Come Here To Me!

Hester Dowden (1868-1949)

There is a curious hidden history surrounding early Irish spiritual mediums, who tended to be women of considerable influence. Hester Dowden, daughter of Irish literary scholar Edward Dowden, claimed to be in contact with the spirit of Oscar Wilde and other illustrious figures. Geraldine Cummins, a distinguished playwright, convinced the American Ambassador to Ireland during the Second World War that she was in direct contact with President Roosevelt’s late mother and former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Ambassador Gray took it all seriously enough to write home from Dublin that that “assuming these comments do come from friends who have passed on, I think they should be treated exactly as advice from friends who are still here.”

The late nineteenth century witnessed a global wave of interest in occultism, spiritualism and in mediumship. In an Irish context, William Butler Yeats is undoubtedly the most celebrated figure to have indulged in it all, as a firm believer in automatic writing and a member of the ‘Ghost Club’ in London. The idea that the dead both had the ability and inclination to speak with the living was a powerful one. The great Harry Houdini would later set out to debunk those he believed were little more than “vultures who prey on the bereaved”, but in the second half of the nineteenth-century converts to the concept of mediumship included leading chemists, physicists and the occasional Nobel laureate. The Evening Herald didn’t buy it, telling readers:

Don’t waste time on spiritualism, for if you wish to demonstrate that you are a first class imbecile you can give no better proof than by parting with your money to so-called professors of occultism who pretend to hold communication with the dead. What strange foolishness sends men and women to ignorant, illiterate, fraudulent mediums in search of ghosts and spirits!

Dubliner Hester Dowden published Voices from the Void (1919) and Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (1923), receiving significant international attention for the later. Dowden’s father was a much respected literary critic and academic, which had provided her access to a world of writers. Beginning her career as a medium in London, her introduction to Voices form the Void was not by any means sensationalist, informing readers that:

Those who are willing to devote some of their time to the study of what is commonly called spiritualism should bear in mind that results are slow, uncertain, and cannot be forced. Indeed, one asks on self whether time is well spent seeking for the few grains of gold one finds in the huge dust heaps of disappointment and dullness.

There was nothing dull in Dowden’s Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde, a collection of claimed automated correspondence with Wilde. Within its pages, she stated that Wilde took a poor view of Joyce’s Ulysses when quizzed on the recently published and then hotly debated work:

Yes, I have smeared my fingers with that vast work. It has given me one exquisite moment of amusement. I gathered that if I hoped to retain my reputation as an intelligent shade, open to new ideas, I must pursue this volume. It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have produced this great bulk of filth.

 She claimed too that Wilde told her “being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is, if one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster.” Joyce, not to be outdone, parodied it all in Finnegan’s Wake, where Wilde talks gibberish through a medium.

Geraldine Cummins (1890-1969)

Perhaps the most widely known Irish medium was Geraldine Cummins, a Corkonian born in 1890 who was many things in one life time. A very capable and talented writer, she wrote three plays for the Abbey – including a comedy – and published a novel, but gradually focused more and more on mediumship. Her influence was significant enough to perhaps impact on US foreign policy. When US Ambassador to Ireland David Gray participated in a number of seances with Cummins, he believed her claims to be in communication with spirits that included former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who had served as Chief Secretary for Ireland and resided in the same home. Balfour provided his own analysis of contemporary events, which were forwarded to the US President by Ambassador Gray. President Roosevelt’s reaction was not dismissive; he informed Gray that to his mind “these are real contributions and I hope you will continue.”

Unsurprisingly in Catholic Ireland, there was frequent denunciation of those who engaged in such behaviour, with the Ouija board specifically denounced on more than one occasion. Created by American lawyer and inventor Elijah Bond, the ‘Talking Board’ launched in February 1891, first marketed as a parlour game. The more common name, it was later claimed, came from an ancient Egyptian word ‘Ouija’, meaning ‘Good Luck’. A flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the letters 0-9 and the words ‘Yes’ , ‘No’ and ‘Goodbye’, Elijah’s grave actually includes the markers of a Ouija Board carved into its stonework.

That the board exploded in commercial popularity around the time of the First World War says much about the tremendous hurt of the time, when men were dying in their hundreds of thousands on foreign battlefields and the very idea of a body to bury was out of the question for most. In November 1919, the Freeman’s Journal wrote of how against the backdrop of such trauma on an unprecedented scale, “one might be tempted to transfer one’s allegiance to crystal gazers, palmists, table-rappers, the manipulators of Ouija boards, and such like exponents of the new credulity.”

The leading opponent of all of this in popular culture was the great Harry Houdini, a legend in his own lifetime and ours, remembered for his escape acts and as the greatest illusionist of all time. There was seemingly nothing the man couldn’t work his way out of, and he had drawn large crowds to see his performances in person in Belfast in 1909. Like many people, Houdini wanted to believe. Before his death he had actually agreed with his wife that if he somehow did find it possible to communicate with her after death, he would and that they would have a secret code, with the message being simply ‘Rosabelle, believe’. His widow held a yearly séance on Halloween for ten years after Houdini’s death, in the hope he’d make contact. In his lifetime, Houdini, like a lot of people who approach this field, had gone into it with a broken heart with the death of his mother in the 1920s, and he became convinced that those telling him he could communicate with her had no way of doing it and were merely frauds. When he toured America in 1925, he offered $10,000 to anyone who could exhibit supernatural phenomena that he could not replicate himself. By the time of his death, he had done much to undo the reputations of mediums the world over. Yet some, like Ambassador Gray in the Phoenix Park, continued to believe.