Materialized Spirit figures: what are they?

Hi Jim but a Spirit Body is just pure energy so there is no problem for it to be within an ectoplasmic form. It is only that energy which animates the ectoplasm, there is no physical structure to the body no heart to beat to provide a pulse only that which the Spirit animates for us.

Anyway Spiritualism is a Truth not Belief and there is little viable, current, evidence of any of this occuring in modern times.

You don't think there is material structure to the bodies we'll have in the next world, Admin Jim?

Admin wrote:

Anyway Spiritualism is a Truth not Belief and there is little viable, current, evidence of any of this occuring in modern times.

But that's probably attributable to the poor state of contemporary physical mediumship.

Jim

Maybe a material structure but not as we know it Jim (to borrow from Star Trek)

Call me Sally Cynical but when my namesake had her pulse felt I reckon it was probably Florrie Cook's heart doing the beating.

Are you saying, KK, that the medium's heart beat was transferred to the materialized spirit figure?

I rather think Left Behind that KK is expressing a fair degree of scepticism about the genuineness of the materialisation of Katie King and that it was actually Florence Cook ímpersonating'the spirit.

Personally, whether Florence Cook was genuine or not, and we must rember that she was caught cheating later on in her career, the idea that a materialised spirit would have a heartbeat, something that early spiritualists seemed quite taken with, has always given rise to significant doubts in my mind.

There seems a certain lack of logic to the idea. The ectoplasm, drawn from the medium and sitters, being formed by spirit into the semblance of the spirit, would need to create all the organs and systems of the physical body to warrant having a heart beat - afterall the heart is required to move blood around the physical body, and surely a spirit doesn't need a heart, and a physical one at that, to appear and be able to communicate. They are only needing to animate the semblance of themselves in visible form.

Sadly, as incidents in the past have so often proved, when there was a heartbeat - there was a medium acting fraudulently.

Irrefutable logic Lis.

Humanity stood and looked out from this point long ago in the time of Christianity. The, then all-controlling, Church split between a Mediumistic based approach and an Intellectual one.
SB stated somewhere that we must repeat our errors if we do not learn from them.

Religion of any kind is utterly useless to assist humanity's journey if it only drapes even more obscuring veils over our limited vision.

Spiritualism merely and simply points to an aspect of Natural Law - Life cannot die. Once the tremendous implications of this have been realised, not merely understood, then this should set us free in Mind and Spirit.
But if it joins the swollen ranks of superstitious cults then it has no purpose and will fade away, too.

Very comforting though religion h. It' how we seek to express the numinous. Right or wrong our hospice visits wouldn't be nearly so welcome without the trappings fictive though they may be. Church I belong to has seven principles on the wall,it' ex SNU but we have prayer including Lord'S Prayer and Bible reading if that' what a reader chooses to bring. Spirit will blow where Spirit chooses. Rituals aren' magic but to invite at the beginning,thank at the end and engage together in common cause call it prayer if you will during a meeting has a resonance that you don' find at other times.
I do think by the way that if there is a pulse to be then it's the medium faking an apparition .
Forrie cook was a very tactile meium and some of her eminent sitters just loved to touch.
Very seedy to modern eyes but I suppose in those days they took their pleasure as they found it. Bonny lasses wafting about in diaphonous gowns and that sort of thing. Certainly paid the bills. The lookers were never short of work.

Lis wrote:

There seems a certain lack of logic to the idea. The ectoplasm, drawn from the medium and sitters, being formed by spirit into the semblance of the spirit, would need to create all the organs and systems of the physical body to warrant having a heart beat - afterall the heart is required to move blood around the physical body, and surely a spirit doesn't need a heart, and a physical one at that, to appear and be able to communicate. They are only needing to animate the semblance of themselves in visible form.

I don't think you can put logic into ectoplasmic materializations, well not logic as we know it, and I don't think it's necessary to create all the organs and systems of the physical body to warrant having a heart beat in a materialization because it's just a replica of a physical body and the spirit animating it would just have to add a pulse to the relevant parts of it.
The only reason I can see for adding a working pulse would be if an experiment had been arranged before hand where one of the sitters was to be invited to check the pulse of the materialization, otherwise it would just be a waste of available energy.
All the fine details of a materialization take energy and there's only so much energy produced in each seance hence most of the materialization would be covered in energy saving, easy to produce robes with just the face visible... In one of Minnie Harrison's seances one of the materializations lifted it's robes to show no legs, it was just hovering...

Some of the photos from the Minnie Harrison Saturday Night Circle sittings in Tom Harrison's book are less than convincing but on the other hand they had neither cause nor reason to fake phenomena. Some things were surely seen but as to what and how.
These faithful non commercial PM circles are possibly the best venue for genuine phenomena. Interesting to se what's beginning to emerge via Gerald O'Hara's [author of the outstanding Dead Mens Embers] group in Yorkshire. There's a full trance medium member in latest PN.

KatyKing wrote:Some of the photos from the Minnie Harrison Saturday Night Circle sittings in Tom Harrison's book are less than convincing but on the other hand they had neither cause nor reason to fake phenomena. Some things were surely seen but as to what and how.
These faithful non commercial PM circles are possibly the best venue for genuine phenomena. Interesting to se what's beginning to emerge via Gerald O'Hara's [author of the outstanding Dead Mens Embers] group in Yorkshire. There's a full trance medium member in latest PN.

I don't think any photos of materialization phenomena can be convincing. They either look like badly made cardboard cutouts or physical people pretending to be materializations. The only way to be convinced is to witness it yourself as it happens, preferably in your own home circle.

Really that bad? Must admit I have only seen photos but wasn't sure of those either.

The one on the cover looks like somebody's very alive old Nan wrapped up in a bedsheet.
Excellent book though. I reckon Minnie Harrison was the real deal but as Nick says you really need to be there to see it and for some reason I never get invited to PM shows.
Our church PM circle are doing well for regular sitters but its early days for them. Focus seems to be on transfiguration which is a specialism of the group leader.

Going to ask a question now,throw me off site if you like....
Are Materialisations genuine?

Lis wrote:I rather think Left Behind that KK is expressing a fair degree of scepticism about the genuineness of the materialisation of Katie King and that it was actually Florence Cook ímpersonating'the spirit.

Ah. . . that Peter! Being one of the few people more sarcastic than myself, he sometimes leaves me in the lurch!

Jim

KatyKing wrote:The one on the cover looks like somebody's very alive old Nan wrapped up in a bedsheet.
Excellent book though. I reckon Minnie Harrison was the real deal but as Nick says you really need to be there to see it and for some reason I never get invited to PM shows.
Our church PM circle are doing well for regular sitters but its early days for them. Focus seems to be on transfiguration which is a specialism of the group leader.

Yes. . . I never could fathom the idea why ectoplasm has to cover spirits from head to toe.

KatyKing wrote:
I do think by the way that if there is a pulse to be then it's the medium faking an apparition .
Forrie cook was a very tactile meium and some of her eminent sitters just loved to touch.
Very seedy to modern eyes but I suppose in those days they took their pleasure as they found it. Bonny lasses wafting about in diaphonous gowns and that sort of thing. Certainly paid the bills. The lookers were never short of work.

Probably much the same idea that nudes were so popular as works of art in more strait-laced times than they are today, Peter.

It would be very "evidential" if a materialized female spirit could "prove" that she wasn't the male medium: or if you could run your hands all over the "materialzed young woman": all purely in the interests of science, of course.

KatyKing wrote:

I don't think any photos of materialization phenomena can be convincing. They either look like badly made cardboard cutouts or physical people pretending to be materializations. The only way to be convinced is to witness it yourself as it happens, preferably in your own home circle.

I'm thinking of one - Silver Belle? - in one of Maurice Barbanell's books. It looks like a cartoon cutout of an artist's version of a pretty girl portraying an "Indian princess".

Lis wrote:

There seems a certain lack of logic to the idea. The ectoplasm, drawn from the medium and sitters, being formed by spirit into the semblance of the spirit, would need to create all the organs and systems of the physical body to warrant having a heart beat - afterall the heart is required to move blood around the physical body, and surely a spirit doesn't need a heart, and a physical one at that, to appear and be able to communicate. They are only needing to animate the semblance of themselves in visible form.

Males sense. But then, you could also say that since the spirit bodies, in their own world, do have beating hearts and breathing lungs, a truly effective materialization could make the materialized spirit have these characteristics - as well as just the appearance of their bodies - in our world.

Jim

For sure there are genuine materializations al the time. Seems to me that the idea of PM in some circles is to raise enough energy so that even non mediums can see physically what mediums see clairvoyantly and to maybe hear them in DV contexts. Also for sure from the get go more fakery has been passed off as PM than any other aspect of Spiritualism. PM was mega when I was a lad anf physical mediums were the premier league. Church was ticket and invite only for a physical demmer. Those days there were more PM mediums demming. But even as a lid I remember people saying that PM wasn' what it had been. My dad chaired for Helen Duncan when she demmed at Hunters Lane Rochdale meeting and that was the PM benchmark for him ever after. He was always on about her. Trance mediums were ten a penny and we also had Johnny Eagles and his ilk who did fire tests holding hands over flames and such plus shoving needles into themselves after the manner of fakirs. That was a big draw too. It was northern working class Spiritualism and some of it was a bit end of the pier. The more popular old circuit mediums weren't averse to putting on a bit of a show. Fast and funny or something unusual brought in the crowds. We're a lot more 'respectable' these days if that's the right word. What we do now is more akin to what back then would have been called 'posh London style' and that didn't play well in northern mill towns back in the fifties and sixties. PM has always been faked and always will be so long as there's money to be made from it. That's not to say all PM is faked just most of it and most of that fakery goes on in the commercial black out shows..

petal34 wrote:Going to ask a question now,throw me off site if you like....
Are Materialisations genuine?

I certainly hope so, otherwise I've been wasting the last 12 years developing it, ha, ha...

Do you take bookings Nick?
Good PM dem would likely fill our church twice over.
PM me with rates if you do please. We're a big cause so not ungenerous.

KatyKing wrote:Do you take bookings Nick?
Good PM dem would likely fill our church twice over.
PM me with rates if you do please. We're a big cause so not ungenerous.

yeh no problem KK, just as long as I can bring my gran and a white bed sheet... if you pay her enough she'll dress up as a red Indian as well!!!

Well if it pays the bills Nick then all strength to you comrade.
That's a serious offer by the way so if not you but you know a PM chum who might oblige then the door is open.