Into Thin Air

Marina Warner

  • The Invention of Telepathy by Roger Luckhurst
    Oxford, 334 pp, £35.00, June 2002, ISBN 0 19 924962 8

Eva C., one of the most sensational ‘materialising’ mediums of the early 20th century, was much photographed in the act of producing spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or ‘pseudo-pods’. These long viscous skeins of white stuff, which sometimes passed as if miraculously through a gauzy gag tied over Eva C.’s face, were thought to be ‘ideoplasts’ – projections of the medium’s mind. The photographer and impresario of these séances was Mme Juliette Bisson, a rich widow, and the patron of a physician turned psychologist, Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing; Eva C.’s séances were staged in his native city, Munich. The Baron later published exhaustive minutes of the proceedings, in books with such titles as Phenomena of Materialisation (1913, translated into English in 1920), and his lurid commingling of female physical display, scientific language and forensic, evidentiary process brings to a prurient culmination the labours of psychical investigators during the last three decades of the 19th century, the period dealt with in Roger Luckhurst’s study.

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[1] Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, 208 pp., £37.50, 5 July 2001, 0 521 80168 0).

[2] Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (2001), reviewed in the LRB by Hilary Mantel (10 May 2001).

[3] ‘Telepathy’ (translated by Nicholas Royle) was published in the Oxford Literary Review (1988). Roger Luckhurst has written on the same subject in ‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental: The Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis’ in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (1999).

[4] Reviewed in the LRB by Terry Castle (23 May 1996).