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Biographies Eusapia Palladino
Sir William Crookes
Spiritist Society Eusapia
Palladino was born in Murga, Her
father was assassinated when she was eight, and a friend of his took her to her
grandmother’s house. She was very badly treated by this grandmother, and was
one day found abandoned in the street. A charitable family brought her home,
only to expel her months later, because of her clumsy and unhelpful character.
Another family who had been friends to her family took her on for a few days,
while preparations were made to send her to a convent. At
that time, visitors to the family suggested everybody tried the experiment of
table tilting. All the adults present sat around a table and waited for it to
move. After a quarter of an hour, as nothing had happened, they decided to
invite Eusapia in to help with the chain. After a few moments, the table started
to levitate, the curtains moved, the bottles and glasses started to clatter and
the bells started to ring. After they established the phenomena were produced
through the girl, the family decided to keep her on and not send her to the
convent anymore. These phenomena happened throughout her childhood. According
to the medium herself, there was an English lady who was married to a Mr Damiani,
in According
to Professor Chiaia, Eusapia was a woman of extremely humble social standing,
robust and illiterate. Her first introduction to the European scientific world
was through a letter from Prof. Chiaia to Dr Cesare Lombroso, published in an
Italian newspaper of 1888, where he describes his experiments and invites
Lombroso to join him in the investigations. Lombroso only accepted the
invitation in 1891, and after several experiments, he became convinced of the
authenticity of the phenomena and declared: “I am confused and feel sorry I
fought the possibility of the so-called Spiritist facts so persistently.” It
was thanks to his conversion that many other important European scientists
decided to start investigating psychic phenomena through Eusapia. The
phenomena produced by Eusapia were listed and classified a number of times.
According to Morselli, a professor at the The
second class of phenomena were called telekinetic, which described movements
without direct contact between the medium and the objects. Objects that were far
from the medium were brought to the table, the chairs where the researchers were
sitting would move, musical instruments would play. The
third class comprehend the alterations to the gravity of objects: oscillations
in the arms of scales, changes in the medium’s weight, varying from 5 to 10
kilograms, levitation of the medium’s body, production of cold draughts at the
beginning of the manifestations, irradiations from Eusapia’s head and body. Sounds
and signals constituted the fourth class. Raps, knocks and other noises occurred
at the table or far from the medium, sounds of musical instruments, sounds of
hands and feet, voices. Mysterious signs were also left on the attendees wrists,
stains on the table, and pencil marks on the walls. There was also the
occurrence of direct writing, either utilising pencils or pens (ectoplasmic
hands) or without them (pneumatography). Also mouldings left in substances like
plaster-of-Paris would be produced, such as hands, fists, feet and even faces in
profile. A
fifth class of phenomena was the unexpected appearance of objects brought from
afar, either on the table or in the room (introduced in the room through closed
doors), like flowers, branches, nails, coins and stones. The
sixth class comprehended materializations, defined by Morselli as the creation ex-novo
of shapes more or less organised, which had the physical properties of matter,
i.e., of being resistant to touch (tangible). The phenomena observed included
touching, prodding, kissing, biting, hand-shaking (one would feel the skin, the
hand’s warmth and the movement of the fingers). A subclass could be described
as the luminous phenomena, points of lights flashing, tongues of fire and the
appearance of luminous clouds. There was also the appearance of dark
“prolongations” in the form of human limbs that emerged from various parts
of Eusapia’s body and which were given the name “pseudopods”. Professor
Cesare Lombroso later added another class to Morselli’s system, including
isolated phenomena: 1) influence on photographic film 2) mind reading, vision in
darkness, at distance 3) understanding of foreign languages unknown to the
medium, like English and German 4) influence over electroscopes, which were
discharged at distance. During
her life, Eusapia submitted herself to 36 research commissions, from 1888 to
1909. According to Morselli, she manifested forty-four types of mediumistic
gifts. She disincarnated in 1918, at 64, after almost half a century of
continuous investigations, under the most rigorous conditions stipulated by the
greatest scientists of the time.
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Endearing
Gems From Francisco C. Xavier And
for the rest of our lives
Heaven
and Hell
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