explain the afterlife. As of yet science has failed to explain paranormal phenomenon, explained Williams, though to him this was not an indication that the paranormal didn’t exist, but more that the scientific process was broken. Research into the Higgs boson particle by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has offered him some hope. “It seems to me like science, religion and philosophy are all coming to a point of merger,” said Williams, “and neither one really likes it.”
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