(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Incidents in My Life INCIDENTS IN MY LIFE BY Home, Daniel Dunglas ( Author ) Dec-01-2005 INCIDENTS IN MY LIFE INCIDENTS IN MY LIFE BY HOME, DANIEL DUNGLAS ( AUTHOR ) DEC-01-2005 By Home, Daniel Dunglas ( Author )Dec-01-2005 Paperback
Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism (Classic Reprint)
(These descend to ns, among the fragmentary records which,...)
These descend to ns, among the fragmentary records which, with shattered temples and decaying cities, form the only remaining proofis that snch nations as the Assyrian and the Egyptian were once great upon the earth, many CT idences of the vividness with which light from another world hroke in npon man during the earlier ages of onr own. Every spiritual phenomenon which has in the present day startled the Christians of the West was, centuries ago, familiar to the Pagans of the East. On the common foundation of a belief that spirit visits were neither few nor far between every mythology of those far-back times was based. The most superhuman virtues, and abominable crimes, of Chaldean, Phoenician, Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Boman, are traceable to a spiritual source. For then, as since, the good of the truth that man cannot die, to live again, but, living once, lives eternally, was at times largely perverted to evil.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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Incidents in My Life (Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge) (Volume 1)
(D. D. Home (1833-1886), the famous spiritualist and mediu...)
D. D. Home (1833-1886), the famous spiritualist and medium, here documents the extraordinary psychic events in his life. Originally published in 1863, this is the first of two autobiographical volumes by Home, the second appearing nine years later. Home describes mysterious phenomena from his very first vision at the age of thirteen to the séances he held for the rich and famous in England, France, Italy and Russia. He astonished his receptive audiences with startling paranormal feats including levitation. His hosts included Napoleon III, Prince Humbert (later Humbert I of Italy), Charles Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton, and many other celebrities and aristocrats. Interwoven with these high-profile activities, Home describes his personal life - the early death of his first wife, his subsequent financial difficulties, and his ongoing battle with tuberculosis. Incidents in My Life presents a fascinating insight into the phenomenon of spiritualism during the Victorian period.
Incidents in my Life - Part One (Spiritualist Classics)
(To those who knew him Home was one of the most lovable of...)
To those who knew him Home was one of the most lovable of men and his prefect genuineness and uprightness were beyond suspicion.
Sir William Crookes - President of The Royal Society
D. D. Home is regarded by many as the greatest medium of all time. The term psychic was coined as a description for his unique gifts and in numerous tests, under laboratory conditions with imminent scientists of the era; he was never once found to be anything other than genuine. History paints Home as the star attraction of the spiritualist drama that was all the rage on the stage that was the second half of the nineteenth century. He lived a life akin to that of a character in a Hollywood blockbuster, coming from a humble background to find himself moving between the royal courts of Europe at the behest of their figureheads and eventually marrying into the Russian royal family.
One evening in August 1852 Daniel was at the home of Ward Cheney, a businessman in Connecticut, who is a distant relative of US Vice-President Dick Cheney. The following is a witness account of what occurred;
Suddenly and without any expectation on the part of the company, Mr. Home, was taken up in the air! I had hold of his hand at the time, and I and others felt his feet they were lifted a foot from the floor! He palpitated from head to foot apparently with contending emotions of joy and fear which choked his utterance. Again he was taken from the floor, and the third time he was carried to the lofty ceiling of the apartment, with which his hand and head came in to gentle contact.
The Cheney event is one of many incidents in Homes autobiography Incidents in my Life -Part .1. The book documents the amazing psychic events throughout his life and the people who queued up to witness them. Regular sitters included Count Alexis Tolstoy, cousin of Leo Tolstoy, Prince Humbert the future King of Italy, the Earl of Dunraven, Sir Francis Galton; Charles Darwins cousin, Napoleon III and many more.
Incidents in My Life: Second Series (Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge) (Volume 2)
(In 1872, D. D. Home (1833-1886), the famous spiritualist ...)
In 1872, D. D. Home (1833-1886), the famous spiritualist and medium, published this sequel to his controversial autobiography Incidents in My Life (1863). In it, Home responds to the criticism levelled at him by reviewers, sceptics and detractors including William Thackeray and Robert Browning. He describes his expulsion from Rome in 1864 owing to the authorities' fear of 'sorcery', opposition from French and American clergy in 1865, a visit to Russia, and the opening of the 'Spiritual Athenaeum' in London in 1867. He also reports numerous séances and spiritual manifestations. The book ends with documents relating to an 1868 lawsuit over a large sum of money given to Home by a wealthy widow, Jane Lyon. Although a promised third volume never appeared, the present book provides fascinating insights into the phenomenon of spiritualism and its attendant controversies during the Victorian period.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Daniel Dunglas Home was a Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights.
Background
He was born near Edinburgh on the 20th of March 1833, his father being said to be a natural son of the 10th earl of Home, and his mother a member of a family credited with second sight.
There was a certain mystery about Home's parentage.
He went with his mother to America, and on her death was adopted by an aunt.
Education
Sometime between 1838 and 1841, Home's aunt and uncle decided to emigrate to the United States with their adopted son, sailing in the cheapest class of steerage as they could not afford a cabin.
After landing in New York, the Cooks travelled to Greeneville, near Norwich, Connecticut.
The red-haired and freckled Home attended school in Greeneville, where he was known as "Scotchy" by the other students.
Career
He saw his first vision at age 13.
A schoolfellow, Edwin, died in Greeneville and appeared to him in a bright cloud at night in Troy, thus keeping a childish promise with which they had bound themselves that he who died first would appear to the other.
Home's second vision came four years later.
One night he heard loud, unaccountable blows, the next morning a volley of raps.
His aunt, remembering the Hydesville rappings that had occurred two years before, believed him to be possessed by the devil and called for a Congregationalist, a Baptist, and a Methodist minister for exorcism.
This being unsuccessful, she turned him out of doors.
Professors Robert Hare and James Mapes, both famous chemists, and John Worth Edmonds of the United States Supreme Court owed much of their conversion to Spiritualism to this young man of frail health.
Home's first levitation occurred in the South Manchester house of Ward Cheney, an eminent American manufacturer.
Home was proud of the impression he made upon these two distinguished men and wrote about it to a friend in the United States.
The letter was published in the United States and found its way to the London press, whereupon Brewster at once disclaimed all belief in Spiritualism and set down the phenomena to imposture.
At the same time his statements in private supported Home, and they too found their way into the newspapers.
More lasting harm was done to Home's reputation by Robert Browning's poem, "Mr. Sludge, the Medium, " which was generally taken to refer to Home.
The poem was a malignant attack, since Browning had never claimed in public to have caught Home at trickery and in private admitted that imposture was out of the question.
Both there and in London Thackeray availed himself of every opportunity of sitting with Home.
He admitted to have found a genuine mystery and warmly endorsed Robert Bell's anonymous article "Stranger than Fiction, " published in the Cornhill Magazine, which Thackeray then edited.
His name and fame soon spread there, too.
False rumors arose among the peasants that he was a necromancer and administered the sacraments of the church to toads in order to raise the dead by spells and incantations.
This rumor may explain an attempt against his life on December 5, 1855, when a man ambushed him late at night and stabbed him three times with a dagger.
Home had a narrow escape.
Home changed his mind, however, and left Italy for Paris, where, to the day from the announced suspension, his powers returned.
The news reached the French court and Napoleon III summoned him to the Tuilleries.
The story of Home's séance with Napoleon was not made public.
The curiosity of the press was aroused, however, when the first séance was followed by many others. An account of the first séance in Home's autobiography, Incidents in My Life, tells how Napoleon followed every manifestation with keen and skeptical attention and satisfied himself by the closest scrutiny that neither deception nor delusion was possible.
The room was shaken; heavy tables were lifted and then held down to the floor by an alteration of their weight.
The emperor replied, "Quite right, but you may add when you speak on the subject again that there is a difference between believing a thing and having proof of it, and that I am certain of what I have seen. "
When, soon after these séances, Home left Paris for the United States, rumors were rife that his departure was compulsory.
Fantastic stories began to circulate as soon as he left Paris, and while he was regaining his shattered health in Italy it was even rumored that he was in the prison of Mazas.
Home was in great power at the time and so much sought after that the Union Club, where fashionable sophisticates congregated, offered him 50, 000 francs for a single séance. Home refused.
Shortly after Home returned to England, friends tried to bring about a meeting between him and Michael Faraday, the famous scientist and proponent of the involuntary muscular action theory to explain table movement.
Thereafter, the idea of giving him a sitting was abandoned.
Home derived more satisfaction from his experiences with Dr. Ashburner, a royal physician, and John Elliotson, sometime president of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, a character study of whom, as "Dr. Goodenough, " was drawn by Thackeray in Pendennis, and to whom the work was dedicated.
When Ashburner became a believer in Spiritualism, Elliotson, who was one of the hardest materialists, became estranged from him and publicly attacked him for his folly.
A few years later, however, Home and Elliotson met in Dieppe.
The result was a séance, a strict investigation, and the conversion of Elliotson.
On his return to London he hastened to seek reconciliation with Ashburner and publicly declared that he was satisfied of the reality of the phenomena and that they were tending to revolutionize his thoughts and feelings.
Home's phenomena also radically changed Robert Chambers, coauthor, with Leitch Ritchie, of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which startled the public by its outspoken skepticism.
Chambers attended the séance Robert Bell wrote about in Cornhill Magazine.
Nevertheless, Chambers anonymously wrote the preface to Home's autobiography in 1862.
Six months later his book Incidents in My Life was published.
It attracted widespread notice in the press.
The book sold very well and a second edition was published in a few months.
This, however, did not relieve the money problems Home began to experience.
Relatives disputed his right of inheritance to the fortune of his wife, and, looking about for a means of livelihood, he decided to develop his keen artistic perception.
Because the manifestations were beyond his control, however, he was soon ordered to quit the papal territory.
He left for Naples, where he was received by Prince Humbert, and returned in April to London to demand diplomatic representations on the subject of his expulsion.
His public rendering of Henry Howard Brownell's poems was very well received; on returning to Europe he continued this new career with a lecture on Spiritualism in London. His health, however, could not stand the strain.
Lyon took a fancy to Home and proposed to adopt him if he added her name to his own, in which case she was prepared to give him substantial wealth.
Home assented and changed his name to Home-Lyon.
Lyon transferred £60, 000 to Home's account and drew up a will in his favor.
He parried the blow of the assassin's stiletto with his hand, which was pierced.
Four séances were held, but because of Home's illness the manifestations did not extend beyond slight raps and movements of the table.
The committee reported that nothing material had occurred, but added that "during the inquiry Mr. Home afforded every facility for examination. "
In May 1871 Sir William Crookes began an investigation of Home and reached a very favorable opinion of what he saw.
Before this investigation other important events took place in Home's life.
He won the lawsuit for his deceased wife's fortune, became engaged to an aristocratic lady of wealth, and gave several séances in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
His opinions on fraudulent mediumship and his protest against holding séances in the dark were bitterly resented by other mediums.
They said that he had little experience of the powers of others.
On a few occasions he sat jointly with William Stainton Moses.
Home slowly broke with nearly all of his friends and spent most of his time on the Continent.
In 1876 his death was falsely reported in the French press.
His grave is at St. Germain, Paris, and his tombstone is inscribed "To another discerning of Spirits. "
In the Canongate of Edinburgh there is a fountain erected to his memory.
It is not known who erected it nor why it was placed opposite the Canongate Parish Church.
A book, privately printed in France, recorded the strange experiences of the high society with Home's mediumship.
Earlier, in Italy, Home had been introduced to the king of Naples.
In 1869 the London Dialectical Society appointed a committee for the investigation of Spiritualistic phenomena.
The committee, before which Home appeared, had some of the most skeptical members of the society on its list, including atheist spokesman Charles Bradlaugh.
Long after Home's death various writers speculated on how Home's feats might have been achieved by trickery, imputing that there must have been trickery.
But the evidence suggests that Home was pressured by a foolish and unstable woman.
Her claim that Home used undue influence "from the spirit world" is refuted by her transferring allegiance to a Miss Nicholls, another medium, at the time she reneged on her commitment to Home.
He converted to Catholicism and decided to enter a monastery.
He was received by Pius IX and treated with favor.
In Home's state of seclusion from supernormal contact, Catholic influences found an easy inroad into his religious ideas.
In the process, he converted to the Greek Orthodox faith.
Views
Quotations:
When Lord Adare asked, "Is not the sun hot?"
the control answered "No, the sun is cold; the heat is produced and transmitted to the earth by the rays of light passing through various atmospheres. "
Personality
Home was a sensitive, delicate child of a highly nervous temperament and of such weak health that he was not expected to live.
It was noticed that he had keen powers of observation and a prodigious memory.
He is a thoroughly good, honest, weak and very vain man, with little intellect, and no ability to argue, or defend his faith.
Quotes from others about the person
Bell's account of a séance with Home starts with a quotation of a Dr. Treviranus to Coleridge: "I have seen what I would not have believed on your testimony, and what I cannot therefore, expect you to believe upon mine. "
The only admission Podmore made was that "we don't quite see how some of the things were done and we leave the subject with an almost painful sense of bewilderment. "
"He was liable to fits of great depression and to nervous crisis difficult at first to understand; but he was withal of a simple, kindly, humorous, lovable disposition that appealed to me….
He was scrupulously sensitive on this point, and never felt hurt at anyone taking precautions against deception…. "
After the first such sitting, on December 22, 1872, Moses wrote in his notebook:"Mr. D. D. Home is a striking-looking man.
He shaves his face with the exception of a moustache, and his hair is bushy and curly.
He gives me the impression of an honest, good person whose intellect is not of high order.
I had some talk with him, and the impression that I have formed of his intellectual ability is not high.
He resolutely refuses to believe in anything that he has not seen for himself.
For instance, he refuses to believe in the passage of matter through matter, and when pressed concludes the argument by saying 'I have never seen it. '
He has seen the ring test, but oddly enough, does not see how it bears on the question.
He accepts the theory of the return in rare instances of the departed, but believes with me that most of the manifestations proceed from a low order of spirits who hover near the earth sphere.
He does not believe in Mrs. Guppy's passage through matter, nor in her honesty.
He thinks that regular manifestations are not possible.
Consequently he disbelieves in public mediums generally.
He said he was thankful to know that his mantle had fallen on me, and urged me to prosecute the inquiry and defend the faith. "
Lord Adare, then earl of Dunraven, describes Home's character in the 1924 edition of Experiences in Spiritualism with D. D. Home:"He had the defects of an emotional character, with vanity highly developed (perhaps wisely to enable him to hold his own against the ridicule and obloquy that was then poured out upon spiritualism and everyone connected with it).
He never took money for séances, and séances failed as often as not.
He was proud of his gift but not happy in it.
He could not control it and it placed him sometimes in very unpleasant positions.
I think he would have been pleased to have been relieved of it, but I believe he was subject to these manifestations as long as he lived. "
Sir William Crookes summed up his opinion as follows:"During the whole of my knowledge of D. D. Home, extending for several years, I never once saw the slightest occurrence that would make me suspicious that he was attempting to play tricks.
To those who knew him Home was one of the most lovable of men and his perfect genuineness and uprightness were beyond suspicion…. "
Frank Podmore, a most skeptical psychical researcher, said of Home:"
"Podmore added: "Home was never publicly exposed as an imposter; there is no evidence of any weight that he was even privately detected in trickery.
"Between the publication of his Modern Spiritualism in 1902 and The Newer Spiritualism in 1910, Podmore nevertheless succeeded in unearthing a single piece of so-called evidence of imposture in a letter from a Mr. Merrifield, dated August 1855 and printed in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1903), in which the writer claims to have noticed that the medium's body or shoulder sank or rose in concordance with the movements of a spirit hand and to have seen afterward "the whole connection between the medium's shoulder and arm and the spirit hand dressed out on the end of his own. "
Connections
Home married twice. In 1858, he married Alexandria de Kroll ("Sacha"), the 17-year-old daughter of a noble Russian family, in Saint Petersburg, his Best Man was the writer Alexandre Dumas.
They had a son, Gregoire ("Grisha"), but Alexandria fell ill with tuberculosis, and died in 1862. In October 1871, Home married for the second, and last time, to Julie de Gloumeline, a wealthy Russian, whom he also met in St Petersburg.